My trusty XPS13 Sputnik is starting to show its age and hard life, with the battery life heading to 1.5 hours max & the right cursor no longer working, so I’ve ordered a replacement. The Sputnik programme hasn’t yet caught up with the new model so I’ve ordered the 9350 with (almost) no OS instead (Windows 10 Home). I hear getting it to work with Linux might be a challenge so hoping someone else is already working on it, or sorted it (would be even better). I’ll be using Tumbleweed, maybe dual-boot with Leap for fun (and fallback).
Issues that are out there include non-functioning DW1820A wireless card (BCM4350 chipset) which will be resolved in 4.4 kernel. That’s scheduled for release early 2016, not sure how fast that would make it into Tumbleweed - any know the approximate delay between kernel release and availability in TW?
All tips welcomed, will post here how I get along.
I’d be interested in this as well as I’m looking to buy XPS 15 9550. Since Opensuse (tumbleweed) is my prefered OS, I’d like to know if it will work with this model?
I have the Dell 9350. Fantastic laptop. Wifi doesn’t work. I installed LEAP, as Tumbleweed wouldn’t install. I use a USB network dongle for now.
First I changed BIOS HDD settings from raid to AHCI. And enable booting from USB. Then pushing F12 to start a UEFI boot. With LEAP the install form a USB3 stick took about 5 minutes. After that it is searching for the scaling settings (with configure desktop | font). Because Plasma is not HiDPI ready yet.
After the necessary updates I started to enjoy the powerfull hardware an beautiful screen. With reading of my newspaper, flipping pages on the touch screen and a slide show from Digikam. Some things need improvement, as scaling of video. A HD movie (1920x1080) won’t play full screen (3200x1800). But Youtube did play full screen.
First steps look amazing. And it can only get better when the hardware gets better support in the next kernel versions.
Installed Tumbleweed (as Max_23, have to set BIOS HDD to AHCI to get the drive seen by the installer - I also updated the BIOS to 1.04 as it shipped with 1.0.0)). I also had trouble with secure boot, where it all seemed to install ok but on reboot flashed up a message about checksum fail. Disabled secure boot, reinstalled. Now appear to have a system that works but won’t boot without using the USB installer flash drive to boot from. This may be a grub/efi NVMe issue, which also may have been the issue with the secure boot (checksum would fail if the file couldn’t be read)
Issues: no wifi (should be fixed in 4.4, due January)) but have also ordered the Intel AC7260 card as a known working drop-in replacement
Touchscreen: not working out of the box, but started working after the sound was fixed
Sound: initially not working but “/usr/sbin/hwinfo --sound” output suggested running “modprobe snd-hda-intel” so I did which resolved it, and that fix is persistent across reboot. YaST sound module recognised it as Intel but said it couldn’t be loaded (liar!).
The message about the boot fail is real small because of the screen resolution and not up for long, but seems to be a file not found error which would tie in with a grubefi issue reading NVMe devices. Will investigate further.
I installed LEAP. I have no issues with touchscreen and sound. My model is a cnx9305 with a 256 SSD. I did not install new firmware.
I got wifi working with the with the Kernel HEAD repo. This has kernel 4.4 RC 4. With thanks to Knurpht in the Dutch topic.
Only problem now is that I can’t remove the network cable and USB dongle. Something crashes and Plasma stopped working. But when I leave the network cable attached I can receive data over wifi.
I have also issues with a flickering screen, especially after a locked screen and re-entering my password.
I read somewhere that Intel has some improvements ready to the kernel for drm / i915. So I hope / expect that it will be better with a newer kernel.
And despite all the issues, it is very nice laptop.
Not sure how I got to the 1.04 BIOS rather than latest, but have installed 1.1.7 now. Doesn’t resolve my boot issue, which with the help of a camera and zoom I can report reads:
Failed to open image EFI\boot\grub.efi - Not Found
Failed to load image EFI\boot\grub.efi: Not Found
start_image() returned Not Found
which, given it all works fine if I boot via the USB key and select boot from disk there, does suggest an issue booting off NVMe drives.
I’m also getting some graphics issues after screen unlock, but switching compositor off and on with Alt-Shift-F12 seems to resolve them.
I tried 4.4RC4 but only reach a black screen. Someone on Dell XPS forums reports a similar issue with Ubuntu 15.10 and 4.4RC4, maybe there’s more hardware variation between models than would seem probable?
Did everyone boot into Tumbleweed OK?
I’ve got XPS 9550 with 512 GB SSD and 4K screen. I’ve got Tumbleweed installed on SSD and USB Stick but cannot boot into either one.
I have Leap on another USB. That I can boot into 4 out of 10 times.
Looks like it doesn’t like my peripherals attached to it over daisy-chained USB hubs while booting. Once I’ve booted it with all devices detached - TW booted just fine (once so far).