My review of Dell XPS 15 as a developer laptop (opens in new tab)

Business laptops have the following advantages over consumer laptops: - they're much more reliable - better support - a lot fewer problems with drivers and other incompatibilities - they are designed for work, which means you will have fewer problems with things like virtualization - generally speaking, the keyboard and the track-pad will be better

And the good thing is that some of the disadvantages of business laptops like size and bulkiness have also disappeared. You can now find business ultra-books that look good and work well.

It amazes me that it's 2016 and none of the windows based laptop makes have come out with anything that approaches the macbook pro. Microsoft seem closest with their surface book line, but that seems beset by driver issues, and Razer might have something with their Blade series, but that doesn't seem to be available in the UK 3 or 4 years on from launch. ASUS also seem close but again beset by a few odd build quality issues.

If I knew anything at all about this kind of thing i'd be tempted to do a kickstarter to fund the development of a quality developer laptop that was windows/*nix based that aped the macbook pro as much as possible.

Deal-breaker, right there. I had a hard enough time with a previous dell/ubuntu combo pulling this trick and roasting itself alive in my bag, and I've no desire to repeat.

I have to use a very expensive HP Z-Book for work with a power adapter that has a loud coil whine. I've fixed it by not using the power adapter and only plugging it in when I'm away for lunch or on the toilet.

I think that moving forwards an Apple laptop is going to be a hard requirement before I work for an organisation. It's not that other companies don't make good laptops, it's that Apple doesn't make bad laptops, so I know if the company has a policy of buying them I'm guaranteed to get something good, instead of the POS Lenovo that the IT department bought.

Building a computer to play with and learn from is great. But when you have to get work done, it pays to get the best. Spending time fooling around with problems that shouldn't be there in the first place is a time & money waste.

The touchpad/clickpad/whatever drivers have been a challenge since day one. I've learned how to customize the Windows registry settings to make it mostly cooperate with what I want and they were mostly fixed by the time Windows 10 was released.

I've actually thought the device itself has been a pretty good performer, battery life is not awful but not great, and mechanically it's pretty durable. The screen is pretty amazing (I have the first slightly less than 4k IGZO panel which I run at 1920x1080).

My biggest complaint is the lack of dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdn keys. But this is a problem on pretty much every laptop made with chicklet style keyboard and it is SO STUPID.

I was considering the new XPS 15 since mine is now three years old and I have the screen glitch, but the fact that they haven't fixed the coil whine problem shows me they just don't care. (That said I've read that not everyone reports this problem.)

I've generally had good luck with the Dell Latitudes though screen quality can be a big variable from model to model and year to year. I've also looked hard at their Precision line from time to time.

I do nearly all my programming on a desktop with a real keyboard. My biggest gripe using a laptop for programming is the lack of the home/end/pgup/pgdn keys and numpad on most models.

Another issue is the crappy broadcom wifi card that shipped with it. Wifi connection would just randomly disappear and only return after multiple retry/reboot combinations. Replaced it with an intel card and haven't had any problems since.

I do like the laptop but do not believe these problems should exist on a laptop with such a high pricetag.

Yes, you can get something with the exact same hardware specs for cheaper, but when you also consider size, weight, battery life, high-quality trackpad and other components, there are very few products that compare - and those that do are at the same or higher price level.

1) Constant problems with Broadcom wireles. Supposedly they employ someone to work on Linux drivers but I never heard back from them.

2) As has been mentioned HiDpi support in Linux is not good, I ended up using 1920x1080 anyways.

3) Defects. I did not have coil buzz, but accidentally shaking the laptop too hard (e.g. in one's bag, or tapping the bottom) would cause screen/gpu to glitch and require a hard restart.

4) Dual video support on Linux is also quite poor. In practice running Bumblebee gave only marginal improvements.

Compared to a MacBook Pro: build quality is worse, it is heavier, battery is worse, wifi problems as mentioned. I would stay away from any Dell products in the future.

In general I have found that laptops are generally 'fast enough' for the dev I'm doing and creature comforts such as battery life, keyboard, screen, and case quality are far more important.

[1] http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/Laptops/spectre-x360-211501--1...!

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...

I am using a previous generation model (Precision M3800) and am quite happy with it so far. I get ~4 hours of battery on Linux. This includes a lot of browsing, watching a few videos. I also have the ability to get a higher capacity battery (from 60Whr to 90Whr) in the future. It is also quite easy to take apart and upgrade any internals you want.

What I did so far:

  - updated all the firmware to the latest (thunderbolt has a separate firmware)
  - bumblebee automatically disables the nvidia gpu on startup (i don't need the extra power or power draw)

I used to have the first XPS13 model with linux support officially from dell and this laptop is just as good and even better due to better hardware. Slightly larger and heavier but not an issue for me.

Palm detection support is ass and might have to look into it more as it's driving me crazy. There is also some firmware bug where the screen won't start after sleep.

With proper hidpi support and remaining firmware fixes from dell this will be a nice laptop even with linux.

The only minor annoyance was the lack of driver support for the Alps touchpad hardware. Thankfully, after poking and prodding enough people I was able to get specifications and implement driver support. I do wish that Dell, et al would be more proactive in pushing their vendors to merge driver support but oh well.

All-in-all, I'm very pleased with the machine.

FFWD to today, I have a quiet laptop. Doesn't flicker on white background when dimmed 30%. Doesn't squeak anywhere. Doesn't wake up randomly. The keyboard is fine. Is easy to open. Fans are not spinning when charging. No coil whine, this shit still happens? Only thing in four years that broke was the battery. Bought a new one for €40.

Thanks for sharing the experience though, seems like I still have to stick to Apple for a while for my mobile computing. Unfortunately it comes with this horrible window manager and dumbed down desktop. That said, the cons list of the XPS15 is more than enough reason to cope with OSX.

But it failed at future-proofing, no USB Type C connector. At the price range £750-800 I would expect a premium laptop to have one. Seeing cheaper sub £500 laptops are equip with them.

I plug into Ethernet and need to expand at work, but this is where it stopped for me.

I've had two past terrible experiences with Dell so I beg myself not to make the same mistake when I see something irresistible or too good to be true. Still searching for good dev machine. I may wait a while until Lenovo announces their new line up for 7th Gen Intel but that could be nearer to 2017.

So, earlier my laptops have typically been with me for nearly 6 years each, these days, with the constant upgrades it feels like Iam buying a mobile phone that is sealed shut and demands an upgrade every 2 years. I've now stopped updating OSes as a result of the slowdowns I see everytime I upgrade the OS.

It's a big laptop, you'll use it on a desk, so the battery life is fine.

I use my XPS 9550 for work and carry around a MBP13 for email / reading / surfing.

The biggest problem with the 9550 by far is the keyboard. The MBP keyboard is amazing in comparison. However it is a laptop keyboard, I have yet to encounter a good one (old Thinkpads come the closest). Just buy a decent mechanical keyboard and plug it in.

Do people really notice coil whine that much? When I built my PC last year with a 970 GTX every review I read mentioned the horrible coil whine. I don't notice it at all. I also helped build my roommates computer with the same 970 GTX and I didn't notice the coil whine at all on that one either. It's possible that both those cards were "lucky" but it seems like literally every single 970 GTX review mentioned coil whine and I have yet to notice it.

I confirm there's sometimes a slight squeak when I press the left of the spacebar but it's hardly a dealbreaker.

So overall I'm very happy with it: gorgeous 4k screen, reasonably powerful dedicated GPU, firm keyboard with enough key travel.

These two points are enough for me to immediately dismiss a laptop. Especially the home / end keys are vital when writing code (for me at least)

I'm quite disappointed by it, and I was hoping to push our company to move over the XPS line.

We got the HD display with touch screen. Although it's a decent display, there's substantial glare. In fact, scrub the useless touch and get the matte, which also boosts the brightness a little bit. Not to mention, the laptop is so light that attempting to touch the display will just flip the laptop. This is my first "not antiglade" display since the CRT era, and I regret it a lot.

After several months of usage, the display developed several uneven backlighting issues (some spots are quite bright), and I noticed the black is not as black anymore compared to an unused one (we have 24 of them with several to spare). We moved from the HP EliteBook series (which also has their issues), and while the contrast is much better than any elitebook I've used, we never had uneven backlighting with HP.

The keyboard was a big issue, and I see that XPS does not realize how important it is. In fairness, the X1 keyboard is not too bad, except for the awful placement of the Home/End keys. No squeaking and decent feedback. But the small keys such as the arrow keys work very poorly. The rubber dome behind them is so small that if you don't press the key with some little extra force it will "pop" but not activate. In particular, this is especially bad for the up arrow, which of the 24 laptops we have was horrifying. If you use bash, remember the up arrow is "recall history". The problem is that the key is slightly slated (for "ergonomics"), causing the dome to be pressed unevenly. I fixed mine by some careful placement of scotch, but it's still not the same accuracy of other keys.

The trackpad is awful for some reason. HP was much better here. No amount of tweaking would allow me to perform fine movements.

Battery life is the same on both linux and windows (around 7 hours new for random workload), so no complaints here. Power management works. But, the HP EliteBook G4 we where using before has a super-easy replaceable battery, and we changed many over the years. The G4 is around 6 hours of battery runtime. Not much difference honestly. Not to mention the G4 is very easily serviceable.

On linux I still have problems with the intel drivers with the carbon. The "old" drivers work, but the modesetting drivers cause "twitching" of the image especially on the second external output. Incredibly annoying to the point that I'm still using the legacy one. This is a classic issue with intel, and unfortunately it's the same for any laptop nowdays.

Overall, the display is still a bit better than whan HP offers, but the rest is worse. The laptop is a bit thinner and lighter, but honestly there's not much difference here. The appreciated the serviceability of the HP line as components started to fail. Although opening an X1 is not hard, there's not much you can swap without replacing the entire laptop.