Depends on what model. The IT department gave me a dock and I couldn't get it to work with my Dell laptop. It was insufficient to charge the laptop, and I got tired of trying. Later a BIOS update plus driver changes will get it working on windows, and there are people successfully here using their dell thunderbolt dock with Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.
Ultimately, I gave up and bought an intel nuc with an M2 SSD and plenty of ram. It just works.
