I have had the Kaby Lake XPS 13" for about a year. Linux is nice in many ways and it's a decent laptop. The small formfactor/screen might be the best thing about it hardwarewise. Here's my rant:
- I had to research and create a bashscript with these cmds to get better defaults / fix stuff:
# This is to stop touchpad from beeing to sensitive while typing
syndaemon -t -k -i 1.0 -d
# Fix headphone hissing
amixer -c PCH cset 'name=Headphone Mic Boost Volume' 1
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- Wireless networking performs way worse then on my macbook pro 2015.
- Bad palm rejection on the touchpad bites me all the time, even though I tweaked it with above script.
- Power supply stopped working after ~6 months. Dell sent me a new one though.
- Feels more sluggish then the older MacBook Pro 2015 even though the specs are better.
- Battery-life already feels ... bad.
- When I close screen and opens it back up it's very slow to re-connect to the WLAN. Again, my older MacBook Pro is so much faster.
- Ubuntu have some bad defaults for how certain things work. For example, when I connect to a bluetooth-speaker the default isn't that the volume-buttons on the keyboard controls the bluetooths-speakers volume.
I really wanted to like this laptop, but I'll most likely go latest MacBook Prop for my next. Even though I enjoy the power of pure linux.. and the keyboardlayout better then on a Mac.
Still have odd random crackles and noise when I for example stop/start a youtubevideo. Not a showstopper as the hissing though. Tried some tips on URL you pasted but no deal.
I've had Dell XPS 13 DE for about a month now. Overall I'm very happy with it. It's great to have the power of linux right on the computer, not a SSH-session away. I got the 1080p version cause the battery will last longer. Too bad it also ment I only got 8 gigs or ram.
There's also some rough edges, some of them I could solve.
Touchpad is supersensitive. If you're typing a longer sentence suddenly you could jump out of the input/text-field cause your thumbs touched it. Tweakable, got better with "syndaemon -t -k -i 1.0 -d".
I think the keyboard backlight turned off too quick, tweakable with "echo 5m > /sys/class/leds/dell::kbd_backlight/stop_timeout"
The WLAN doesn't come online as fast as I would like it to after closed screen and sleepmode. Way quicker on my MacBook Pro (2015). Also feels like I have more net-problems when the WLAN-signal is weak when compared to my MacBook Pro. Mosh in a terminal is great for keeping connections from a laptop to servers though.
Bluetooth syncing to wireless speakers and similar isn't as fluid and automatic as from Win 10.
The worst part is a constant lowlevel hissing when using headphones. I haven't been able to solve that yet :/.
But overall I really like the keyboard, the screen, the formfactor and Ubuntu 16.
I think something simple would add alot of value and separate you from other similar services :). Wouldn't be wrong with icons from os/browsers but just he 2 biggest would add value too.
For example if I see the icon from the most common IOS-version looks bad I won't be using that particular charcode.