Linux drivers for XPS 9360

My machine shipped with Windows and 16.10 runs great on it - see my recent post. Can you expand on "sluggish" & post your configuration to see if anyone can help.

Thanks for your reply. 

There are many small things. For example, whenever I click the Dolphin icon, it takes about a second before something happens (white indicators on either side of the icon), and before the window is showing another second has passed. Similar times are occurring when starting other programs (Shutter, Libreoffice Writer). When I drap and drop a Firefox tab to another screen, it takes longer than I expect to render correctly. The same goes for opening a terminal window (ctrl-alt-t).

At other times, there seems to be no problem at all, with relatively 'heavy' programs (google chrome) starting in half a second.

Sometimes I wonder if it's a windowing/display issue, which is what has caused me to ask about the drivers or an image file.  

My setup is Ubuntu 16.10, full drive encryption. I thought about reinstalling the OS, 16.04 with only home folder encryption, but I read that at least from the encryption side it'd actually be worse that way.

Apart from that, I usually use an external monitor. The RAM load is 3.3 GB of 7.7 GB at the moment, which is typical.

I have full drive encryption and don't experience any of the delays you describe, so I suspect it isn't that. I don't use an external display, so have you tried without? Others are reporting issue with external display mirroring, so perhaps that is the cause.

Thanks basteed for your reply.

Also without external monitor i have these issues. I don't have mirroring of the external monitor (when attached).

There is 2 things that I think could be of influence:

- Could you tell me, which 'additional drivers' are installed on your system? There is one showing up on my system: "unknown: Unknown - this device is using an alternative driver. (*) Using Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs from intel-microcode (proprietary)"

- Did you make any changes to the BIOS before installing Ubuntu? There was a setting I had to change according to a tutorial, but I can't remember which it was - something with a bus to access the storage drive, if I'm not mistaken. I'll have a look later to see if I can find it in the BIOS.

Many thanks,

I chose install additional drivers option at install time and have the same 1 proprietary driver you describe - no others. The only BIOS changes I made were 1) change SATA to AHCI - so NVMe SSD is recognised (described here) and I also disabled touchscreen - which I don't need/want. I also have my QHD resolution set to 1920 x 1080. Secure Boot is on and I have full drive encryption.

Ah yes that's exactly the setting I changed in the BIOS (the SATA setting).

I didn't need to make any other adjustments I think, I'm not 100% sure (i was not able to install onto the SSD, but I can't recall how I fixed it, maybe similarly as described in your link.

Is there a way I can 'time' processes that start/stop, e.g. once I click on a folder in Dolphin, it sometimes takes multiple seconds before its contents appears. I'd like to figure out, which processes are running in those instances. I'm suspicious of my nfs-attached NAS, but then again the delay also occurs when simply opening a small txt-file (in a local folder).

But I guess this is no longer something Dell-specific - should you have any more tips I'm grateful to hear them, and otherwise thanks for your help!

Hi Basteed, where did you get the Ubuntu 16.04 drivers from?

I installed 16.10, not 16.04 and ticked the "install additional drivers" box in Ubuntu install - so I guess Ubuntu automagically finds the appropriate ones - I didn't manually install any extra & all works fine, as per my OP.

Thanks. I finally got the wifi card working after doing a full Ubuntu 16.04 reinstall using the recovery disk, where I chose full disk encryption.  After the install, wifi didn't work. Then I manually installed https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/amd64/linux-firmware/1.157.5 and got wifi working.

I confirmed that Fedora 25 with kernel 4.8.13-300.fc25.x86_64 wifi/touchpad/sound all work out of box.