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I have recently received a brand new Dell XPS 15 Series 7590 (2019) and installed the Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. While the system does start up and run, basically nothing works.

Most critically the CPU power management is broken. The power demand (and temperature) of the system is much higher than under Windows and after a couple of minutes the system decides that it needs to spin up the CPU to the temperature limit at 100 % idle, meaning that the system would quickly destroy the hardware. (Playing around with powertop, et. al. did not solve this.)

At the same time the system is unresponsive, even typing in terminals often leads to seconds long lags.

Other things that don't work:

  • Touchpad (there is a Dell fix)
  • Changing screen brightness (OLED)
  • Too slow to watch Youtube
  • Very high CPU load when browser open
  • WiFi not recognized

So, how do I install Ubuntu on this laptop? Would Ubuntu 19 help? Or is this hardware just not supported?

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  • Ubuntu 19.04 is required and power management works somewhat better with a newer Ubuntu/Kernel. The touchpad works out of the box then. Some further configuration for brightness and power management can be found here: github.com/TillmannBerg/Ubuntu-Dell-XPS-15-2019
    – Berg
    Jul 28, 2019 at 11:08

2 Answers 2

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I made a github repo to fix all the issues for Ubuntu on Dell XPS 7590(Brightness, wifi, power consumption, suspend power consumption).

long story short,

  1. CPU Issues: Ubuntu 19.04 or 19.10 are better because the kernel support newer processors better. But you can use Ubuntu 18.04 but kernel in that version doesn't support new processors which lead to high power consumption, so you will have to install PowerTop and other power management tools to reduce the power consumption. be aware that PowerTop disable intel module which case screen flickering in suspend mode(fixed this issue in my script).
  2. WiFi: you can install killer wifi driver following bellow steps(killer wifi website). 
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-hwe-team/backport-iwlwifi
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backport-iwlwifi-dkms
reboot
  1. Brightness: you will have to use one of two methods:
    • Xrandr: just run in terminal window xrandr --output $(xrandr --listmonitors | awk '$1 == "0:" {print $4}') --brightness 0.6 to set the brightness to 60%, or change 0.6 to range from 0 to 1(0 to 100%). you will have to make a script to change it by fn keys(check the repo).
    • ICC color profile: check this source repo for instruction, or use my script which have the above two methods to choose from.
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  • this answer is highly underrated, it is really good. It does the things I was planning on doing. Great work!
    – Tarick Welling
    Jan 27, 2020 at 19:50
  • @TarickWelling, thanks for your kind words, really appreciate it :). And I would welcome your contribution anytime.
    – Mohamed Youssef
    Jan 27, 2020 at 22:40
  • @MohamedYoussef I tried all the steps in your repo (github.com/MuDiAhmed/…) for making screen brightness operational through keys, but The brightness works after running sudo make oled_xrandr_install. But, when I reboot, the brightness again doesn't work until I run the sudo command again. Can you tell me how I can fix this?
    – Noopur Phalak
    Feb 6, 2021 at 14:08
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I'm the author of the guide How to install Ubuntu on Dell XPS 15 7590 (italian, sorry). I've been messing with it for more than a week now and I can confirm that Ubuntu 19.04 works definitely better. You'd still need PowerTOP for acceptable battery performance and the Wi-Fi card won't work out of the box, but almost everything else is usable. Give it a try!

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