The Dell XPS 13 is the best-known developer-focused, high-end Linux laptop. Here's how it got there.

Today, the Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux is easily the most well-known Linux laptop. Many users, especially developers – including Linus Torvalds – love it. As Torvalds recently said, “Normally, I wouldn’t name names, but I’m making an exception for the XPS 13 just because I liked it so much that I also ended up buying one for my daughter when she went off to college.”

So, how did Dell – best known for good-quality, mass-produced PCs – end up building top-of-the-line Ubuntu Linux laptops? Well, Barton George, Dell Technologies’ Developer Community manager, shared the “Project Sputnik” story this week in a presentation at the popular Linux and open-source community show, All Things Open.

    •  moon_matter   ( @moon_matter@kbin.social ) 
      30•11 months ago

      Popularity makes all forms of support infinitely easier. I’d struggle to come up with any technical reason that could be worth giving up the ability to easily google for issues or install software. That doesn’t mean I think you shouldn’t use other distros, just that I believe Ubuntu is the best choice for a default install targeting average people.

    •  joojmachine   ( @joojmachine@lemmy.ml ) 
      22•11 months ago

      If you want it to stop being a standard, help your distro do a better job at marketing. Ubuntu is one of the few that do some actual market research and dedicate resources to getting the OS into the hands of people by getting them interested in it. It’s one of the things we are looking forwards to doing better in Fedora.

    •  flashgnash   ( @flashgnash@lemm.ee ) 
      20•11 months ago

      As much as people don’t like Ubuntu, for users who aren’t enthusiasts they don’t want a million different options to choose from

      If we keep changing the standard it’ll drive people away and leave behind support

    •  phx   ( @phx@lemmy.ca ) 
      16•11 months ago

      There may be, but realistically it’s probably the most well known.

      I’m just happy to have Linux as a standard at all. If it works on Ubuntu, there’s a high chance it works on other distros and can be easily replaced

    •  hemko   ( @hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
      16•11 months ago

      Ubuntu sucks for many reasons, but new user experience is on the better side. I don’t want to use Ubuntu over Debian myself but I feel like it’s the mandatory corporate evil that can make Linux more appealing to more than just techies while also making Linux desktop more appealing to corpos in Microsoft’s ecosystem. Intune already has some rudimentary support for managed Linux Desktop, with Ubuntu currently supported.

          •  MiddledAgedGuy   ( @MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org ) 
            2•11 months ago

            Snap packages are files that contain a file system and get mounted. They contain the application and libraries and such it depends on.

            It doesn’t sound like such a bad idea on paper, and speaking for myself and from what I’ve gathered from stuff I see in the community, a general bias against Canonical probably plays a part.

            But specifically as a desktop package solution, I do think it’s a poor one. It’s messy, slow, bloated and sandboxing creates usability issues (though it has benefits too, of course).

    •  MiddledAgedGuy   ( @MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org ) 
      12•11 months ago

      This one is tough for me. I’m opposed to any distro being considered the “standard”. It feels so antithetical to what makes Linux great.

      But it’s also probably what we need for better user adoption. I don’t know which I’d pick if I had to, but I know it wouldn’t be Ubuntu.

    •  intelisense   ( @intelisense@lemm.ee ) 
      7•11 months ago

      It’s fine, I bought an XPS 13 years ago with Ubuntu and immediately put OpenSuSE on it. At least I’m not paying Microsoft. I still have that laptop, and it’s great. I think Lenovo deserves an honourable mention here, too - we buy T and X series laptops at work with Ubuntu and they work great too.

        •  tuhriel   ( @tuhriel@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
          2•11 months ago

          Yeah and there is a big issue. I would place myself as quite tech savvy, but last time i looked for a distrobI got overwhelmed… Good thing: there are questionnaires that lead you to a good enough suggestion… Back then it proposed mint

          But then the next question: which desktopp environment?

          I installed on my huawei matebook and it worked okay-ish, but it had one dealbreaker: even with a lot of tinkering there was no way I got standby or hibernation to work. Which is a must for me…

          So I removed mint and installed kubuntu… Now standby and even hibernate work (kind of) But it totally craps up when I try to use my external monitor together with the internal screen… Even a lot of terminal tinkering later I don’t have it working… Oh and the speakers still crap now

          There is a lit of information around how to maybe get stuff working, but a lot of it requires a lot of upfront knowledge:

          • a lot of questions are answered with “yeah, enter that in your terminal” without any explanation what exactly it does (which is bad in two ways in my opinion)
          • a lot of official documentation doesn’t explain very well what the configs do and what syntax etc. is expected
          • there is often a lot of elitism around that really pushes away newcomers

          EmI do love tinkering, but sometimes it’s really frustrating even for me. No way I could my GF to try that out…