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Laptops · Dell XPS 13

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

12owners with an opinion
90%of verdicts positive
2/0positive/negative since 2024
1 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for display and reliability; criticized for performance and support.

What owners wrote

Recommends itOwned 1 year
I can't recommend the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition enough. Comes installed with Ubuntu, and I've been running mine with Fedora for the past year and change. Battery life is over 22 hours, roughly 14 hours while streaming NetFlix. (You have to get the 1920x1080 screen for better battery.) At idle it uses about 2.3 watts with screen on. The laptop works well with https://fwupd.org/ under Fedora for all BIOS/firmware updates.
Recommends itOwned 1 year
Id recommend the Dell xps13 developer editions, I've been using the first version for a bit more then a year now, being extremely satisfied. And the only issue I ran into, a broken power supply was replaced within 24 hours due to the pro support included in the price. It's been working great with both windows and Linux while being both portable and powerful (for a small laptop. The new version does seem to be better in every way, but you could probably get away just fine with a refurbished "old" one.
Likes it
I miss so much the first generation of the Dell XPS 13 dev edition. I think that we were almost at the top of the curve in term of quality/price. Only a few things could have been fixed (like the webcam at the bottom of the screen) and it would have been perfect. But, sadly, next generations went deep shit instead. Nowadays, I have a very hard time selecting a laptop that would fit my needs, even disregarding the price. One of the worst feature in term of offender is the keyboard: Manufacturers are going on with this totally stupid unergonomic trend of having "half size" enter keys, removing page-up/page-down keys, and hiding directional arrows behind over keys needing to use the "FN+other_key" to be able to use the arrow.
Likes it
I have a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition from work that came with Ubuntu 20.04 preinstalled. Basically a flawless experience. I've posted about it on here before, I guess the Windows SKUs are slightly different? People reported different results when installing Linux themselves on top of machines that shipped with Windows. I have a ThinkPad 25 for personal use with Debian and that's great too. For machines that I use routinely I don't have time for any issues.
Neutral
I bought a XPS 13 in developer edition, which came with a preloaded Ubuntu. I still have that laptop but it's only used for emails mostly. Machine has a nice Intel CPU, 4K display (touch capable, which works fine under Linux too). The only issue I had was it came with a Ubuntu 18.04 and some stuff like launching Software would crash. It worked, but some stuff would crash from time to time. All those issues got fixed when I moved to 20.04 (which came out a month after I got the laptop) and machine has been working very nicely since. The only issue is RAM is soldered and it only has 16 Gb of Ram. For my current laptop, I went for Lenovo for one main reason : price... All the Dell configurations were 2k or over. The Lenovo cost me 1100 euro. For that price I got the 16 inches model, 64 Gb of soldered LDDR5 Ram (much faster than standard replacable DDR), 1 Tb Samsung EVO 980 SSD, a 7840U CPU and it came preloaded with Fedora 39... Seeing the prices Dell is asking, there is no way they can compete with Lenovo on price for the hardware you get. And when you go check the Lenovo forums and report issues on Linux, you have someone there (Mark) that pushes those to the developers in charge of the firmware, or their Linux team. On the Dell forum, unless another user helps you, you're fsck because you cannot get in touch with ANYONE from the Dell Linux or their UEIF firmware devs.. There is a sharp and huge difference between what you see on the Dell/Linux forums and Lenovo/Linux forums.…
Doesn’t like it
> is it because you can copy and paste with a keyboard shortcut? To be honest the genesis of Kinto came from my Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition days in 2016 - I was wanting to make Ubuntu my primary OS, but I was highly annoyed by 2 things. 1) Copying and pasting btwn the general GUI apps and the terminal had inconsistent hotkeys because of the need to hold down shift on the terminals. That has always stuck w/ me and I have never liked the need to carry or backup dotfiles around for hotkey configurations of individual apps or being forced into creating a global, always on, hotkey (aka xmodmap, setxkbmap, etc). Autokey was also not good enough & my early python based attempts at context switching was far from what it needed to be. 2) The Dell XPS 13 had a hardware level bug that would cause the kernel on either Linux or macOS to halt the system randomly. I reported it to the community & as far as I know that bug still exists to this day. Only Windows would ignore it, so I sold it and bought another macbook pro after that. You have to understand that I decided to commit 100% to the macOS keyboard layout in 2012 - up until then I had been switching back and forth btwn Windows, macOS and Linux distros, but I wanted to get a lot more serious about programming and it felt like too much additional mental overhead to keep changing that gear, especially as I was learning new keymaps in code editors that were not consistent btwn OS's. I also committed for ergonomic reasons and the how th
Neutral
I have had good success using Manjaro on my Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM. It is an altogether vastly better experience than using Raspbian, in my opinion - even when using KDE. Docker, Code OSS, and a ton of tools were up and running right away with pacman and yay. But it will never be as fast as my Dell XPS 13 DE, and it's definitely not designed to replace it. I have been extremely impressed with what I can do on the Pi 4, but it is certainly not as quick or as able as a full blow i5/i7 based laptop. Apples and Oranges.
Likes it
I'm using the new Dell XPS 13 Developer's Edition, without the touch screen. I've found build quality to be a step up for Dell, but still a bit flimsy especially around the cover of the monitor. I like that it's pre-vetted hardware for running Ubuntu/Linux, has very long battery life, and the screen is really a joy to look at. It's a 13-inch screen crammed into an 11-inch laptop body, so you get a lot of screen real-estated without the full bulkiness. I also love the lightweight (close to MacBook light here), and the versatility in connectors (a detractor for the MacBook line for me). In addition, out of the box things like 5GHz ac wifi just works under Linux.
Recommends it
I'm surprized nobody has provided a link to Dell's XPS 13 "Developer edition" laptop. http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt... I bought one after using an Asus UX31E for two years and the Dell laptop is better in almost every aspect. To wit: * 1080p IPS screen * 5+ hours of battery * An amazing keyboard (imho better than Macbook keyboards, which are by many considered among the best laptop keyboards) * Weight is only 1.36 kg * Comes with Linux (Ubuntu) pre-installed The only thing I preferred with my Zenbook was its trackpad, which was smooth and metallic, since my sweaty fingers have a tendency to stick on the XPS trackpad. On the other hand, I _hated_ the Zenbook keyboard, and would choose a good keyboard over a good trackpad any day.
Recommends it
I've used several ThinkPad x-series laptops in the past. My current machine is a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, which ships with Ubuntu pre-installed. Good battery life, excellent performance and nice size/weight - comparable to a 13" Macbook Air. You'll ned a mini-DP to HDMI/DVI converter cable though.
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is the usual recommendation as far as having the most "Macbook"-like design (e.g. slim, unibody aluminum, but powerful).* ThinkPads generally have pretty solid Linux support, and System76 makes a line of Linux-only laptops, although both of them will be a good bit chunkier than your MBP. Neither are bad laptops if you're willing to trade sleekness for a tad more power or durability. It really depends on what you're looking for. * This excludes Huawei's "Matebook" line, which is more like a Chinese carbon-copy MBA clone, and doesn't come with Linux as a preinstalled option.