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Laptops · Dell XPS 13

Dell XPS 13 9310

8owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
1/0positive/negative since 2024
1 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for battery and portability.

What people wrote

Likes it
I have an XPS 13 9310. I think the build quality is fine. The battery has never been replaced but it might be time: $ upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0 | grep energy-full energy-full: 33.5388 Wh energy-full-design: 50.9732 Wh
Likes it
I went from a T440s to an XPS 13 (9310). It's my favorite "ultrabook"-type laptop I've owned so far (where the point is moderate specs in a small form factor with great battery life). It beat out my T440s for me because my t440s needed its mobo replaced TWICE because whatever about it that connected it to the trackpad and keyboard kept failing. Whereas my 9310 has been perfect. The only real hiccup I've ever had with it was: - when I bought it, the (intel) wlan card was too new and only arch had the driver in the kernel. - there was some flickering/jittering display problem that started showing up when we bumped kernel major versions somewhere in 2021ish. Was it 5 to 6? Anyway it ended up being reduced by a subsequent kernel update and then fixed when I disabled panel self-refresh (PSR) in the kernel args. But I stayed on the last 5.x kernel for a while until I figured that out. It's also generally impressed me at how well all its USB3/C stuff works. I use it with a dock while at work to drive an external display for personal stuff, and it has also driven a 49" 1440p super ultrawide which impressed me. And it's worked well even when I have literally every port on the dock populated with something or other: display, nic, mouse, kb, webcam, etc etc. with some docks or some laptops I've found that you usually find limitations as you try to use every single port simultaneously. I tend to hold on to laptops that I know work well with all my stuff for well past their technical re…
Doesn’t like it
> There was another Intel related issue with this laptop also; the gpu would freeze/panic intermittently, multiple times a day. I had this on my Dell XPS13 (9310) as well, although in my case it was a few times a week, maybe .5 times a day. It also seemed to almost always trigger when kwin was animating something, particularly switching to another virtual desktop, but never when playing any games. I can't imagine why, but the problem mostly went away when I turned off all animations in kwin, and seems to have gone away completely sometime about a year or so ago. All in all, it's still a better experience than the Macbook Air I was using prior to having this XPS13... That damn Macbook loved to vomit onto the screen and lock up without warning. No dust, thermals seemed fine, battery was healthy... no clue what was wrong with it. And without many exposed settings to fiddle with.
Neutral
I have the XPS 13 Dev Edition (9310, from mid 2021) and replaced Ubuntu with Arch Linux. 1. The fingerprint reader needs some older and/or patched versions of the corresponding tools/daemon. I fixed it upon setup, but don't really use it so didn't bother checking if this works now with the latest vanilla versions. 2. Something related to Bluetooth causes random CPU lockups (I think the kernel/driver is the culprit), so I have it disabled. (3. IIRC the Wifi wasn't properly supported by the mainline kernel for some time upon release - but I bought the laptop quite late into the product cycle, so this didn't affect me) 4. The WiFi chip does not support promiscuous mode If it was really as Linux-compatible as the ads suggest, everything would work out of the box with mainline kernel & upstream versions of user-space tools. Mostly they probably should have picked a better supported WiFi/BT combo chip (e.g. something from Intel) instead of using a chip that barely works (yes, it's soldered on and I the dev variant probably has the same PCB as the non-dev variant). Besides that, the UX is quite good. As you say, sleep works well (but I'm expecting that from any decent laptop; I know, I'm expecting too much). The touchscreen is awesome in Chromium (too bad Firefox doesn't touch-scroll, but maybe that can be reconfigured in about:config). [edit] light rephrasing, added 4. + last two paragraphs.
Neutral
The new suspend mechanism is s0ix and it works quite well. My xps13 9310 (32gb version with the jank AX500) will even get to opportunistic s0ix with a recent 5.17 kernel. When I originally setup this laptop, I found that if I left the intel raid storage crap enabled, the mvd module would prevent s0ix/suspend. Switching to AHCI in the bios resolved this. https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-li...
Likes it
Adding to my comment on my XPS13 7 days ago: * I raised a service ticket with Dell. * They asked me to install the latest firmware for the XPS13 9310, dated 8 April 2021. * That solved the problem: now I can close the lid and the laptop properly sleeps; I can put it in my bag without it getting noticeably warm; battery loses just a couple of % overnight, not 75% as it did before. So irrespective of whether this 11th gen does S3 sleep or not, my laptop is now performing in line with what I expected. Thus: thank you Dell.
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
My own experience doesn't reflect that. I've been using Linux for work for years and tried to switch from Windows to Linux for games. NVIDIA drivers and game support on Linux is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone without experience. On laptop it's awesome, unless you have both an iGPU and dedicated GPU, then switching properly is a pain. WiFi drivers are a hit or miss: some cards are great, some others are not well supported. Knowing which is which before buying requires reading extensive documentation. Even Dell on their XPS 9310 fucked up Linux support so bad they dediced to quietly remove the option to buy Ubuntu laptop and communication about supporting Linux. My personal laptop recovers all screen when waking up from sleep, my work laptop doesn't and I need to unplug and plug them again. One thing that works awesomely well for me is Printer supports (scanners are another pair of hands though). Anywhere I tried, discovery works great out of the box, even for USB printers it works without having to download a driver from a strange website. When using snap (default on Ubuntu) Firefox crashes often if it updates in background. Libre office is far from the Office experience, which I tend to forget as I use Google Workspace apps instead. Having tried working on Windows, Linux and MacOS, I wouldn't move to another environment. The pros greatly outweigh the cons for my own use-case. But I will still keep a Windows for gaming and cannot recommend it to relatives.