Review: the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Laptop

Petros Koutoupis — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 13:00:00 +0000

A look at Dell's thin and sleek XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop that now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS pre-installed.

Canonical recently made an official announcement on its company blog stating that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop (that is, Project Sputnik) now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) pre-installed. Upon reading this, I quickly reached out to Dell asking to review the laptop. I'm a Linux developer, and when a developer edition laptop is marketed with Linux pre-installed, I need to experience it for myself. The laptop eventually arrived, and like a child on Christmas morning, I excitedly pulled the device out of the box and powered it up for the first time.

This is a pretty rock-solid notebook. The device is very light and easy to carry—meaning, it's mobile (which is very important in my book), thin and sleek. Not only does the device look good, but it also performs very well.

General Specifications

In my possession is the 7th generation of the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. This generation ships with an Intel Core i7 8th Gen microprocessor. It is a four-core, eight-threaded (hyperthreaded) i7-8550U CPU operating at a 1.8GHz frequency. With this configuration, the system itself reports eight CPUs. The system is installed with 16GB of RAM.

First Impressions

Upon first boot, you're greeted with a Dell welcome screen followed by a generic set of Ubuntu-related questions (such as license agreement, keyboard layouts, timezone and so on). Toward the end, you are given an option to create a recovery USB image, which could be very handy one day. If you opt out of creating one, no worries, you can go back and create one at a later time.

Figure 1. The Dell Recovery Media Menu

The first thing I did, after logging in to my user session for the very first time, was run a software update.

Although this does not at all relate to the quality of the device, I did find it a bit strange that the operating system was pre-installed with both Chrome and Chromium web browsers. I'm not sure why anyone would need both, but they both were there. If you're a Firefox user, you'll need to install it from the Ubuntu Software center.

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