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ToolsCanonical recently made an official announcement on its company web log stating that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop ( that is, Project Sputnik ) now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ( Bionic Beaver ) pre-installed. Upon reading this, I quickly reached out to Dell asking to review the laptop. I ‘m a Linux developer, and when a developer edition laptop is marketed with Linux pre-installed, I need to experience it for myself. The laptop finally arrived, and like a child on Christmas dawn, I excitedly pulled the device out of the box and powered it up for the first clock .
This is a pretty rock-solid notebook. The device is very light and easy to carry—meaning, it ‘s mobile ( which is identical important in my bible ), reduce and streamlined. not entirely does the device spirit good, but it besides performs very good .
General Specifications
In my possession is the seventh generation of the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. This generation ships with an Intel Core i7 8th Gen microprocessor. It is a four-core, eight-threaded ( hyperthreaded ) i7-8550U CPU operate at a 1.8GHz frequency. With this shape, the system itself reports eight CPUs. The system is installed with 16GB of RAM.
First Impressions
Upon first boot, you ‘re greeted with a Dell welcome filmdom followed by a generic set of Ubuntu-related questions ( such as license agreement, keyboard layouts, timezone and then on ). Toward the end, you are given an choice to create a recovery USB prototype, which could be very handy one day. If you opt out of creating one, no worries, you can go back and create one at a late time .
figure 1. The Dell Recovery Media Menu
The first thing I did, after logging in to my user session for the very first time, was run a software update .
Although this does not at all relate to the quality of the device, I did find it a bite foreign that the operational system was pre-installed with both Chrome and Chromium web browsers. I ‘m not certain why anyone would need both, but they both were there. If you ‘re a Firefox drug user, you’ll need to install it from the Ubuntu Software center .
Input Controls
One of the most authoritative aspects of any calculation device is its stimulation controls ( keyboard, mouse and so on ). The keyboard feels comfortable—that is, with the exception of the placement of the PgUp/PgDn keys. Those two keys are identical conclusion to the leave and properly arrow keys. I ‘m sure, over time, I ‘ll end up getting used to it, but during the class of my review, I constantly and incidentally pressed the PgDn key while navigating my way around in a end and text editor. Again, the keyboard feels nice. It ‘s responsive, and the atavistic from when you press the keys down feels fair about right. Although, why is there silent a Windows picture for the Super samara ? ! I jest .
I besides do appreciate the backlit computer keyboard. You even can toggle the backlight on and off manually. This backlight besides fades to off when the keys have n’t been pressed in some meter. Although, I do n’t recall what that idle time or timeout is set to .
The touchpad is very responsive as well—maybe a bite besides sensitive. I find myself by chance closing tabs or selecting things I never intended to select. By default, Ubuntu enables natural scroll among a few early touchpad-specific features .
The notebook comes with a touch screen bonded to the display. I constantly find it a bit awkward trying to make manipulation of a touch screen while maneuvering between a keyboard and a trackpad, but that ‘s precisely me. however, I do see the rate in it when it comes to testing and debugging applications intended for fluid, embedded or web use. I did notice a pair things with the touch screen :
-
Although it’s responsive and calibrated accordingly, not all windows are
created equal. I had no issue moving GNOME native windows and applications
around the screen, so long as it was not touching the edges
of the top, bottom and sides (I thought that was weird). But for whatever
reason, regardless of where I tried to hold down to drag the window of
the Chrome web browser, it just would not budge. -
Because the physical display extends to nearly the edges of
both the top and the sides of the lid, every time I went to adjust the
angle/tilt of the screen (from the left side), my large fingers would
activate whatever was positioned on the Dock right underneath it.
What I do find a bit frustrating is that I am not able to disable the touch screen from the Ubuntu Settings panel, unless it is very well hidden somewhere. The lone way that I believe this can be done is through the Xorg configuration files .
Input controls overall rat : 4/5 .
Display
The display is absolutely amazing, and by amazing, I mean beautiful. Everything is identical chip and clean. As a software developer, I decidedly can appreciate all of the available screen very estate. I live in the concluding, and more specifically, I use my favored developer tools : six and grep. It is a 16:9 riddle scaling to a 3840 ten 2160 resoluteness ( 4K ). indeed, needle to say, there ‘s plenty of board for me to open one or more concluding windows on the like blind .
The shield solution is thus bombastic, some applications don’t necessarily scale american samoa well as the stay of the background environment. You can go to the Settings→Devices→Displays menu and change the value of the Scale airfield from the default option 200 % to something more, but some of the other applications may not comply with the changes ( a good example is GIMP ) .
name 2. The Display Configuration Menu
correct before I dove into this area, I went to the Ubuntu Software Center and installed the graphic editor. The application was loaded about a soon as the installation was accomplished, and it was immediately apparent that the icons and options of both trays did not scale like the rest of the engage system .
Display overall military rank : 5/5 .
Audio
I actually enjoy the quality of the onboard speakers. I am streaming audio through it while typing this review, and it sounds pretty darn good. Everything is clear and crisp, as one would hope .
The microphone worked as expected, and the folks on the early end of my television chat were able to hear my part with little to no noise or background noise .
Audio overall military rank : 5/5 .
Power Consumption
office consumption and battery animation can make or break a device intended to be used for mobile computer science. If you ca n’t get this right, what ‘s the point ? overall, I am extremely shanghai with the power pulmonary tuberculosis of this device .
To put this into perspective, I was running from barrage for 30 minutes while navigating in a browser and writing my notes for this follow-up in Google Docs, and 95 % of the battery is inactive remaining—not bad. Of path, if I were to increase the workload on this car, that number would cursorily drop .
As one would expect, the backlight of the jury dims to help conserve energy, and you besides have the choice to reduce the luminosity or turn off the backlight underneath the computer keyboard. You can do early things to reduce the power pulmonary tuberculosis angstrom well. For exemplar, if it is n’t being used, it may be to your advantage to disable Bluetooth .
Fast-forward a few days : the notebook has been off of the charger for three days now. I ‘ve been routinely going back to the device ( and waking it up from hibernation ) to use it for minor tasks here and there throughout the course of those like three days. The notebook is silent above 60 % battery. For a four-core device, this is very estimable .
As an add bonus, you can check battery state of matter promptly without opening up the lid and log in to your school term. The bequeath side of the notebook has a office gauge where by pressing a button, you are given a general and ocular approximation .
figure 3. The ocular Battery indicator
power consumption overall evaluation : 5/5.
Read more: Legacy of the Void Wiki Guide
Performance
Boot-up clock time was by and large reasonable. Although I did n’t precisely take a stopwatch to it, it felt to me as if I was at the login screen for 15 seconds after I pressed the power clitoris. nowadays, I ‘m not entirely sure what ‘s going on under the hood before the operate arrangement begins to load, but in my personal public opinion, I was expecting something a act faster when running off of an NVMe SSD. Either way, even 15 seconds is not unreasonable. And unless I reboot after a system update that requires it, I ‘ll never power-cycle my machines .
Waking up from a sleep or hibernate state is besides very immediate. Although I do not power off my notebooks, I alternatively close the hat to ensure that my applications and their states are however introduce when I reopen the hat and reawaken the device. Within a second or two, I am prompted with the login riddle .
To test the system ‘s overall operation, I decided to build three separate Linux kernels simultaneously, all unlike versions :
- 4.14.67
- 4.18.5
- 4.19-rc2
What truly impressed me was the accelerate at which the organization was able to untar the archives. For exemplify, the 4.19-rc2 gzip file was approximately 154M in size and took less than four seconds to uncompress—3.961 seconds to be demand. not badly !
When it came down to preparing and building these kernels all simultaneously, I was surprised that the base Ubuntu effigy for a developer machine did not include the developer environments for things like the C library or tied the kernel. I needed to install header files from libc-dev merely to build things in C. Eh, those are minor details .
back to building the kernels, I gave the exact lapp config ( x86_64_defconfig ) of the kernel to all three and ran the build simultaneously. All three completed within 25 seconds. Wow ! now, when I parallelize the builds with the -j option in the make control, the time dropped to less than ten seconds. I mean, holy place stool, belly laugh ! This is a four-core hyperthreaded machine using NVMe. So, I would expect it to perform, and it does just that. The 16GB of memory obviously helps a whole draw .
Wireless network performance besides was good and seemed to be very responsive .
Performance overall evaluation : 5/5 .
External Device Support and Peripherals
immediately, apart from a single microSD time slot and a earphone jack, everything else is USB-C. This seems to be the course nowadays, and it makes sense nowadays that newer devices to market all support the protocol. even the world power adapter connects over USB-C and will occupy a single USB-C port .
But, what does this mean for expandability ? It means you are required to buy adaptors and expanders to connect more devices, which includes external monitors. Dell does provide the customer with a single USB-A to USB-C adapter, and in most cases, that may be enough. This way, you can connect your USB thumbdrive or that external hard drive—or possibly even that one developer microcontroller board to communicate with its JTAG interface over consecutive .
Some folks may have issues with this, but honestly, I personally don’t mind. The protocol is much more superior than its predecessors, and it can sustain more connections for those that require it. truth be told, you need to give Dell some credit here. Unlike some of its competitors, Dell is at least easing your passage from USB-A to USB-C by providing that adapter. Those same competitors will sell you a alike adapter for $ 60 or more on their websites .
I besides am pleasantly surprised that the operate system went out to my local anesthetic network and found my print server with zero effort on my separate. vitamin a soon as I went to printer settings, it already was listed and ready to go .
The biggest problem I have is with the webcam. The webcam is curiously positioned beneath the display ( rather of at the top, as is distinctive ). This means that in order to capture your confront, you need to adjust the careen of your screen, which leads to an awkward display of your front. And if you ‘re on a video-conference address, everyone else will have a dainty view of your fingers typing away at the keyboard. I hope future iterations of the XPS wrinkle will address this design emergence .
figure 4. The Odd Placement of the Webcam
external device corroborate and peripherals overall fink : 3/5 .
And the Rest
The software integration between Dell and Ubuntu seems to stand out a lot—and I mean this in the most positive room. System update include Dell-specific hardware/firmware patches. This is huge .
trope 5. The System Doing a Hardware Update after Rebooting from a Software Update
I did experience a couple quirks or issues throughout this write-up. Let me country the following disavowal before getting into the details of those quirks :
The problems I ‘m about to describe have nothing to do with the Dell hardware. They are focused on the Ubuntu operational system running on that hardware. I ‘ve been observing this exact lapp behavior in virtual machines ( if applicable ) and on other non-Dell physical devices .
Applications would sometimes randomly crash. I ‘ve observed this with both the Update Manager and, again, with Nautilus. I ‘m not certain if it ‘s the version of Nautilus supported on Ubuntu 18.04, but careless of the environment that I use with this particular distribution and release, the Nautilus file director lotion routinely crashes and generates a “ report to Canonical ” message. The problem continues to occur with the latest Ubuntu software updates .
figure 6. A Reoccurring Software Crash in the Nautilus File Manager
Another oddity relates to the almost-never-resolved Linux problem : hibernate. To clarify, by nonpayment, Ubuntu places your car in a sleep express when it idles or if you close the eyelid of your laptop. After some time, the machine transitions from sleep to hibernate mode .
rest saves your current state into memory and places your peripherals into a low ability mode. In hibernate manner, the save state will be placed to disk, and the device will be powered down wholly. Ubuntu calls this modality “ suspend ” .
After six attempts to wake up the device from hibernation, lone five were successful. In that one case, I was not able to bring the machine back up, and I was greeted by a wholly total darkness screen with its backlight alight astir. After spending four minutes pressing every samara and finally pressing the world power button hoping it would do something, I gave up and held down the power button to force a system closure and restarted it .
In that same one case, I did do something unlike. I closed the hat while plugged in. I unplugged the device some time belated and attempted to reawaken it. I wonder if I hit some corner-case software microbe handling this transition.
anyhow, you can configure or customize the engage system ‘s suspend settings. For exemplify, you can extend the time it suspends from sleep or just disable it wholly for when the device is plugged in and/or on battery baron .
Software integration overall rate : 4/5 .
Final Thoughts
overall, I had a identical convinced experience with the 7th generation Dell XPS 13. It ‘s a powerful car and fully capable of handling all sorts of developer workloads. And if used in a professional environment, it’s very mobile deoxyadenosine monophosphate well. You can carry it from conference room to conference room and resume your oeuvre with little to no dislocation. Ubuntu is well integrated with the car, and it shows. You ca n’t ask for more in a developer’s laptop. I decidedly consider this device to be well worth the investment .
