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Laptops · Dell XPS 13

Dell XPS 13 9370

8owners with an opinion
71%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
4 yrslongest happy owner
2happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability; criticized for support.

What owners wrote

NeutralOwned 4 years
My experience of 4 years with Linux on Dell XPS 13": - WiFi stability issues with the Killer WiFi NIC were so severe at some point that I bought an Intel WiFi NIC only to learn that it's not replaceable in 9370 (but it is in 9360). A bit later I bought an external USB WiFi dongle which brought some connection stability while trading off connection speed. I sank some time into understanding and debugging firmware, without good results. A script that pings the router in a loop and reloads the connection when needed makes YouTube usable, but downloading any large files without retries was a major headache for a long time. Now it's less of a headache: maybe the firmware has finally caught up. - Sleep on Linux can be indeed unstable; sometime I find my laptop out of battery after sleep, apparently because it wakes up on its own from time to time. - Camera position below the display makes it very awkward for video calls. If I'm not mistaken, this was solved in newer models. - Keyboard is quite pleasant to use, but its build quality could be better: plastic keys started to peel off after four years. In comparison, a twice as old MacBook Air keyboard still holds together very well despite heavy usage. - Trackpad has been working well for me on Linux, I'm satisfied and don't have any complaints (I might be a very undemanding keyboard-oriented user though). - The laptop screen is high quality, but its narrow aspect ratio feels a bit off, I'd appreciate more vertical space. - My main mo
Likes itOwned 3 yearsStill going
As I understood it, it's an ACPI configuration, more or less 'forced' by Microsoft, to ensure this cool new S0 is the default. See [0] [1] and [2]. The fix/work-around is to tell the kernel to not do that, and just use traditional S3 sleep. Adding `mem_sleep_default=deep` to your kernel cmdline should fix it. Been doing this on my XPS13 for 3 years now and it's fine. [0] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199689 [1] https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-13-9370-battery-drain... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/8b6eci/xp_13_9370_bat...
Doesn’t like itOwned 2 years
I'm going to give an anti-recommendation for the Dell XPS 13. It was considered the top Macbook alternative back in 2017-2018. The design is good, but the parts are flimsy and the customer service is poor. My wife and I both bought one: me a 9360 and later her a 9370. Around a year into using my laptop, the power button started to occasionally get stuck behind the case and turn off the computer. After 3 years, it's gotten so bad that this happens any time I close, open, or adjust the angle of the laptop screen. The screws that hold the bottom of the case together tend to get loose, but the root cause of this problem is a crack in a metal part of the internals of the laptop that's probably been there since day 1. Currently, I'm using KDE Neon since Plasma gives a good warning when the power button is pressed. Additionally, I had to replace the battery since after 2-3 years just outside of warranty, it went down from 10 hours to 45 minutes. Dell Support refused to fix either of the issues. You might think this is just a case of getting a lemon, but my wife's 9370 had problems too. The computer came with several keyboard keys not working. Dell Support took over a month to ship a new one, and I spent forever on the phone with them figuring out why the repair was still "processing". Now after 2 years, the battery has started to swell and has cracked the outside of the case a little. No luck from Dell Support getting this issue fixed. Unless you buy a good support plan like
Likes it
People aren't shitting on GTK for no reason. We/I do it because new releases are flawed and GTK is often what you get if you buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled and hardware-certified. Even several months ago, if I scrolled to the bottom of Nautilus with a MX Master mouse, I couldn't scroll back up. The "nothing" stopping me from contributing is that GNOME source is in an inconvenient location, is more difficult to understand coming from non-GUI microcontroller programming than for the core devs, and is a hassle to build. When I try to install or compile dependencies, I seem to encounter a new error every time, like GNOME Builder not respecting a corporate proxy while using WSL even though my environmental variables are set correctly. (So now, you're learning about "curl -vvv" and maybe installing MSYS instead of figuring out why your mouse doesn't scroll up. Make sense yet?) Beyond that, I don't want to turn my computer into a machine with Flatpak and multiple GB of devel files just so I can fix the scroll bar that should already work and might be caused by libinput or kernel source. Something is fundamentally wrong if the GTK scrollbar---one of just a handful of available widgets that would be put in countless GTK programs---doesn't work in a GNOME app . The last 3 Linux devices I've owned have been an overpriced garbage heap of Certified hardware---running too hot with GPU glitches, OS hanging, everyone's special take on application packaging (aka No More Ubuntu for me…
Likes it
I used to use a Macbook, in fact I had two of them. I used the as my daily driver from 2008-2014. I have also used Linux on my workstation, (development machine) that doubled as a Windows gaming workstation and on my servers. When it came to buying a new laptop I decided to go with a XPS 13" 9370. Hardware support has been great. The touchpad (Elantech) is also excellent and very similar to what I had on my Macbook. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_(9370) Looking back now, I always preferred open source software, vim, firefox, libreoffice, LaTeX, etc regardless of platform. If I was to compare my efficiency with either Windows or MacOS, I'd have to say I prefer a tiling window manager now (I use i3wm https://i3wm.org ) and am really looking forward to the drop-in replacement https://swaywm.org for Wayland. Wanting to use Wayland will certainly influence me to buy one of the upcoming AMD Navi GPUs, due to be released soon over a NVIDIA one. PS: btw i use arch, I do also use Debian too in some cases.
Recommends it
Dell XPS 13" 9370 running Fedora 29 at home 9380 running Ubuntu 18.04 at work. Formerly MacBook Pros. I'd recommend the Dell XPS 9370 and Fedora 29 combo as a decent Mac alternative. I've run Linux systems for a little over 20 years now and have historically found the Linux laptop experience to be pretty painful, full of driver incompatabilities and other annoyances like non-functional suspend. So when Apple transitioned the Mac to Unix-like OS and Intel chips I hopped on board and was a huge Mac fan. Early on in the 10.x series Mac OS was a great Unix operating system with a nicely functional desktop environment, most stuff just worked without a bunch of hacking. Over the years, though, Apple has been gutting the core of Mac OS and replacing it with their own proprietary APIs that lack Linux compatibility (OpenSSL, OpenGL, OpenCL, etc...). Homebrew and Docker can spackle over some of this but it seems quite a hack, especially given that most production work I do runs on some variant of Linux. At the end of the day most of the tools I use heavily are open source and run on Linux and those that don't have reasonable open source alternatives (1password vs pass, for example) so I migrated. On the work front I've been using Linux desktops since around 2006 and have been keeping tabs on the desktop experience. It's improved a ton over the past few years. As much as it pains me to say this systemd has helped a lot. In my experience Dell hardware has mostly had decent Linux compatib
Recommends it
XPS 13 9370 has been the best purchase I've made in years, and Dells customer support really isn't too bad considering they don't have stores in every city like Apple does. MBP's have their own sets of issues, and aren't flawless either.