The XPS series is no pillar of Linux support. Turn to Thinkpads for this[0]. In case you can't be bothered with the upcoming wall of text: Dell seems to have entirely different definitions of "support" for the paid OS, vs. the free one.

I could pick my own hardware for work, and I went with an XPS 13 9333 "Ubuntu edition" + superspeed dock for over 1300 GBP ($2K USD). I shouldn't have sponged on the extra hundred or so bucks for the X1 Carbon (..."startup"...), but the "Linux readiness" sucked me in. I don't exactly feel like I got my money's worth:

- "Coil Whine"[1]. My expectations from a $2K SSD laptop is complete fucking silence unless the fans are going. There is still some serious coil whine happening when some arbitrary conditions are met - If you often work in a quiet environment (any AM workers here?), you will notice this eventually. This also changes pitch when <things>, so you won't be tuning it out. This was noted as fixed by Dell for the 9333[2], when in fact it hasn't been. Not exclusively a Linux issue, but unacceptable in a $2K machine.

- Driver support: wifi: Identity crisis. The stock wifi drivers don't quite register as wifi drivers, but at least NetworkManager still kinda works. "Huh?"

# iwconfig
[...]
wlan0 no wireless extensions.

Why do I care? Because maybe I wanted to switch out NetworkManager for wicd (not possible). Maybe I wanted monitor mode on my card (nope). Maybe I just wanted to run Kismet - or anything other than NetworkManager (not possible). Huh.

- Driver support: wifi: instability. I got very frequent wifi disconnects/hiccups/delays on both the 2.4G and the 5G bands, when other hardware on the same location worked just fine (my Mac co-workers liked to pick on me for this, but hey, I would too in their shoes). By "delays", I'm not nit-picking milliseconds, I mean getting 2000ms+ pingbacks from the AP when a macbook placed right on top of it (for science) got the expected 20-70ms. Huh.

- Driver support: Touchscreen: forget about it.[3] Kind of entirely broken. After using the touch screen, moving the mouse (or trackpad) again will "jump" the cursor position to around 2x, 2y of where you left the touchscreen pointer. This was so annoying when I had a bottom-right "hot corner" kind of thing on Ubuntu (Mac convert here, forgive me) that I disabled the touchscreen entirely with xinput (any accidental touches would subsequently trigger "expose" mode). Also, if you attach a second monitor, the touchscreen input is mapped to the entire virtual desktop, rather than the laptop screen alone. As a consequence, under such circumstances, the touchscreen would only work correctly for taps at 0,0. Huh.

- Superspeed Dock: forget about it entirely, you'll regret buying one for Linux. First of all, not actually a dock, but a port replicator. Nevermind that, that's me being pedantic. Secondly, $180. Nevermind that, that's me being cheap. Thirdly, it doesn't work: Ethernet won't work[4], audio/mic won't work, HDMI won't work, DVI won't work. Very disappointing, I was looking forward to a triple screen setup. Oh well. Counterpoint: Well, Dell says it won't work, so what did you expect? Dell should put some more intelligence into its "also recommended for you" part of the website. Even if I had seen it, I would have expected some kind of hackaround to be possible. I search far and wide - no dice for the stuff that I cared for (screens/audio). It seems to be related to DisplayLink, which simply dropped Linux Support for its 3xxx/4xxx series. Nice.

Apologies for abusing your vertical screen real-estate, but I've been holding back this rant for well over a year now, and "it's your fault for triggering it" (I kid). But seriously, Dell's "Linux ready $2K wonder" would get them sued if they pulled the same crap for Windows. But it's Linux, so who gives a shit, right?

[0] Bought a refurbished X220 from ebay for 1/5 the price of the XPS 13 - installed Ubuntu - everything worked from the get-go. Even the fingerprint reader. I've read similar experiences for the vast majority of Thinkpads, since the IBM days, through the Lenovo days. Highly recommended for Linux, though YMMV.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwR4CWzDtfQ Mine isn't quite as bad (or the recording volume is deceptively high on this video), but still very noticable after a while. Also, not deterministically reproducible (my favourite kind of bug). And no, I am not confused about what a fan sounds like. Fans don't change pitch when you hit the built-in keyboard, or scroll on Chromium, or fart in its direction. The pitch change is what makes it stand out from "background noise", so you won't be able to tune it out if you're one of the lucky ones. At a point of high frustration (with another unrelated bug) I literally shouted "shut your fucking face" at my laptop, waking up my girlfriend in the next room :/

[2] http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/... "We fix coil whine - the fix is: buy 9333s!" - Blatant lie.

[3] Personally, I don't really care about the touchscreen - there simply wasn't an option for the i7 CPU without one, so... "whatever". Still completely broken drivers, though.

[4] And the XPS13 doesn't have an ethernet port either, so you rely on the (not so reliable wifi) entirely for networking, if you need such advanced features. I found some hack to make it work, but I forget which exactly. (Document! Idiot.).