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I live in Japan: a country where Dell does not sell the XPS13 Developer Edition.

And I used to work in London where one of my friend had the XPS 13 Dev Edition. And, of course, I really liked it.

I was wondering if I can just buy a normal xps 13 and install Ubuntu on my own? Would there be any extra steps or peculiarities compared to a normal PC install? I would really like to make sure before I invest money and time in this (I do not want to be stuck with a window entertainment laptop since I already have my wife's macbook).

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  • Ubuntu is expected to run easily on any system that has 512MB or above RAM and 1GHz or above CPU. You can even run Ubuntu from a USB Flash Drive (8+ GB recommended) on any computer as above that can boot from USB - while creating USB Startup Disk, you can choose persistent storage to be able to store your files and documents on the USB running Ubuntu.
    – Sri
    Sep 8, 2014 at 3:07
  • @Sri would the optional touch screen work?
    – le-doude
    Sep 8, 2014 at 3:18
  • Good call: Make touchscreen working with Ubuntu 13.10 on Dell XPS13
    – karel
    Sep 8, 2014 at 3:20
  • The touch screen kind of works, but kde doesn't do multitouch support, or scrolling. For me I can tap things on the screen, but it's often 5cm next to it...
    – dorien
    Sep 11, 2015 at 9:32

3 Answers 3

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I looked over the hardware and it looks like they are exactly the same. Most of the hardware is intel which makes getting your drivers working a non-issue. If you get a Windows 8.1 based laptop you will have to work around getting UEFI Firmware Settings to allow you to install another operating. You Can normally find this setting to disable UEFI in the bios and install like normal. Since this laptop doesn't have a disc drive you will have to use a usb drive to install ubuntu. It looks like the ubuntu version is cheaper from what dells site shows. I Think you could even do the reverse and install windows later if you wanted since the hardware matches.

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  • Thanks for checking. A friend also told me that I can just call Dell and ask them to remove the windows license (so basically I will receive an empty computer). Which would resolve the UEFI potential issue.
    – le-doude
    Sep 8, 2014 at 4:15
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I bought the windows version, wanting to install linux (what I did). It was the most horrible linux install I ever did. The computer reverts into awefull blinking and uncontrollable touchpad every few days. Battery life is 3-4 hours with dimmed screen.

At one point I wanted to return it and order a mac instead... this has never happened to me (a die-hard linux fan) before. I thought linux was about stability, this is unseen...

Reverting to the sputnik kernel when this happens seems to help:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:canonical-hwe-team/sputnik-kernel
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux
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Of course you can. 15.04 will work better, though. And yes, it requires a bit of tweaking. Most of the work Dell has done for the Developer Edition has already been integrated into the main kernel.

See my answer here with lots of resources: Dual boot ubunuty/windows 10 partition on Dell xps 13

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