I have an xps 13 developer edition from 2016. It came with Ubuntu preinstalled out of the box.
It was the worst linux experience I've ever had, and just a bad experience in general. They gave it a broadcom wifi chip which has poor linux support, no built in drivers out of the box so whenever I reinstalled I needed to connect an ethernet wire with a usb dongle to download the driver. The wifi also just had very poor reception compared to other laptops.
Sound problems intermittently where half of the time it would have no sound on boot, and I'd have to continually reboot until it decided to work.
They had an absolutely infuriating feature which adapted brightness levels of the screen so that if you transition from dark to bright it would gradually adjust. Except this feature was broken and it does the opposite of what was intended -- it instantly cranks the brightness up to 100 and then gradually adjusts down to what the beightness should be. Even if this feature worked properly it would be undesired, but it is broken in the worst way and there is no way to disable it on my model. I have spent many hours trying.
The computer also arrived with the chasis mis-aligned. I couldnt plug anything in to any ports, we had to get a dell guy come in and reasemble the machine.
The charger also stopped working after about 1.5 years. I bought a new charger but now the charging port only works intermittently.
QA issues aside, you'd think that they would choose parts known to work well with linux but they inexplicably did not.
It was the worst linux experience I've ever had, and just a bad experience in general. They gave it a broadcom wifi chip which has poor linux support, no built in drivers out of the box so whenever I reinstalled I needed to connect an ethernet wire with a usb dongle to download the driver. The wifi also just had very poor reception compared to other laptops.
Sound problems intermittently where half of the time it would have no sound on boot, and I'd have to continually reboot until it decided to work.
They had an absolutely infuriating feature which adapted brightness levels of the screen so that if you transition from dark to bright it would gradually adjust. Except this feature was broken and it does the opposite of what was intended -- it instantly cranks the brightness up to 100 and then gradually adjusts down to what the beightness should be. Even if this feature worked properly it would be undesired, but it is broken in the worst way and there is no way to disable it on my model. I have spent many hours trying.
The computer also arrived with the chasis mis-aligned. I couldnt plug anything in to any ports, we had to get a dell guy come in and reasemble the machine.
The charger also stopped working after about 1.5 years. I bought a new charger but now the charging port only works intermittently.
QA issues aside, you'd think that they would choose parts known to work well with linux but they inexplicably did not.