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.

  •  hemko   ( @hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
    16•1 year 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•1 year 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).