How I got around all these bugs that came stock with this laptop.

Hello everyone!

As it seems like most of you have experienced, this operating system is chock full of crippling bugs.  It took me a long while, but I believe I have worked through the vast majority of them.  Let's start from the beginning.

When I got this laptop, I was immediately disappointed.  The second I got to the Unity desktop, I get an internal error, my touchpad doesn't work properly, couldn't connect to bluetooth, and plenty of other fun annoyances.

About 15 minutes into using this OEM version of Ubuntu, I decide to wipe it.  So, I burned an ISO of the most recent Elementary OS (which I highly suggest), and proceeded with the install.

I'm not the most familiar with UEFI-boot, so I made the noob decision of wiping the EFI partition thinking it was just some recovery image.  So now my computer doesn't boot.  Sick.

I was able to track down the OEM iso from Here.

If you choose to use this ISO, you must burn it to a DVD (not a flash drive), and use a USB DVD drive to boot to it. (Yeah, I know).

Once I had all my UEFI partitions back, I was free to install my Linux flavor of choice.

I proceeded to boot back into eOS, and I was able to erase the 16gb swap space (that Dell had the genius idea to implement),  and I erased the / mount point. I then set up that free space to be the / mount point of eOS and the rest of the install went fine.

Immediately, I saw results.  The newest eOS is on kernel 3.19, whereas the  Dell OEM Ubuntu was on 3.13 , which seemed to resolve a lot (not all) of my driver issues.  Bluetooth works, wireless works, touchpad works better, but there's still issues I'm working through.

The biggest improvement was the touchpad.  It was practically unusable before I installed eOS.  The left click would get "stuck", and I would have sporadically spam input to get it to release.  None of that in eOS.  The one issue I am dealing with though, is that when I try to click with one finger, and drag around with the other, the window just jitters.  My one "fix" currently is that I have to click with my fingernail, then drag with with my other hand's finger so the touchpad doesn't register 2 fingers.  Super obnoxious. And I still can't get "Disable Touchpad while Typing" to work, no matter how many fixes I've tried.

I feel like Dell really overcomplicated this whole process.  Especially with being so withholding about their software.  If the distros were kept up to date, a lot of these issues wouldn't be issues.

I know this is supposed to be a "developer" model, but it's supposed to be for developing other things that aren't the machine I bought.

I'm assuming my link for the OEM iso is going to get taken down, but if so, just PM me and I'll get it over to you.