Re: Dell prepares to rebrand

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

Ages ago when I was working at Dell, and later Dell EMC, there was an
internal linux fan group that tried to get as many laptops as possible to
work smoothly with linux. They had a public repository hidden deep, deep
inside some dell sub domain with tools and stuff.

http://dell.archive.canonical.com/
for Ubuntu.  You need to work out the codename for your laptop and then you
can add the repo for eg:
http://dell.archive.canonical.com/dists/bionic-dell-bighorn-grizzly-mlk/
(mlk = Meteor Lake, whl = Whisky Lake, and other Intel CPU generations)

I would be surprised if you would not be able to run linux perfectly fine
on the latest and greatest XPS.
 
I think they even sell an XPS variety with Ubuntu from the factory.

Often the deal is that Ubuntu is often available for purchase with the
latest XPS, but it's not always the latest Ubuntu - Dell are 1+ year behind
because of their QA and testing.  If you buy a laptop today it might have
22.04 LTS on it, because it shipped around the time of the 24.04 LTS release
and 22.04 was the current LTS at the time they did the development work.
Their repo contains packages which patch Ubuntu to make it work out of the
box on their hardware, plus some Dell management stuff you don't need.

However, you often don't really need their repo.  Once the laptop has been
out a few months, the patches get upstreamed and a fresh Ubuntu install
works fine.  So what I'd do is install the latest interim release of Ubuntu
(eg 24.10 currently) and keep on interim releases until you hit the next LTS
(now 26.04), at which point you can decide whether to stay on LTS or keep on
interims.  That way you should have an install that works for the first
couple of years - the first six months after release can be bumpy but should
settle down after that.

Even then, most new laptops don't introduce anything new that isn't covered
by existing releases.  This is really only for when something new is
released and Linux/Ubuntu need to catch up.  In my case, it was the
'soundwire' audio drivers on an XPS17 shipped spring 2020 - I stuck with
Dell's 18.04 until that had landed in mainline (20.10 I think).

Theo