It's finally good (XPS 13 9343)

After a long time of trial and error, I believe I finally have a very good setup with my top end XPS 13 DE. The only thing that still doesn't work is the microphone, and I still get the occasional double key press. However this system has been extremely reliable, fast, gets good battery life and I never get kernel panics. It is my primary work machine and I use it between 6-10 hours a day. It has done about 20,000 miles of travel with me so far.

None of this is meant to be taken as gospel, and I would welcome and appreciate any feedback or suggestions on better methods.

Here's a summary of what I did, I hope it helps someone.

-  upgrade to BIOS A04 immediately. Most of you have probably done this by now, or its hopefully shipping with this now. This took my keyboard bouncing key issue from a 99 on the annoyance level to about a 10. The keyboard is extremely usable now.

- Replaced the wireless card with an Intel 7265 from Newegg ~$30 shipped. I know, it ***, but the Broadcom drivers are awful and are causing lots of problems (they havent been updated since last November). I have no idea if this voids the warranty, maybe check with Dell first. You will need a small T5 screwdriver as well as a small phillips head. It's not hard to do. If you don't do this, you will still be able to have a mostly reliable system but you will likely have kernel panics when switching wireless networks, or possibly resuming from sleep (I had both). Apparently there are patches for the Broadcom driver. I have never tried them. I don't think the Broadcom is a bad card, and hopefully the issues can be resolved when they (finally) update the drivers.

-Perform a clean install of Ubuntu 15.04 using UEFI instuctions (link below) provided by Dell. Wipe the entire disk (backup your data first, obviously), there is no reason to keep the factory image in my opinion. And I wouldn't be concerned that 15.04 isn't an LTS release. You'll have moved on to another version long before the support cycle is done ;)

For some reason this didnt work the first time when I installed and encrypted the entire volume, it wouldn't boot. I did the entire process again and it worked with UEFI, Secure boot and full disk encryption.

http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN297060/EN

- Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, add these lines at the bottom. This is going to fix kernel panics and help the touchpad.

blacklist mei
blacklist mei_me
blacklist psmouse

I also add this to disable the webcam because I dont want it. I know you can disable this in the BIOS, but I've found that even with it disabled, it still works  a lot of the time. Weird.

blacklist uvcvideo

EDIT: If you blacklist these modules and your kernel is still loading them, run 'sudo update-initramfs -u' then reboot.

- Run apt-get update/upgrade, install all updates which should include a  new 3.19x kernel. Reboot. You can verify those kernel modules are now blacklisted by running 'xinput'. You should NOT see a Synaptics PS/2 driver loaded.

- Do this to make the trackpad WAY less annoying--Add below contents to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf (you will likely have to mkdir xorg.conf.d) then log out and back in.

#setting for synaptics
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall"
Driver "synaptics"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
Option "Protocol" "event"
Option "FingerLow" "10"
Option "FingerHigh" "40"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.3"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1.6"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.5"
Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinW" "8"
Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinZ" "10"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "100"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "15"
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
Option "PalmDetect" "1"
Option "AreaRightEdge" "1020"
Option "AreaTopEdge" "40"
Option "FastTaps" "0"
Option "SHMConfig" "1"
Option "MaxTapTime" "100"
Option "TapAndDragGesture" "false"
Option "Clickpad" "1"
EndSection

-Next we're going to start messing with kernels, so I like to add this to my default grub conf so it will show a boot menu on every bootup for 5 seconds, it just makes switching between kernels and getting into recovery mode easier if I need to. This is also adding some kernel startup options which will fix the screen flickering issue on boot/reboot/shutdown, and also have the options that the Dell patch included for kernel panics.

Edit /etc/default/grub to look like below then run 'sudo update-grub' and reboot

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=false
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_ips=0 pcie_aspm=force radeon.modeset=0 nouveau.modeset=0"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

-Install a 4.x kernel. 4.1.1 works GREAT! The only thing that doesn't work is the mic. It seems to have a bug that pops up every other kernel update because I know it worked in a previous 4.x kernel. I bet it works again in 4.1.2. I never use my mic, so this isnt a concern for me. If it is you may consider seeking out the patch ( I have never cared enough to try) or staying on the older kernel. Doing this new kernel installation will keep your previous kernels in place, so you can always switch back to them in the Grub boot menu. If you didnt replace the wireless card with an Intel, you will need to apply a patch to the Broadcom driver to get it to work in Kernel 4.x, directions here about half way down the page :  http://forthescience.org/blog/2015/04/21/installing_ubuntu_14_04_on_the_new_dell_xps_13_v2/

Get the kernel install debs from here:http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.1.1-unstable/

(or whatever the latest version is).

You need 3 debs from there (replace x's with the version you are downloading), linux-headers-xxxx-generic_amd64.deb, linux-headers_xxxx_all.deb, linux-image-xxxx-generic_xxxx_amd64.deb

Then install them: 'sudo dpkg -i linux-headers_xxxx_all.deb'

'sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-xxxx-generic_amd64.deb'

'sudo dpkg -i linux-image-xxxx-generic_xxxx_amd64.deb'

Reboot. Run uname -r to verify you're on the new kernel. If you're still on the old 3.x kernel, then reboot and select the new kernel under Advanced in the boot menu. You can set the default one later manually if you need to.

- Install laptop-mode-tools. I still can't find a definitive answer as to whether or not this is still the best way to go, but it works and it works well. You can manually edit the intel_pstate conf and set some pretty conservative CPU speeds if you want to stretch out that battery. With this enabled, Max CPU set to 50%, Turbo boost disabled, Wifi power savings at 3, I get a solid 9 hours of run time with Wifi on and screen at about 75% brightness and the laptop stays very cool. It's still responsive and fast. If I take that max CPU to 25%, it runs at the lowest speed of 800Mhz constantly and the laptop is seriously cold. I have never stretched out the battery on this setting, because at this setting you definitely notice UI sluggishness.

'sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools'. You'll then see a bunch of stuff in /etc/laptop-mode. under conf.d you can edit some of the settings for pstate, wireless, etc. I also had to manually add the init script for laptop-mode to startup as they weren't starting up on reboot.

After all of this you should be in pretty good shape. Here I would set up my IPtables rules, and install Cinnamon desktop and remove Unity. Cinnamon seems to play much nicer with this HiDPi display. Things just look much better in all apps without having to tweak anything. One issue I had is the network settings dialog doesnt work when you install Cinnamon. If you run 'cinnamon-settings' from the terminal, you will see an error about libnetwork.so. The fix was to pull libnetwork.so out of a cinnamon-settings DEB installer out of the Ubuntu Wily repo (its version 2.6) then replace the file on my system with that and then the network settings preferences panel worked.