Initial Impressions⌗

I haven’t used a Dell laptop for around 4 years and the laptops that I have used from Dell were either Inspiron or Precision models. I have to say, Dell made an excellent product with the new XPS 9300. I have been waiting for the Developer Version of this laptop for a while now, but I couldn’t wait when I saw the 32 gigs version available.

My current laptop is the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (6th Gen). Its an amazing product, the one thing it lacks is in terms of memory. The highest memory it can have is 16 gigs, although its sufficient for many users, I needed a portable and powerful laptop with more memory to test Fedora images on a VM, while continuing to work on my routine stuff.

Coming back to Dell XPS 9300, here are the specs I got for my laptop:

  • 10th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-1065G7 Processor
  • 32GB 3733MHz LPDDR4x Memory Onboard
  • 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
  • Intel® Iris Plus Graphics
  • 13.4" UHD+ (3840 x 2400) InfinityEdge Touch Anti-Reflecitve 500-Nit Display
  • 2 Thunderbolt™ 3 (DisplayPort / Power Delivery (4 lanes of PCI Express Gen 3)
  • 1 microSD card reader v4.0
  • 1 3.5mm Headphone/Microphone Combo Jack
  • 1 Type-C™ to USB-A v3.0 adapter ships standard
  • Weight: 2.65 lbs (1.2 kg)
  • Killer™ Wi-Fi 6 AX1650, 2 x 2, Bluetooth 5.0
  • 4-Cell Battery, 52 Whr (Integrated)

The things that I miss from my X1 Carbon are more ports, especially USB-A since I use lot of two factor authentication with hardware tokens, a HDMI port as it’s useful to present in meetings rooms in the office. These are nothing major, but nice to have.

Installing Fedora on Dell XPS⌗

This was sorta a roller coaster ride until I figured out how to install Fedora on it.

First, I booted into Windows that it was shipped with and created a separate partition to install Fedora in that partition. I then created a Fedora rawhide (Yes, I use Fedora rawhide and I love it :D) bootable USB stick and tried to install on the empty partition I created, but Anaconda didn’t recoginize it. Then I did what everyone does, I googled about it and realized that Dell systems ship from the factory with the SATA operation mode set to RAID ON.

Then, I changed it to AHCI in BIOS but then it didn’t boot into Windows. I tried lot of things to keep using AHCI and still be able to dual boot, but all of my tries were in vain. I gave up and tried to erase everything and install Fedora rawhide on it.

This failed mid installation, I am guessing it’s cryptsetup as it failed to install with encrypt hard drive selected, but installed fine when I deselected that option. I checked that cryptsetup has been updated in rawhide, so I grabbed a Fedora Branched image and it worked like a charm. Once I was able to boot into branched (now its F32 releasing on Apr 28, 2020), I was able to upgrade to rawhide by running this command

dnf -y install fedora-repos-rawhide; dnf -y –releasever 33 –disablerepo=\* –enablerepo=rawhide distro-sync

Issues⌗

So far, I have seen 3 issues with it:

  1. It’s not shutting down completely when you shutdown the laptop, I had to do a force shutdown when I had to power it off. I have created a ticket to track this issue: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1825298
  2. I tried both thunderbolt dock from Lenovo and Dell 6000 dock, while the Lenovo’s thunderbolt dock is working often, sometimes it’s not recognizing the external monitors and is slow in detecting the keyboard and mouse attached to the dock. On the other hand, Dell 6000 dock worked great for everything, but it’s not even recognizing the external monitors at all. I think it’s due to Dell’s DisplayLink tool which they don’t support for Fedora. I tried installating their Ubuntu drivers, but that didn’t work either. It errored out trying to find kernel headers even though I have them installed. Interesting fact is, I tried Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM and tried to install that driver, which also failed due to the same reason and on Ubuntu 18.04 in a VM, it didn’t complete running the installation, but it’s just stuck.
  3. The power button has a fingerprint reader but the drivers are not available yet. Dell mentioned that they will release them later this year, hopefully a open source one rather some Ubuntu binary.

Interesting Facts⌗

One thing that surprised me is the amount of BIOS options Dell provides, one thing especially tricky is Power On Lid Open, I thought it was an issue initially until nirik pointed it out that it’s an option in BIOS and I seemed to like it now.

You can disable devices such as Camera, Touchscreen, Fingerprint Reader and more. You can also set the keyboard’s backlight brightness, timeouts. You can also set the number of cores that the OS can use. There are ton more options.

Final Verdict⌗

Dell XPS 9300 is an amazing laptop, the things that I most liked about it are:

  1. Beautiful screen, with 13.4" UHD+ (3840 x 2400) InfinityEdge, its perfect size for me.
  2. Keyboard is wide and end to end and the touchpad is huge and very useful.
  3. It’s super fast especially compared to my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon.
  4. Battery life is amazing, I seem to get almost a day life out of it not running any heavy processing.