Dell's New Sputnik 3 Mates Touchscreen With Ubuntu

ClaraBow writes "I find it interesting that Dell has started selling a thin and light touchscreen laptop called the XPS 13 Developer Edition, which will have Ubuntu Linux OS and Intel's fourth-generation Core processors, code-named Haswell. The laptop, code-named Sputnik, has a 13.3-inch touchscreen and will run on Ubuntu 12.04 OS. It is priced starting at $1,250 and is available in the U.S." One thing I wish was addressed in the blog post announcing this newest entry in the Sputnik line, or its listed specs (bad news beats not knowing, in this case), is battery life.

Comments

Why do you find it interesting?

[thegarbz]

What's interesting about it? Usual summary qualities here on slashdot, the editors can't even copy and paste in a useful manner.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[simonbp]

It doesn't come with Windows or OSX.

Not exactly hard to do, but still exceedingly rare for laptops in the US.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

We love Linux, that's why.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Kjella]

It's from a major OEM, it runs Linux which hopefully means it has Linux-friendly hardware and good Linux drivers. That's enough to be newsworthy on slashdot, which still hopes Linux will overtake the market share of such gems as Windows Vista and Windows 8 ;)

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably true, just a bit worried since it ships with 12.04 which is almost two years old. 13.10 would be a better choice to get a more useful version of Unity.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[ClaraBow]

It's a high-end, slick laptop with Linux preinstalled. In the past, Dell has focused on low-end Linux offerings. So it is very interesting -- this could be the beginning of a new trend if Dell can sell enough of them.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about Unity updates, but you can install the kernel from 13.10 and xorg from 13.04 w/o voiding the LTS-ness.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody said "gunoo".

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Joining Yet Again]

I find it interesting that BUY THIS PRODUCT NOW ** Awesome features!! ** Relevant to your audience!!! **

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

8GB RAM, i5 and 128 GB storage are low end for a developer laptop. The screen resolution is good. 13" is a matter of tastes. Small for me but ok for some other people.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Teun]

I don't care what version of Ubuntu it has, it is Linux compatible hardware, that's what counts.

Within no time I'll have a nice KDE desktop installed.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[H0p313ss]

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop ?

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[neonleonb]

There's a higher-CPU higher-disk version for a couple hundred more. I agree about the lack of RAM, though.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Teun]

This being a touch screen I might go for one of the more suited KDE offerings like plasma-active or even the netbook layout.

But hey, I can install more than one and at the login prompt I select the specific desktop that suits me best :)

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[ledow]

Linux-compatible does not mean anything more than "it works".

And, as far as I've been able to tell over the latest 10 years or so, Linux "works" on basically 99% of machines I've ever touched without having to do anything special (yes, I have jumped through hoops, but that's not the point - here someone else has jumped through those hoops for you).

Whether it works TO ITS FULL CAPACITY is another question entirely. For example, chances are that it's graphics chipset is "supported" but very, very slim that it enjoys full acceleration unless we're talking about an Intel chipset or a binary driver somewhere. And we can already do *that* anywhere we like.

The fuss about Linux drivers is no longer "does it work" (and hasn't been, for a long time) so much as "does it work as fully as possible?". And almost certainly, in a consumer laptop, the answer is no.

All this says is that their laptop happens to work in Linux with a certain configuration. There's no guarantee that it won't include a binary driver and/or only a certain Linux image being "supported" (i.e. working at all). And that leaves you off no better than a Windows machine that only comes with a recovery disk.

(For hoops that I've jumped through, try setting up your Linux partitions to mirror those of a Zip-disk on even boot/install USB disks, having to manually load soundfonts with a script to make soundcards work, or having to compile for some mini-ITX boards that can barely support the 486 instruction set to get an idea of the sorts of things that can crop up with old / embedded / poorly supported hardware).

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[H0p313ss]

Remember people complaining about Ubuntu because it was "brown" and claiming Mint was better because it was "green"?

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Kjella]

(yes, I have jumped through hoops, but that's not the point - here someone else has jumped through those hoops for you). (...) And we can already do *that* anywhere we like.

Actually that's exactly what you can't do with a laptop, maybe this bit and that bit works great with Linux while others don't work well or at all. Been there, tried that and it had nothing to do with price or quality but simply that some companies cared to support Linux and other's didn't. Same with accessories, one printer worked brilliantly while an almost similar competitor was a paperweight but at least those you can research. And if it doesn't quite work well you've got nobody to blame but yourself, they didn't sell it with Linux and never claimed it would work.

If you value your time then the fact that they have "jumped through those hoops" for you has value. That you have a company you can actually go back to and say "You sold me a Linux laptop but such and such isn't working!" has value. They're a big OEM, that puts pressure on the manufacturers to have Linux drivers. Perhaps during their testing and validation they've found bugs that have been fixed for this exact reason. Trust me, they do care a bit more if Dell says they'd like to sell a model but their drivers are buggy than if Joe Nobody says it doesn't work for him. But please use the Ubuntu install CD and take your chances on some random hardware, as somebody must figure out how to jump those hoops.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[msobkow]

What the hell are you people running on your machines?

I run 2-3 copies of Eclipse, DB/2 LUW, PostgreSQL, and MySQL with a JEE debug server on a 4GB box. I run Oracle, Sybase ASE, and SQL Server on a Windows 7 laptop with a JEE debug server and a couple of other things with 4GB RAM, usually including a couple of java programs that are sucking back 768MB each.

Neither box comes anywhere near thrashing. In fact, they hardly use their swap at all.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

8GB RAM, i5 and 128 GB storage are low end for a developer laptop

Amazing, isn't it, what people managed to achieve with those paltry 4 GB of RAM ten years ago or so? Oh, wait, I didn't have 4 GB of memory ten years ago...

Also, I believe that large memory on mobile devices eats power. Those extra GBs will cost you. True, this is a particularly pressing matter in cell phones in particular, but with low-power states on modern CPUs and low-power SSDs, according to Amdahl's law, memory becomes a proportionally greater power hog on any laptop.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's a big IF. It may depend on Dell proprietary drivers to make this install of Ubuntu work, and so may not be compatible with distros in general.

Take a look through Ubuntu's "Certified Hardware" collection. Note there's two types: stuff that works with the regular download Ubuntu, and stuff that only works with the OEM pre-installed Ubuntu.

Link code not working in preview. He're the raw link
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[icebike]

The fuss about Linux drivers is no longer "does it work" (and hasn't been, for a long time) so much as "does it work as fully as possible?". And almost certainly, in a consumer laptop, the answer is no.

Actually, I don't find NO to the answer at all any more. As long as you avoid Nvidia or commit to running their proprietary drivers. The last several laptops I loaded Linux on everything worked, right down to the fingerprint reader. And they could be said to work MORE fully than when they were shipped with window.

All this says is that their laptop happens to work in Linux with a certain configuration. There's no guarantee that it won't include a binary driver and/or only a certain Linux image being "supported" (i.e. working at all). And that leaves you off no better than a Windows machine that only comes with a recovery disk.

Wait, there is no real problem with binary drivers. They may not be fit to ship with any linux distro, but when you are buying a whole machine you aren't getting or expecting a virgin 100% untainted Linux. You have a manufacturer standing behind the laptop and any binary drivers that it requires. End users who buy machines pre-packaged with linux could care less what RMS thinks.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[ledow]

And the answer "The drivers are as supplied on the recovery disk" is not familiar to you?

They are a big OEM. They don't care about supporting these drivers in anything but an OS they have supplied. Like my last 15 years of putting Linux machines into schools, I would bet that any Linux driver is tied to only a particular kernel, and that without proper source, and that they never update it. They won't support other distros and unless you want to run Ubuntu 12.04 (specifically) for ever, you won't see much action above and beyond telling you to put the machine back into it's factory state (i.e with Ubuntu 12.04 and their driver how it's always been installed).

But more likely, it will have some cheap base hardware that's already "supported" by chance and they do nothing special to sell it as a Linux machine. And you won't get anything beyond the standard binaries.

I will happily still to my "chances" on some random hardware, like I've been doing for over a decade. The examples I cite are few and far between and usually because support for a certain type of machine / hardware was DROPPED from Linux distros rather than anything to do with it not actually being present at all.

I think you've just fallen for the advertising - it says Linux so it must mean ALL Linux forever with open-source code, right? My hardware from pre-1999 that says the same will happily prove you wrong. Sure, if you're lucky it had a 2.0/2.2 driver for it at some point, but you don't stand a chance of getting it working nowadays - and some of those drivers refused to install on anything but the "supported" distro.

The fact that this comes with Ubuntu tells you one of two things:

- They support ONLY Ubuntu
- or -
- Ubuntu does well enough supporting this with no help required.

P.S. I have sent computers back to companies that claimed Linux support, and I made a major UK distributor fight with their suppliers to get me a custom BIOS made for a laptop because they sold it to me as "supporting" Windows XP and then found out it wouldn't boot XP if you had encryption software (required by law in my field) because of a crappy BIOS bug. Literally, I had an AMI BIOS written, just for that laptop, just for me, because of how much money it was going to cost them if I had sent the laptops we'd bought on the basis of XP support back.

Trust me, doing the same for Linux is a LOT harder, especially when they can demonstrate that on ***A*** Linux with ***A*** driver that it works.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Useful version of unity" is an oxymoron. Unity is the Metro of Linux.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[AdamWill]

"For example, chances are that it's graphics chipset is "supported" but very, very slim that it enjoys full acceleration unless we're talking about an Intel chipset or a binary driver somewhere."

It has an Intel chipset, which has full 2D and 3D acceleration.

I have the second-gen XPS 13 developer edition. Every function on the system works. It does not include any binary drivers. Yes, only the supplied Ubuntu install is 'supported', but then, if you buy a Windows 7 laptop and then self-install Windows 8 on it (for instance), your manufacturer isn't going to support that either. I run Fedora 19 on my second-gen XPS 13 and all its functions work fully and correctly.

"try setting up your Linux partitions to mirror those of a Zip-disk on even boot/install USB disks"

What? That fragment does not even make syntactical sense, so far as I can work out.

"having to manually load soundfonts with a script to make soundcards work"

Along with the reference to 'Zip-disks' - 1996 called and it wants its problems back.

"or having to compile for some mini-ITX boards that can barely support the 486 instruction set to get an idea of the sorts of things that can crop up with old / embedded / poorly supported hardware"

So, buying CPUs that 'can barely support the 486 instruction set' is a bad idea in 2013, huh? Thanks for the tip, I never would've guessed.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[AdamWill]

" In the past, Dell has focused on low-end Linux offerings"

Well, not really, because they've been selling this system for like two years now. This is just the Haswell bump for it.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[PixetaledPikachu]

Probably true, just a bit worried since it ships with 12.04 which is almost two years old. 13.10 would be a better choice to get a more useful version of Unity.

12.04 is the current LTS, and will be supprted and patched until 2017. Alternatively, almost any hardware that is supported on 12.04 will run just fine on 13.x, with maybe certain AMD cards as an exception, but that has nothing to do with ubuntu

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Frosty Piss]

And at $1,250, overpriced. And of course they can then point to poor sales as to why they only sell Windows laptops / tablets at a reasonable price.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[dov_0]

What's useful about it? I mean the laptop itself this time. You have a keyboard and a touchpad. Why reach further and touch the screen? Touch screens are great on tablets, but somewhat limiting. Why the hell would they be useful on a laptop or a desktop? Just seems like more work for the same results to me.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[dov_0]

Well said! Unfortunately, catering for idiots is the mark of the late 20th century and early 21st and it isn't going to get better. People are busy and lazy. They don't want to have to learn new things. Learning for the joy of learning is going out the door and has become 'vocational learning' only. Universities even back in the 70's were dropping art and history courses as well as classical languages and history etc. The industries that have run the American economy that has influenced the world in these things so much just want consumers. People who know what the specials are at the dept store, but don't really think much. They know how to use facebook, are not savvy enough to avoid the ads and know how to use youtube enough to view cat videos. Mostly, they know how to buy, buy, buy and consume what they are told to consume. Stupidity is the desired outcome. Stupid consumers who just buy whatever crap is dished out to them.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[deviated_prevert]

And at $1,250, overpriced. And of course they can then point to poor sales as to why they only sell Windows laptops / tablets at a reasonable price.

It comes with one year support with the option of extending the support. Perhaps this is why Dell is trying out the market with Linux. It is billed as a developer device so one would think that the specs are for those who run and compile software not exactly your average joe consumer. If you notice the price is slightly lower than a comparable Mac Book PRO. The only difference is the screen res as Mac Books have a Retina Display, whatever the hell that is LOL. So this is not designed to be sold in the box stores. If it takes off then perhaps a cheaper line of consumer Linux option laptops might show up. Somehow I don't think Dell is going to dabble in the Chromebook market the way Samsung does.

There is another thought, perhaps Dell is doing this to piss off Microsoft again, every time they have offered a Linux or no os option in the past all of a sudden they get a quick visit from the men in black from Redmond and POOF the line gets axed. The other thought is the reason why they have chosen Ubuntu this time around is because a stock Ubuntu need to be tweeked to do certain file formats and in selling Ubuntu in a stock format the goons from the MPEGLA cannot come after them, even if Microshaft comes knocking about fat and ntfs patents perhaps they will just turn around and sick them on Shuttleworth this time around instead of just dumping the Linux line like they did with their RedHat option laptops and desktops in the past.

Considering that Dell already got cash from Redmond, perhaps they are trying to squeeze a little more cheese out of MS. Either way I do not expect them to actually aggressively market an alternative OS, they like all the other manufactures just kowtow to the almighty Windows, always have and I doubt they actually have the balls as a corporation to break the free from the OS monopoly.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[FlyHelicopters]

Why the hate for Windows?

Linux has its place, but Windows isn't evil...

Unless you know something I don't of course. :) Maybe Windows turns into SkyNet or something...

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Teun]

I don't read any hate for Windows but I do read the usual,based on facts, warnings against Microsoft.

Windows has it's place but it's not because MS has such a clean rap sheet forcing it upon us.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Riiight, because if it was hard to make it should be hard to use...

That mentality is exactly what has held Linux back for so long.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[giarcgood]

12.04 is the current LTS, and will be supprted and patched until 2017.

Also 12.04.3 is from August this year. So it isn't some old OS left out to dry. I dunno if this is the version used but would be surprised if it isn't.

I dont use Ubuntu so I am not sure what is included in these increments. Bug fixes and backports?

Actually there is quite a lot I don't know.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[thegarbz]

Except Dell have offered products with the choice of running windows for several years now...

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[pmontra]

I just run top and sorted by memory usage. I see firefox (with 10 tabs open), thunderbird, emacs, skype, nautilus, dropbox, Xorg followed by many other system applications. I have mysql and postgresql running by the don't make it into the top 50 or something. If I had a ruby on rails application running, or cassandra, they'd be in the top 10. I can run all of these quite comfortably together on my 4 GB laptop, unless something gets unexpectedly too big and I have to kill it. But I'm always a little on swap. I know that if I start Eclipse I have to close something else. IntelliJ is much more RAM friendly but luckily my job doesn't involve stuff for which I need an IDE. emacs is really enough. Even vim would do.

What I can't run in 4 GB is all of the above plus more than one VM. Actually if the VM is not a headless Linux server or a WinXP client I can't run it unless I close some of the applications I keep open all the time. The free Win7 and Win8 VMs from http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads tend to use a lot of RAM and if one does web development it nice to have a couple of them open for testing on IE. That's less and less important because all of my customers moved to Firefox or Chrome over the years but some of *their* customers are still on IE, which is getting more standard. (BTW, I used to run this laptop with Windows and a virtualized Linux development server, but as my job is to develop for Linux servers and web browsers I decided to go the other way round and I'm perfectly happy with that.)

Furthermore there are occasional memory hogs. A sample program from a Coursera big data course (don't remember which one) required 2 GB of RAM to process some sample csv file for an assignment. Those were program and data provided by the teacher and there was nothing I could do about it. Plus I do occasional video editing. Extra RAM is always handy.

Because of those memory constraints (and end of support) I'm looking for a new laptop and I'm not considering anything that can't be upgraded at 16 GB minimum. I like the internals of HP's new Zbook 15 (fully user serviceable parts, up to 32 GB RAM, up to two disks, etc). I don't like some of its exteriors: the keyboard with small arrow keys and the number pad which turns it into an interface for left handed people (the touchpad is placed to the very left, which is common but inappropriate for 90% of the population). I definitely prefer the keyboard arrangement of their Elitebook 850 g1 (about the same width and no numberpad), which stops at 16 GB and is a weaker machine in many other ways. Actually I prefer the case of my current nc8430, which has a better keyboard (more key travel) and a 16:10 screen (the zbook has to be wider to raise to the same screen height). My Core 2 Duo is still good enough for my job, disk speed (or lack of, compared to SSDs) is not a problem but obviously everybody welcomes a faster machine, me too. However the limited memory is definitely becoming a problem.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[pmontra]

Sometimes I had the instinct of touching the buttons of a dialog without of reaching for the touchpad. Moving a finger to the screen is faster than aiming the mouse/touchpad and clicking. Maybe scrolling isn't, as I'd have to keep the arm raised for a longer time and rolling the mouse wheel or a two finger swipe on the touchpad are much more comfortable. Maybe there are no other useful use case for touch on laptops (is pinch to zoom common?) but maybe as a web developer I better have a touchscreen if people using Win8 gets addicted to touching things inside their browsers.
Maybe, maybe... Many unknown unknowns with a technology which is new on this class of computing devices.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Dell have offered products with the choice of running windows for several years now...

Dell has offered PCs with Linux for many years. Especially a few years ago it was a very visible option on their web, and you could get it cheaper than Windows PCs (without the free support). It is a myth that you haven't been able to buy major brand Linux-PCs, but all OEMs that have tried have usually scaled i back because lack of buyer interest.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

"and Intel's fourth-generation Core processors, code-named Haswell"

It's interesting that
1) the submitter thinks the /. audience hasn't heard of Haswell yet, and
2) Intel considers Haswell the fourth generation after Pentium M (Banias), Core (Dothan), Core 2 (Merom/Conroe), Core i7 (Nehalem), Core i7/i5/i3 (Sandy Bridge)... but it actually makes some sense: on the desktop Conroe was a far bigger departure from Dothan and Prescott than Nehalem was from Conroe. The sanest generational grouping post-P3 would be Willamette + Northwood + Prescott ("Netburst" arch), Banias + Dothan ("Pentium M" arch), Conroe + Nehalem, Sandy + Ivy, Haswell ("Core" arch).

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Lennie]

It won't run a completely standard desktop Linux, there is a PPA with some drivers, the source is available.

I think a lot of the source is already upstream though (like Linux kernel driver for the touchpad), the drivers were created by Dell or the part manufacturer.

So now the PPA ends up being mostly backports to the Ubuntu LTS.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Lennie]

Lots of people run multiple VMs on their machine, they just haven't figured out running LXC or even Docker would be a much better idea.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Antonovich]

I have been looking at these for a while now but I just can't understand why they are so expensive. I know prices on RAM and HDs vary but something is wrong here.

I currently have a 14" HP with a i5-2410M, 6GB of RAM and a 750GB/5400 HD. This all comes in at under 2kg. I bought it with the Windows tax and it STILL only cost me 700€, over 2 years ago. I use Ubuntu 12.04 and battery life is crap. I completely disabled the separate graphics card and I still get far lower life than on windows (which I use once every two months or so for the odd word document I can't be bothered risking the format of). I spent ages trying to get it performing better but nothing worked. I want to continue using Ubuntu 12.04 until at least 14.04 comes out - I much, much prefer running the same system as my servers and I'm too old to be permanently testing a new distro....

In theory, this system is almost perfect - I lose on disk space but I only really need 256GB - the rest can go on an external disk and better disk speed would be really nice. A touch screen decidedly turns me off (a developer laptop? seriously? know any developers that like you putting your greasy mitts on their lovely screen?) but it's thin, light and has decent battery life, *with drivers for linux so I don't have to piss around like in the ol' days*. But 1300-1450€ - WTF?!? (in France). I might get a discount because of my Linux Foundation membership but I got to the point where I had to put my credit card in on the site and I still didn't see whether there would be a discount, and if so, how much.

They may eventually get my business, because I'm willing to pay a couple of hundred extra for decent Linux support but I'm definitely going to be left feeling like I was done in the back of a Volkswagon...

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has an Intel chipset, which has full 2D and 3D acceleration.

And no OpenCL support (unless you count the open source driver which calls abort() for the 90% API calls yet to be implemented). Every time someone praises a vendor for their Linux driver support I run into the edge cases. I really should not be surprised very few applications use OpenCL and Intel is not exactly known for cutting edge GPUs.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Mike Frett]

Windows found it's place in a landfill back in October 2012 when I switched to Linux. So yes, it has it's place. Also, most companies try selling Linux laptops on severely underpowered hardware and then they complain it doesn't sell. But really, it doesn't matter what Dell does, they are old news just like every other PC maker that sells Windows only hardware; which is why Microsoft has a future problem.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Christian Smith]

Ubuntu maintain backported kernels and Xorg from the later Ubuntu releases, so that current hardware can be supported in a sane manner while keeping the apps stable.

So, my 12.04 laptop is running the kernel and Xorg stack from 13.04 (no doubt 13.10 kernel and Xorg is in the works) all in a 12.04 LTS supported manner.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[realityimpaired]

It's available in Canada too, at $1289.99 to start....

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9333/pd?oc=cax13u1238&model_id=xps-13-9333

For those who don't want to click the link (or if the link is geo-locked)....
Core i5 4200U (2.6GHz)
13.3" 1920x1080 touchscreen display
8GB DDR3 memory (1600MHz)
128GB SSD
Intel HD 4400 graphics
Ubuntu 12.04
Weight: 3.04lbs
Warranty: 1 year Next Business Day onsite support (after remote diagnosis, also 1 year). You can extend that to 3 years, and you can also buy up to 3 years of accidental damage coverage.

That's not a low end laptop. You are getting your money's worth, and it's in the same price range as Windows-based laptops with similar spec.

If you really want a cheap laptop with Linux on it, buy a chromebook. You can unlock them and replace the Chrome OS with a standard Linux distro if you want.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[realityimpaired]

So don't use it.

I have a feeling they're including it because a 13.3" 1920x1080 screen with touch is cheaper than one without, due to economies of scale, and the fact that Windows is going in the direction of touch screen mandatory.

Besides, if it's being marketed as a developper system, having the touch as an option for one more thing you can test before your users do is a good thing.

Re: Why do you find it interesting?

[AvitarX]

As someone who runs windows on a macbook pro 13 inch retina, it's not a wtf is that, it's a "I can carry a primary and a back up system comfortably and have all the screen real estate I want if I get close to it, and very crisp fonts ". It has made my job far easier to work off site.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not likely to get Linux support beyond the main distros from a major company like Dell to be honest, let alone any company that's actually smart about how support is handled for it or anything like it. Dell prides itself on its ability to have a varied support staff trained in a variety of OS's and technologies (I'm talking enterprise-class here; you get what you pay for), but if an issue gets beyond their technical ability, they have an escalation path to the developers of the OS for support. The problem with most major Linux distros is that there isn't a company backing them; its community driven. A good example is CentOS. While technically its a ripoff of redhat, its still got a few differences that have thrown a wrench into using some applications. I've called Dell before to get support from them on CentOS and they were limited in what they could assist with. When I began to push for a 'why', it was only then that I understood the reasoning for why they supported things in this manner and why most companies are going the same direction.

Ubuntu has a company backing it; a company that makes money and that loses money depending on their ability to provide a certain level of stability and consistency. What this means for Dell is regarded as the 'escalation path'. Once an issue gets beyond the knowledge of Dell's best and brightest, they have to go to the source for an answer or a fix and whoever that source is, they are expected to be able to support their product to the extent necessary to provide a resolution. A company whose reputation and business are riding on their ability to fix a problem are going to do the job a lot faster and a lot better than a community driven OS whose only support staff are a small team of people who have a day job and develop Linux as a hobby who don't really care about the one-off ends up costing the company that sold the solution a multi-million dollar account.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[chmod a x mojo]

So, again, what exactly is worth the extra price?

The support? Would a developer really need that? 1 year of support is not worth $500

It sure as hell isn't the specs, you can get a Lenovo ( or HP equivalent ) g500s touch ($550-600ish, either keep the 6GB RAM or spend $60 for 16GB upgrade) as a mobile dev platform for ~1/2 the price. All you have to do is install Ubuntu / Debian / whatever on it - and I would hope devs can do this simple task- and pretty much everything works OOTB. This includes the touchscreen, video card ( with one annoying caveat currently, you need to adjust the backlight up from 0 when booting, after /dev gets fully populated), and all other hardware.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[ais523]

I'm not convinced that it necessarily means the hardware will be particularly Linux-suited. I bought a Linux (Ubuntu) laptop from Dell a while back (this was in the era of Ubuntu Feisty, I think?). It came with a manual for getting started on Windows, and had a Windows key on the keyboard (which the installed version of Ubuntu happily interpreted as Super, as it usually does). It didn't particularly feel like anything other than a standard Windows Dell laptop that someone had installed Ubuntu on prior to shipping. (Also, the touchpad didn't work, except for a few minutes a few weeks after I obtained it; I suspect that might have been a hardware issue rather than drivers, though. I got used to doing without it.)

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[ais523]

I currently develop on a laptop with a little under 3GB main memory (and around as much swap). I haven't really noticed memory pressure. (Probably because while I'm programming, I tend not to have much open other than terminals and text editors; maybe a separate window for documentation.) I have more memory pressure when I'm web-browsing (like I am now), rather than developing. (The two activities are mutually exclusive for me; I can't concentrate on programming when I have Slashdot to distract me.)

Re: Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually cheaper than the XPS 13 that ships with Windows, which is itself cheaper than many ultrabooks with similar specs and build quality.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

and then bitch because it doesn't work as advertised

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

. They won't support other distros and unless you want to run Ubuntu 12.04 (specifically) for ever, you won't see much action above and beyond telling you to put the machine back into it's factory state

Got hit with that on a Windows PC a few years back, half of the hardware was custom made in large numbers to be as feature rich and cheap as possible (by Aldi/Medion) - the only way to reinstall the hardware was to use the included recovery disk and even the hardware companies involved refused to provide drivers for custom hardware (being told your brand new Gforce whatever is a striped down version with no support is priceless). So while it is possible that the hardware supports Linux always check with the involved hardware companies first. If you check before buying it will be some wasted time at worst.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[exomondo]

Also, most companies try selling Linux laptops on severely underpowered hardware and then they complain it doesn't sell.

A huge part of the advantage of Linux is not requiring such highend specs to run so that is not the problem, the value proposition is that you don't have to buy such expensive hardware to run it. Otherwise ultimately why switch to Linux? If not for cost then why abandon all your application compatibility on Windows or OSX?

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[exomondo]

It sure as hell isn't the specs, you can get a Lenovo ( or HP equivalent ) g500s touch ($550-600ish, either keep the 6GB RAM or spend $60 for 16GB upgrade) as a mobile dev platform for ~1/2 the price.

It's less portable, heavier and with less than half the screen pixels on a larger display making the resolution far less than half that of the Dell, no SSD, far slower CPU, 1 year next day onsite warranty and of course the year of support (whether you need that is a different story). If it were similarly priced to the G500s I would be wondering why the hell the G500s was such terrible value in comparison. What I'm wondering is why you ignored the obvious and non-trivial differences in specifications between the two?

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hate for Windows?

Linux has its place, but Windows isn't evil...

Unless you know something I don't of course. :) Maybe Windows turns into SkyNet or something...

You may joke, but Microsoft is one of the companies named as cooperating with the NSA. Windows does indeed seem to be designed to support monitoring of it's users.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

No! it is that the people building these things are completely out of touch with reality, exemplified by your characterization of people who just want a simple tool to do a job "lazy idiots". people don't give a fuck about the details of operating system internals, nor should they, and if the operating system isn't just getting the fuck out of the way and letting people get on doing what they actually need/want to get done then clearly the operating system designers are the lazy idiots.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

People are busy and lazy. They don't want to have to learn new things.

Rubbish, people will learn new things if it provides benefit to them, they won't spend time learning something utilitarian if it is pointless. Why bother learning Linux? Sure some people do it for the joy of learning (debunking your other idiotic assertion) but they are a niche, of course not everybody wants to do that. The problem is its lack of tangible benefit, Android provided tangible benefit over its competitors in the smartphone world which is why it has flourished but Linux has never offered such things in the desktop world and still its proponents continue to blame the user, it's getting fucking pathetic now.

Learning for the joy of learning is going out the door and has become 'vocational learning' only. Universities even back in the 70's were dropping art and history courses as well as classical languages and history etc.

Because university courses cost significant amounts of money so those that have no vocational value were unpopular and became niche courses offered by various institutions that matched the low demand for such things.

The industries that have run the American economy that has influenced the world in these things so much just want consumers. People who know what the specials are at the dept store, but don't really think much. They know how to use facebook, are not savvy enough to avoid the ads and know how to use youtube enough to view cat videos. Mostly, they know how to buy, buy, buy and consume what they are told to consume. Stupidity is the desired outcome. Stupid consumers who just buy whatever crap is dished out to them.

yeah yeah yeah, i suppose it makes you feel special though.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that leaves you off no better than a Windows machine that only comes with a recovery disk.

So even if this were the sort of machine you wanted with no binary drivers the only reason to get it would be if you actually cared about that which virtually nobody, even the tiny subset of users that actually do use Linux, does.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[chmod a x mojo]

Yeah, CPU wise it's pretty much the same, the i5-4200U gains maybe 2-6% on the i5-3230M.

As for screen real-estate I didn't see the 1080P, and even then it is not worth the extra money. For ~$100 and 1 extra pound you can get a second USB monitor @15" and the same res as your laptop for a mobile dual screen setup. Dual screen would be more useful, especially at the sizes we are talking about.

As for the HDD, what the hell are you going to do with 128GB, carry around an external drive everywhere too? There goes your weight benefits. If carrying an extra 1-2 pounds is going to kill you, you have some pretty serious health problems and really should spend the money on a Doctor / gym membership... There also is no reason to need SSD performance when coding into terminals / eclipse, other than e-peen bragging rights.

It still has less RAM, the only thing the dell may have going for it is a better keyboard, but they don't show it in the pics. The Lenovo unfortunately has the same chiclet keyboard every manufacturer has gone braindead and decided was a good idea. It's not bad, just not as good as non-chiclet keyboards. One advantage the Lenovo has over the Dell, from what I can see, is the full num-pad. That may not be important to some people, but for what I do it is very useful.

As for the ignoring the "non-trivial" differences, as I said SSD that small is useless, and while 1080P / fullHD may be nice is not necessary, and may even be a bitch to read depending on how the font scaling / sizing is set up. You could argue over power usage and battery life, but realistically, for development you should be sitting in one spot, not wandering around with no access to power, so could plug it in 99% of the time making the power savings both from the CPU and the SSD ( which I can't see being all that much more than a properly set up spinning disk; maybe minutes, maybe 1/4 hour? ) a moot point. So yeah, still way overpriced.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[exomondo]

Yeah, CPU wise it's pretty much the same, the i5-4200U gains maybe 2-6% on the i5-3230M.

The battery saving is significant and the GPU performance increase of the former is also significant.

As for screen real-estate I didn't see the 1080P, and even then it is not worth the extra money. For ~$100 and 1 extra pound you can get a second USB monitor @15" and the same res as your laptop for a mobile dual screen setup. Dual screen would be more useful, especially at the sizes we are talking about.

As for the HDD, what the hell are you going to do with 128GB, carry around an external drive everywhere too? There goes your weight benefits.

Hang on, so you won't carry a portable HDD if you needed one but you advocate carrying an additional USB monitor?! And no, if you need extra space you could use an sd card or carry a 0.3lb external HDD which makes it still less than the lenovo.

If carrying an extra 1-2 pounds is going to kill you, you have some pretty serious health problems and really should spend the money on a Doctor / gym membership...

Nice argumentum ad absurdum, I shouldn't worry about things unless they are going to kill me.

There also is no reason to need SSD performance when coding into terminals / eclipse, other than e-peen bragging rights.

Right because nobody actually compiles that code or runs programs that actually do things and the only thing developers do is type code into editors.

As for the ignoring the "non-trivial" differences, as I said SSD that small is useless, and while 1080P / fullHD may be nice is not necessary, and may even be a bitch to read depending on how the font scaling / sizing is set up. You could argue over power usage and battery life, but realistically, for development you should be sitting in one spot, not wandering around with no access to power, so could plug it in 99% of the time making the power savings both from the CPU and the SSD ( which I can't see being all that much more than a properly set up spinning disk; maybe minutes, maybe 1/4 hour? ) a moot point.

All you are arguing is that the things that make it more costly are things you don't need, so the question ultimately is why are you at all interested in something you clearly don't need? You know why it's more expensive and you're complaining effectively that it shouldn't exist because you don't want it, that's just idiotic. Obviously you think developers are just people who sit next to power points and type into text editors, that is false.

SSD performance, CPU/GPU performance, resolution, portability and battery life clearly are not trivial elements, but if you don't consider them important then obviously a system that is defined by those differences isn't for you, so why are you so hung up on something that you don't want?

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

The SSD, hi-res screen and battery life are mostly what makes it more expensive. Naturally if you dont care about those thingss then go for the cheaper lenovo or hp ones without those features.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[gunzy83]

It is anything like the previous generations the drivers will either be mainlined already or in a PPA (in which case they be in a future mainline kernel release). I have the previous gen Ivy Bridge XPS 13 and everything (even the function buttons on the keyboard) works out of the box on Kubuntu 13.04+ and Opensuse. Even Arch was no trouble.

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Christian Smith]

For 13.10 kernel on 12.04:

$ apt-cache search saucy
linux-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel image and headers
linux-generic-lts-saucy-eol-upgrade - Complete Generic Linux kernel and headers
linux-headers-3.11.0-13 - Header files related to Linux kernel version 3.11.0
linux-headers-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel headers
linux-image-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel image
linux-lts-saucy-tools-3.11.0-13 - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 3.11.0-13
linux-lts-saucy-tools-common - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 3.11.0
linux-signed-generic-lts-saucy - Complete Signed Generic Linux kernel and headers
linux-signed-generic-lts-saucy-eol-upgrade - Complete Signed Generic Linux kernel and headers
linux-signed-image-generic-lts-saucy - Signed Generic Linux kernel image
linux-tools-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel tools
linux-tools-lts-saucy - Linux kernel versioned Tools

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[neonleonb]

It's not just what RAM usage is today. It's also what RAM usage *will be* in 2 or 3 years. I certainly want my laptop to still be useful after only a couple of years!

Re:Why do you find it interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed a nice but pricy laptop. I would buy a laptop with similar spec without an OS and install U(Ku)buntu myself
Even a 10 yrs old laptop I use (Pentium 4 with only 512MB RAM) happily runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ,be it not at lightning speed.

Personally I still cant see the advantages of a laptop (or desktop for that matter) with a touch screen.
Having to lift/stretch an arm to touch all the time would highly likely induce RSS.
In this respect a mouse combined with an arm rest chair is (ultimately) so much more comfortable.

Touch screen devices are great for mobile phones and tablets.

But even if was donated a laptop -desktop PC with a touch screen ,I would never use the touch facility

highlandham in the north of Scotland

Relevant because Dell went private

[assemblerex]

It's interesting that a company that pretty much vowed to only be wintel is branching out.
I am guessing microsoft upsetting people with surface has thawed large companies to alternatives.

Re:Relevant because Dell went private

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't their first Linux offering, they previosly sold desktops with Ubuntu preinstalled under the moniker "N Series".

Re:Relevant because Dell went private

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't their first Linux offering, they previosly sold desktops with Ubuntu preinstalled under the moniker "N Series".

I bought a Dell Vostro 15" laptop with Ubuntu on it earlier this year for about $450. Nothing super fast, but I needed a laptop to code & test on when I travel.

I think it's great that Dell is offering a top of the line hardware product with Linux, but starting at $1,250 is ridiculous. Not as ridiculous as Google Pixel for that price, but still.

Re:Relevant because Dell went private

[Nerdfest]

The Pixel has a _really_ nice screen. The resolution of this one is what I'd consider a bare minimum for a developers machine.

Re:Relevant because Dell went private

[AdamWill]

And they've already been selling this system for like two years. This is just a spec bump.

OR System76

[jmd]

https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/daru4

a bit cheaper

Re:OR System76

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks cheaper too.

Re:OR System76

[boorack]

Expandable at least. You can plug in two standard SO-DIMM chips, one m-SATA drive and one 2.5" 7mm drive. It also has 14.4" full-HD screen, big enough to use its full resolution (not retina-like ultra-high pixel density where image has to be enlarged 2x, so you get half the resolution). I'm curious about its reliability.

I'm using Asus UX-32VD which has similiar characteristics (notably it has one standard SO-DIMM slot and one standard 7mm 2.5" drive, despite its slim ultrabook-like look). Sometimes I need a bit more power and bigger screen (being "in the field", not at my desk), so standard PC does not count. I would like to see expandable 15"-16" ultrabook with 2576x1600 resolution (three columns of code plus sidebar!) and quad core processor. Ideally with one or two mSATA slots and one 2.5" bay and at least two SO-DIMM slots. Pixel density would be the same as in UX-31, so with good quality IPS display one would use every last bit of it. Something like Asus UX-51 but with better resolution and expandable. This would be terribly setup for techies, programmers in particular. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of such product - unlike desktop PCs where one can built one's own system from scratch, everyone is on vendors mercy when it comes to notebooks or ultrabooks.

Re:OR System76

[fnj]

I didn't happen to see anything under 14.1", 0.9" thick, and 4.6 lb there. That is a completely different class from 13.3", 0.7", and 3.0 lb. I own two systems (13.3 and 14.1) that differ in physical dimensions by approximately the same amount, and believe me, it is like night and day.

The 14.1" is GIGANTIC and weighs as much as a LOCOMOTIVE. That would be your reaction after coming from a 13.3" lightweight.

For real portability, the 13.3" is the sweet spot - if you can read the screen - which, sadly, I can't really do without tremendous strain any more. But let's assume the tpical user is not 66 years old with a history since early childhood of severe myopia, extreme astigmatism, and gross differential between the two eyes - and exponentially more horrific "floaters" and cloudiness the last couple of decades.

Re:OR System76

[kervin]

I agree. I didn't see the point of an ultrathin for a workstation so I got a System76 "Gazelle", Ubuntu 13.x, 15 inch, i7 Haswell, 16GB Ram, 500GB dual SSD that cost me $1.6K shipped.

Re:OR System76

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

Trackpad, only two buttons, retarded keyboard layout.

How the fuck are you supposed to use Linux with a two button mouse?!

Re:OR System76

[mverwijs]

> Unplug! The Darter UltraThin is designed for over five hours of continuous
> work or play on the go.

I do not understand how this is worth mentioning. At least not without being followed by 'Sorry about that'.

The only reason for me to have a laptop is to be able to have it work constantly, for at least 8 hours a day. Preferably longer.

5 Hours. Yagh. Might as well not ship with a battery at all.

Re:OR System76

[Anonymous Coward]

Fujitsu S904 is probably closest with the U904 being second. Both will set you back a pretty penny though.

This is neat and all

[rsilvergun]

but at $1250 I'm not sure who it's for. I can almost buy a Mac book for that. Maybe developers in need of a linux laptop? Are there that many of them? A lot of my nerd friends could be talking into buying this, but they wouldn't do much with it...

Re:This is neat and all

[kthreadd]

Not almost, you can. The cheapest MacBook costs just $999, so you even get a little over.

Re:This is neat and all

[Ami Ganguli]

I just bought similar hardware from Sony in order to run Linux. I would have considered this one if it had been available three weeks ago.

Some of us really don't want a Mac. Obviously we're a niche market, but presumably Dell thinks there might be enough of us to justify one or two models.

Re:This is neat and all

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony!!??!??!? WTF????

Re:This is neat and all

[Teun]

The price is no worse or better than a Thinkpad with HD screen and I don't feel like subsidising Apple or Sony so all together I find it a good offering.

But first we'll have to see the full specs.

Re:This is neat and all

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought similar hardware from Sony

To quote the late great Bill Hicks: "suckin' Satan's pecker..."

Re:This is neat and all

[NIK282000]

You can pour a beer through a 1200$ Thinkpad or drop it on a concrete floor without killing it, I know, mine stood up to both. With the quality of Dell hardware I would be afraid to use harsh language around it. Unless their build quality has jumped recently I wouldn't want to spend that much on a "disposable" product.

Re:This is neat and all

[AdamWill]

...but this is somewhat more powerful, and a better form factor. The XPS 13 is significantly smaller than the MBA 13"; I know, I've made a stack out of an MBA 11", an XPS 13, and an MBA 13". The XPS 13 is barely larger than the MBA 11", and a lot smaller than the MBA 13".

And I mean, yeah, obviously this is aimed at people who want a Linux laptop. If you want a Linux laptop you probably don't want to buy a Macbook. You can make it work, but it's a giant PITA. I'd much rather buy one of these.

Re:This is neat and all

[AdamWill]

"I would have considered this one if it had been available three weeks ago."

It was available three weeks ago, albeit in its previous Ivy Bridge form. I don't know why Slashdot is reporting this as if it were a new model rather than just a spec bump.

Re:This is neat and all

[Astronomerguy]

Yup. Been there and done that. My Lenovo T510 with bumped up HD and 8Gb RAM is now a Hackintosh running Mavericks just sweet and fine, and it is my primary lappy. The ability to survive spills is its key selling point (I'm a klutz with 2 cats and 2 dogs). It was previously running Mint. A couple of spare 2.5" drives will shortly be configured for Mint again and Windows 8.1 for software testing.

Re:This is neat and all

[Ami Ganguli]

Then it's not really similar hardware is it :-).

My requirements were: light, long battary life, at least 8Gb RAM, at least Full HD screen. The Vaio was the only ultrabook I could find that fit my criteria and was available in Canada when I needed it.

Re:This is neat and all

[AdamWill]

This had the same weight, RAM and display. Only difference in the new model is the CPU and video chipset. Of course, that does make a significant difference in battery life, but then it's pretty much a given that every Ivy Bridge laptop is getting a Haswell bump, so it wasn't particularly difficult to figure out that this one would...

Re: This is neat and all

[AvitarX]

Did you look at macbook pro retina? Don't know how it works with linux, but I got one for windows, as I need windows for my job.

Re: This is neat and all

[AdamWill]

The MBPs are significantly heavier - there's definitely a distinct sub-3lbs weight class where this, the Kirabook, the MBA and so on all play.

$110 Windows tax

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of the machine is $110 less than an otherwise identical XPS 13 with Windows 8.

Re:Anonymous Coward mates frosty with piss

[Mister Liberty]

Sir,
I find your contribution here somewhat off-topic, and bid you --frosty
such as it may be-- warmest regards,
Mr.Liberty

Same price as for Windows

[Animats]

It's the same price as the Windows 8 version. (That's listed at $1299, but scroll down for the "$50 off coupon".) This is progress for Dell; most of their previous Linux offerings cost more than the comparable Windows machine.

Re:Same price as for Windows

[Lennie]

Developing and testing drivers takes time and money, which needs to be recouped somehow. They also offer support. People at support need proper instructions how to deal with customers and their problems (on Linux).

It's a developer laptop, so most of the time it probably means at least it is a technical customer making the call.

I do see they now sell it in my country too, not just in the US anymore. Kinda cool.

Battery Life

[Chemisor]

Funny how the battery life, which just happens to be the single most important criteria for laptop buyers, is not listed... It's like they don't expect anyone to even consider buying it.

Re:Battery Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything more than two hours will do. Power sockets are everywhere. Battery is the last thing I care about.

Re:Battery Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us care about battery life since not all airline seats have electric outlets available. "Compile" is Native American for "hot chip eats battery".

Re:Battery Life

[SeanBlader]

The prior XPS13 with Linux would get 6 hours easy, this one with a haswell chip should get 8 at a minimum.

Re:Battery Life

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have thought they will run forever without recharge on their unicorn farts

No.

[atari2600a]

Unless the person genuinely needs the processing power, the right chromebook purchase can lead to a much cheaper upgrade path to the same [non-graphics/cpu] specs.

Re:No.

[Teun]

You are assuming the traveller buying an ultra portable has always perfect network access or is happy to share his data with the cloud.

Sorry, that's not the world I'm travelling in.

Re:No.

[atari2600a]

Who said anything about ChromeOS? All new Chromebooks ship with SeaBIOS, & the older ones can be reflashed to have it. No signed kernels, no Google Anything. & we're talking the very same crowd that would buy a 'developer notebook'. Then again, something like this has modularity over, say a Chromebook Pixel (which has no modularity). Maybe something that could be purchased in bulk for dev-focused fleets ready to go out-of-the-box, but from what I understand there's bloatware....

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just finished installing xubuntu from a USB stick on an ACER C720 Chromebook ($250). No problem. Why would anyone pay ~$1200 for a Dell unit?

Mac Book Air

[Anonymous Coward]

I can buy a Mac Book Air (with 12 hour battery life!) for less than this Dell turd!

This "offering" will naturally fail miserably because of the price. But, Dell will chalk up the failure to a lack of interest in Ubuntu. Well, I suppose, they'll be 25% correct.

Re:Mac Book Air

[neonleonb]

It has a nicer screen than a Macbook Air, at least.

Re:Mac Book Air

[Anonymous Coward]

It has a nicer screen than a Macbook Air, at least.

And I've got an aftermarket windshield for my Chevy Malibu that's much nicer than what you get from a BMW M5...

Re:Mac Book Air

[AdamWill]

The two are very similar in hardware and form factor, so I don't know why you'd call this a 'turd'. I'd expect them to post very similar battery life figures, given that they're based on very similar hardware. There's nothing magical about the new Macbooks' battery life; it's just thanks to Haswell's significant improvements in power efficiency. Every laptop that's got a Haswell bump has posted similarly impressive improvements in battery life, and this one will likely be the same.

The XPS 13 has a better screen and a smaller form factor than the MBA. And, of course, it comes pre-loaded with Linux. You can argue in theoretical terms about whether the better screen and the smaller chassis are 'worth' the extra money, but let's face it, if you want OS X you'd be better off buying the MBA, and if you want Linux you'd be better off buying the XPS 13.

How about the new backdoors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any specs on the new backdoors from the NSA? Or do I have to wait for the next Snowden to find out?

Er... No.

[ledow]

13.3-inch touchscreen .... starting at $1,250

Er... No.

Quite what's the selling point here? A Linux-based touchscreen (can already get Linux-based tablets that size for much less)? Or a powerful laptop (can get much better laptops that don't cost that much even if you put a touchscreen onto them)?

Who's the customer here?

Re:Er... No.

[AdamWill]

"can get much better laptops that don't cost that much even if you put a touchscreen onto them"

Like what? in the 13" ultraportable (i.e. sub-3lbs) weight class, what is 'much better'?

The Macbook Air 13" is broadly comparable (slightly cheaper, slightly worse hardware). Whatever model number Asus is on right now, it'll be broadly similar in hardware terms but inferior in build quality while being a bit cheaper. The Thinkpad 13" model is lower-specced with a worse screen (though probably better build quality and a better keyboard). Those couple of laptops from Samsung and someone else with retina-class displays use 'U' class processors, which are much much slower than what the XPS 13 and MBA use, and come with less memory. The Pixel costs about the same and has less storage.

I've been through the whole 13" ultraportable class, and the XPS 13 is pretty competitive. Not obviously the best choice, not obviously the worst - there really isn't an obvious best choice, it's all a case of how much CPU power you need, how much screen resolution you need, what OS you want, and how much you can afford to spend.

Re:Microsoft helping NSA to hack your Windows

[Animats]

Good point, but I think you meant to post this under How Big Companies Can Hamper the Surveillance Infrastructure.

So its an MS Surface...

[NIK282000]

...but more expensive, with less features and running Ubuntu.
 
Its another step in the right direction but it is still a long way from bumping MS and Apple from the "full featured" consumer computer market. As much as I hate marketing, it needs to be marketed. Linux doesn't sell itself to the average person, it has to be made to look like the better alternative before any one other than techies will buy it.

Re:So its an MS Surface...

[FlyHelicopters]

Linux doesn't sell itself to the average person

Have you considered that there might be a reason for that?

Linux has its place, it is indeed a useful OS that we should all be grateful for, but to the consumer computer market, it might as well not exist, and that isn't going to change.

Way too many things aren't supported or don't work the first time without any fiddling.

Oh sure, you can cherry pick hardware and find stuff that works great, but frankly you can install Windows 7 on ANY PC that is less than 8 years old and it will work. You can buy almost ANY computer add-on in the past 8 years and Windows 7 supports it.

Printers, scanners, USB devices, video cards, network cards, add-in this, add-in that, all work.

Linux just isn't there with such broad support. Joe Consumer crap printer or other random device has to work 100% of the time, or they'll get cranky.

And that doesn't even bring up the whole, "none of your software runs on it, WINE isn't a solution for Joe Consumer, and the "free" alternatives are not real substitutes.

Re:So its an MS Surface...

[Patch86]

Oh sure, you can cherry pick hardware and find stuff that works great, but frankly you can install Windows 7 on ANY PC that is less than 8 years old and it will work. You can buy almost ANY computer add-on in the past 8 years and Windows 7 supports it.

No you can't. You can install Windows 7 on any PC which was designed to run Windows (which is most of them), sure. But try sticking it on a Mac or a System 76 PC or one of those Asus touch-screens-with-keyboards that run Android. Oh, you might say, you didn't mean any of those- you just meant the Windows 7 compatible ones! But that's sort of the point.

That's not to say Windows users aren't spoilt for choice, obviously- you can run Windows on a huge variety of commodity hardware. But then the lack universal hardware compatibility doesn't exactly do Apple much harm, and Linux is way freer and easier with hardware than that.

Re:So its an MS Surface...

[FlyHelicopters]

Windows 7 runs just fine on a Mac, what are you thinking?

Apple has a very small share of the consumer computer market, their prices are too high and their software choices more limited.

Linux hardly even rates a listing in the consumer computer market. No amount of talk of technical superiority changes that truth.

There are many reasons why this is, but the reasons are almost beside the point. Because the situation that caused Windows to take over the market has not changed, the market will not change.

I first used Linux in 1996, I have used it off and on since. Nice OS, I see the value there, if I was running a web server, or super computer.

Linux on the desktop? I've heard that for 15 years now, still aren't there, won't happen any time soon.

Designed for developers. How?

[danknight48]

"The XPS 13 laptop comes preloaded with Ubuntu® 12.04 LTS, a basic set of developer tools and utilities, as well as access to two beta projects: the cloud launcher and the profile tool."

Dell slaps an outdated version of Ubuntu onto a £1k+ laptop, markets it as "Designed for developers" and its news?

Any creditable Developer with experience, Would not:
1. Buy a Dell (which has a well known reputation for cheap parts/failures)
2. Use Ubuntu as their Linux distro (from experience, the slowest/bloated linux OS available)

Re:Designed for developers. How?

[Anonymous Coward]

2. Use Ubuntu as their Linux distro (from experience, the slowest/bloated linux OS available)

From experience, some people who should know better still use Ubuntu because it requires a shorter initial investment of time.

Re:Designed for developers. How?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess those schlubs at Google are not credible developers by your definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu

Also, Dell monitors and workstations are the bread and butter of large software companies. Their high end workstations are absolutely fantastic.

If you are talking about Dell consumer products, then yes. They also cost /thousands/ less than the professional equipment they offer.

If you don't consider this ( http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=cap3610w7p0078ps&model_id=precision-t3610-workstation&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04 ) suitable for use by a "credible" developer, I have to say I am curious what you think is!

Re:Designed for developers. How?

[danknight48]

I guess those schlubs at Google are not credible developers by your definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu

GooBuntu != Ubuntu
If Google believed Ubuntu was "fine", they wouldnt need to "optimize" it and create a new distro in the process....

Also, Dell monitors and workstations are the bread and butter of large software companies. Their high end workstations are absolutely fantastic.

Dell monitors, for cheap business use? I agree, they hold no data, easy to replace.
Dell workstations, on a domain with roaming profiles and data stored on a HP server? I'd be satisfied with that.

If you don't consider this ( http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=cap3610w7p0078ps&model_id=precision-t3610-workstation&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04 ) suitable for use by a "credible" developer, I have to say I am curious what you think is!

Have you ever looked inside a Dell system, as a engineer?
Buy a £60 motherboard on the net, then, look inside your dell system. The £60 motherboard you just brought is going to be more reliable.
The majority of Dell motherboards still do not use Solid Capacitors. Also, they use the minimal amount of components for the board to function.
And dont even get me started on their power supplies ;)

I'll never forget the Dell rack server we used for Redhat Linux. We decided to try Dell due to it costing less than the HP equivalent.
Biggest mistake we ever made. The Dell server failed twice in one day (PSU related)
It was replaced by a HP equivalent the next day.

I used to work in a PC repair shop prior. 90% of all systems needing hardware repairs (PSU/Motherboards) were Dells. On most occasions, always outside their 1 year warranty by a few months.
From experience, trust me, stay away from Dell. Its just not worth the risk.

Re:Designed for developers. How?

[Anonymous Coward]

So are you implying that if I want non-crappy hardware with Dell, I have to pay thousands more? And this is a good thing?

Luckily there still exists other manufactures, like Lenovo, who sell decent hardware in their normal laptops. It's quite sad when the American company is the one selling cheap chinese crap.

Re:Designed for developers. How?

[Patch86]

12.04 LTS isn't outdated- it's the current Long Term Support version (which is the stable version which is supposed to compete with Windows and Mac on the support front). The non-LTS versions are just a politer version of the Debian Testing release.

Next LTS version comes out April 2014, so if they're still flogging 12.04 in 6 months then you'll have cause for complaint.

No ethernet

[manu0601]

It seems there is no ethernet port. Too bad, the machine looked quite good, but I like reliable networking, hence Wi-Fi only is not for me.

Re:No ethernet

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get a USB 3.0 GigE ethernet dongle, off of eBay or dx or whereever.
Works very well (full GigE speeds, no problem) so long as used in the only functional USB3 port, on the right hand side.
The USB3 port on the left is b0rked by design on earlier versions of the XPS13, probably the same on this one.
The Win8 drivers have a workaround for it, but not the Linux USB3 drivers.

GNU/Linux as opposed to Android

[tepples]

Ubuntu is far closer to GNU/Linux than Android is. For one thing, Ubuntu uses GNU libc, GNU Coreutils, and GCC. And historically, GNU/Linux has been associated with X11-based GUIs, unlike Android that sprang from embedded Linux.

If it's anything like the last xps 13

[p00kiethebear]

If it's anything like the last xps 13 then it will be fucking awesome. I love everything about this laptop. It's incredibly thin and light. The screen is vivid. It runs everything I want it too and never hesitates on me. Plus with the solid state Hard drive it wakes up from sleep in about 2 - 3 seconds.

Hope the keyboard is better

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the previous gen XPS13 for a bit, including a long work trip. It got great battery life even then, but the keyboard was miserable. PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End required a function keypress. The tactile response was weak and it felt like a cheap model, despite the price. The 1 year warranty was lacking too. Ended up handing it off to a coworker and now running a Latitude E6430U for the same money - much better keyboard and tactile qualities, and no question it is more robust with a 3 year warranty. You pay for it with a slightly heavier chassis but I'll take it. 16x9 resolution is still weak though, just waiting for the higher res screens on the Dell mobiles.

On quality, Dell, and IB-^W Lenovo

[sethstorm]

To get anything redeeming out of Dell, you have to order from the business-oriented laptops - such as their Precision line. The biggest drawbacks are that you end up having to pay more to get the same feature set, have to go through a bureaucracy to transfer ownership for support, and have the same problems with support as regular Dell machines. The only upside is that some

On the other hand, Lenovo still has the service and support, but is bastardizing their Thinkpad line in every way possible. Buying the Thinkpad line meant that you could get away from all the things that Lenovo now wants to put in it - lower quality consumer-grade features. While the W540(about the closest thing to the flagship of the Thinkpad line) brings back Flexview, it takes away the Thinkpad black form factor that has been there since the beginning(replacing it with a "graphite black), and has the PCjr chiclet keyboard.

I just hope that Colorware isn't the only practical option for correcting Lenovo's wish to make the Thinkpad a not-Thinkpad.

Re:On quality, Dell, and IB-^W Lenovo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, fuck Lenovo.

I love my Thinkpad, but I won't be buying another, except second-hand unless they turn their business around and go back to making quality designs, with quality keyboards.

Thinkpad's, Fujitsu Lifebooks and HP WX Notebooks used to be the only notebooks for a hardworking unix user. Now there's nothing, Fujitsu have fucked up the Lifebook, HP discontinued the WX, and Lenovo fucked the Thinkpad.

The best bit, is pretty much every Thinkpad owner complained, so they did a big public announcement calling all their customers idiots and telling them they are wrong, and that they'll come to love the rubbish direction Lenovo is moving in. That's a fucking awesome way to run a business...

Into the ground.

Re:On quality, Dell, and IB-^W Lenovo

[Astronomerguy]

Dammit! If I had mod points I'd mod you up. I'm in the IT VAR biz, and I've seen the quality slowly degrade over time. The margins are tight in the hardware business, and there's no incentive for the manufacturers to dial it up. You have to go with niche players if you want hardware with the quality that meets your standards. Gaming portables are intersting, as a re mobile workstations, but $$, weight, and battery life are the trade-offs.

Re:On quality, Dell, and IB-^W Lenovo

[sethstorm]

Given that this kind of stuff happens, I just order from the high end and then make it last. It's served me well for the four generations that I've dealt w/ Thinkpads (A31p/T42p/T60p/W520) such that they can do their job. The less friendly something is to service, the less likely it will be designed to last.

In addition, I've also seen an degradation in quality in the contractors that come by to do service. When I had my T42p repaired, there was a good chance of getting a full-badged employee (or someone competent enough) to fix it for NBD onsite service. Today, the same service level is more likely to get a bottom-dollar contractor that doesn't do it as a main line of their work (where my last W520 had a satellite TV contractor come in).

I've stayed *very* far away from the "gaming" portables given their unbalanced nature. They're made by ODM's that have little-to-no documentation or parts, making them unreliable and hard to service as time passes by. Those machines are why I've bought Thinkpads, since IBM/Lenovo made it a point to make a good design (where the battery is not simply a 50min UPS, but a 3-5h+ power source on a mobile workstation).

Re:On quality, Dell, and IB-^W Lenovo

[sethstorm]

The best bit, is pretty much every Thinkpad owner complained, so they did a big public announcement calling all their customers idiots and telling them they are wrong, and that they'll come to love the rubbish direction Lenovo is moving in. That's a fucking awesome way to run a business...

Which one? Kohut has repeatedly done that (especially with Flexview - something that finally has returned in the W540) in his defense of Lenovo's design decisions. The only announcement I've seen is their "it's evolution" announcement about making their Thinkpads in "graphite black" gray - and it doesn't seem to imply that they're wrong.

About the only thing that Lenovo gets right may end up being their service department - see my parent post about it. It's part of what's kept my laptops working well out of warranty (in addition to part interchangeability).

Re:On quality, Dell, and IB-^W Lenovo

[Anonymous Coward]

The fucking keyboards.

Nobody likes the new chicklet PCjr keyboards. Everyone complained about it. Their response: blog about how the shitty keyboard is actually awesome and every single customer is wrong and an idiot. Underneath the blog post: hundreds, if not thousands, of Thinkpad users saying "no, fuck you, give us back the old keyboards".

Re:On quality, Dell, and IB-^W Lenovo

[sethstorm]

It gets even better:
The upcoming generation of Thinkpads are making the keyboards worse in two more ways:

* Color Scheme - Even more removed from the Thinkpad line due to the removal of the blue highlight color.
* Function keys? You'll have to press FN-Esc to get them. They call it "Windows 8" optimization.

Microsoft Tax

[Tetetrasaurus]

1300 bucks seems like a LOT for an Ubuntu touch-tablet whatever. Is this because you have to pay the Microsoft tax, because anyone not purchasing a windows machine must be installing a pirated copy on the sly?

1080p? another vertically challanged laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

I rather get the Chromebook Pixel then.

SSD Capacity

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say I've been looking forward to this release for quite a while but it's a max 256 SSD which is the same as the Macbook air I own from 2010. I'm pretty disappointed that there's no 512 or 1TB option.

Dell hides its linux lineup...

[dargaud]

I recently needed two new Linux laptops. A small one and a big fast one. With some special requirements: qwerty keyboard, but shipped out of the US, matte screen, fast CPU and mem but doesn't care about GPU, etc... Well, I simply couldn't find anything. The Dell site had only the aforementionned 'development laptop'. System76 and other Linux vendors all had something missing (often the shipping or the matte screen). I was about to get a Win8 laptop to wipe when I got a mail from Dell at work (we buy stuff from them): basically their entire lineup with Linux. With full options. You just had to get into the site in a different way. It's dumb but I know have an ugly but nice M6700 with Ubuntu.

Re:Dell hides its linux lineup...

[Anonymous Coward]

"get into the site in a different way"

So, not http?

Re:Dell hides its linux lineup...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please share link.

Re:Dell hides its linux lineup...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about posting up a link so the rest of us can into the Dell site that different way? Thanks!

you must not browse,read mail or edit text as well

[dutchwhizzman]

Most desktops or laptops that replace them have the unavoidable office related stuff open as well. With what you have opened, you are no doubt working with companies that require doc(x) support on a level that LibreOffice isn't yet giving, exchange mail and you most likely will have browser windows open somewhere. I'm getting the impression you have an extra machine to do all of those.

Dell can't vow only wintel

[dutchwhizzman]

Dell can't vow to do only wintel, since a big part of their server systems are sold to run Linux or some hypervisor. They have to have Linux knowledge and support available anyway, so it doesn't hurt to every once in a while toss a laptop that has 100% linux supported components out there for the shops that like/require those. It's more or less a token effort, since they aren't vowing to support Linux on all their devices, or even to strive to get to that point in a certain time frame. As long as there's a profit in doing this sort of offerings every once in a while, they keep their options open, MicroSoft sharp(er) in their sponsoring and a few more customers happy. See it as them offering both AMD and Intel chips in their servers. They hardly sell AMD, but it makes the Intel systems so much cheaper to buy parts for that it's worth producing them. Same applies to having multiple RAM and storage vendors. If you go exclusive, you can't play the competitors against each other.

Re:Dell can't vow only wintel

[gavron]

Yeah, they can.

We've watched our server purchases go from 100% Dell to 50% Dell/ 50% HP to 100% 3rd party in the
last four years as Dell has become 100% wintel and HP has ratecheted up their pricing without a
commensurate increase in performance or reliability.

This happened despite our being a Dell Premiere client, having "direct access" to get bulk deals,
delivery, and sometimes even pricing. Dell turned into a Microsoft shop around mid-2012 -- long
before it was clear they would eventually be seeking Microsoft "approval" (ownership). We warned
them. We pleaded with them. We tried to bargain with them. In the end it was all just stages of
coping with the grief as we watched our old friend Dell succumb to dying a slow Microsoftian death.

So _NOW_ they want to introduce a laptop running a 1.5 year old operating system? Anyone thinks
this is a great idea? Of course not. They're doing so in order to bid on some government contract
that says they have to have diversity. They don't expect to sell any of these -- see the marketing
hype around it. It's just there because they need to have such a product.

Best

E

Too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

$1250 for a i5, Intel HD 4400, no way

Have they fixed the USB3 driver for the left-side?

[Anonymous Coward]

The second-gen Sputnik (Dell XPS 13, 1080p display, ivy-bridge) has a wonky USB3 port on the left, beside the power jack. The problem is a lengthy internal ribbon cable that connects it to the mainboard, which just doesn't work very well at USB3 data rates. The Windows-8 drivers have a workaround for it, but not the Linux drivers, so the machine has only a single usable USB3 port.

Wonder if they've fixed that in the latest one or not?

Total fail

[Anonymous Coward]

The first two versions still have unresolved driver issues in Linux and they want to release a third? that touchscreen driver is gonna be smooth...

DOA

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm... lessee $1550 for a tiny SSD, 8GB and i5 complete with IGP or $1500 for a Sager NP7330(sans touch, but not loss there it's a nb) w/4800MQ/GTX 765M/16GB/ (13.3")

decisions, decisions.... (actually I already own the latter, but still would have to pick it... BTW it's also a SUPER EASY machine to work on, one plate on the back exposes EVERYTHING, 1x9.5mm hdd bay, 2xmsata, 2xDDR3 slots, CPU(socketed), GPU(well this time it's soldered, but hey the thing's relatively tiny...)

Wish the screen was high DPI

[HalAtWork]

But other than that it looks nice.

2003 called and wants it's 1600x1200 laptops back

[lytles]

labeling a box with 16:9 aspect ratio a "developer edition" should be a crime

Re:you must not browse,read mail or edit text as w

[msobkow]

Email, browsers, Vuze, etc. are all running as well.

That's why I'm baffled at people who talk about "only" 8GB of RAM.

1080 for-the-suck

[Anonymous Coward]

When I can get a 17" one with 1920x1200 or higher, I'll start giving a shit. What's with the 1080 crap? This my tablet has a higher resolution than that!

Re:you must not browse,read mail or edit text as w

[Anonymous Coward]

It's VM's that kill RAM for me. Applications are so-so...but I can blow through 8GB of RAM in a few moments with VM's. Also, if you're doing development against a large DB workload - 8GB isn't sufficient to get your datasets in memory. It's easier to pay extra for that 16/32 GB of RAM in a laptop than to tote a ProLiant around with you for mobile work of that type.