Today, the Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux is easily the most well-known Linux laptop. Many users, especially developers – including Linus Torvalds – love it. As Torvalds recently said, “Normally, I wouldn’t name names, but I’m making an exception for the XPS 13 just because I liked it so much that I also ended up buying one for my daughter when she went off to college.”
So, how did Dell – best known for good-quality, mass-produced PCs – end up building top-of-the-line Ubuntu Linux laptops? Well, Barton George, Dell Technologies’ Developer Community manager, shared the “Project Sputnik” story this week in a presentation at the popular Linux and open-source community show, All Things Open.
Earlier this year I was given one of those XPS machines with Ubuntu and decided to install Debian on it. The camera driver was so bad - I can’t remember technical details but you can’t simply get it to run on another kernel, it was a mess of hacks to get it to work. I decided I won’t get a camera driver. “We ship a laptop with Ubuntu” does not necessarily mean working Linux drivers.
EDIT: To add insult to injury, the touch bar suddenly decided to stop responding to input. It’s already bad enough to not have tactile feedback for Esc / Fn keys / Delete / Print Screen.