Questions about USB-C and Dell XPS 13 with Linux

Mobile Tech Laptops & Netbooks
1

I’m looking at buying a Dell XPS 13 for school to run Fedora. The XPS 13 has fairly limited IO with only one USB-C port and 2 USB-A 3.0 ports. I think I will also get a 4k monitor for this (recommendations?). I tried to find a hub with

  • 1 displayport (preferably mini)
  • 1 gigabit ethernet
  • more USB 3

I had thought that USB-C was capable of transmitting both a displayport stream and a usb 3 stream. But the only hub I could find was this plugable usb-c to dual 4k displayport and gigabit lan. However it has some major problems.

  1. It appears to not be compatible with Linux.

  2. It operates solely on the USB 3 bus, and having a 4k60hz signal plus gigabit lan on the same 5-gigabit bus is extremely problematic at best. Not to mention it not even being on the Intel iGPU.

So, unless anyone can find a better option I am just thinking I will get a 4k60hz compatible USB-C to mDP adapter.

Now about the Dell XPS 13. I’m planning on getting this laptop on a deal from costco for $1300 once their black friday sales go live, so I have a pretty good deal lined up.

I have some questions and concerns about this.

  1. The touchpad. I know that the touchpad is great under windows precision drivers, but is it as good under Linux?

  2. Wifi card. I would be buying the non-developer edition, so I believe that means I would be getting a Broadcom chip. Should I just replace it.

  3. DPI with Gnome. It is really as bad as everyone makes it seem? I can live with some items small.

  4. Dual booting. This isn’t really a concern, but I have a few questions. Is GRUB good to go with NVMe drives now? Also, is there an easy way to add an option in Gnome to restart into Windows?

  5. Touchscreen. Is it good for Linux and Gnome, and is there a way to hot-disable it easily?

2
  1. I have an older dell running Fedora 26 and I have had no issues with the trackpad
  2. Probably… Give it a test run before you buy a new card, but I have had several issues with my broadcomm chip.
  3. I haven’t had any issues with DPI in Gnome, but if you do you could always switch to something like KDE or Enlightenment, or even Pantheon if all you want is pretty.

I have no experience with the last two.

1 Like
3

I’m on the XPS 13 9343 and it’s absolutely beautiful on Linux.

1 Like
4

The touchpad works like a dream on arch.

Im running a Dell XPS 13 9350 on Arch and i have almost no issues. The only issue i have is finding an adapter that will do usb type c video. I ended up with the small dell adapter with vga and hdmi.

Im running the 1080 model so i dont need scaling, I was warned by a friend not to get the 3k model, because the battery life is not nearly as good because the i7 is a power hog and the display takes more power. But if you MUST get the 3k screen use KDE, its scaling is years ahead of everyone else’s scaling.

Installing rEFInd, it makes dual booting easy. Also make sure to make seprate EFI patitions for windows and linux(s) because windows messes with the EFI partition when it updates.

1 Like
5

I’m super jelly of you and your 9350. I wanted type C, but bought in a bit too early, so instead, I have a mini-DP.

1 Like