M3800 Ubuntu 15.04

Docking stations that offer USB -> Video out (HDMI, DVI, Display Port, etc.) use drivers by DisplayLink:

http://www.displaylink.com/

Unfortunately, DisplayLink as a company does not support Linux because they do not see a great enough demand to warrant the development and maintenance of Linux drivers.

USB -> Ethernet does, however, work.  So you could have a two-part docking solution where you get a mini-dock to give you Ethernet and USB 2.0 ports from a USB 3.0 (Dell has a simple dock like this) and then do a separate cabling solution to power your displays from the built-in video outs.

So I contacted support about upgrading to 15.04.

They were really efficient in calling me back but it was quite clear from the conversation that Dell are really a Windows company and the tech support staff have not really got to grips with Ubuntu just yet.

They told me that as 15.04 is not an LTS release it's not supported, although upgrading would not be a problem in terms of hardware support for my machine.

They did say that they would expect the 16.04 LTS release to be fully supported.

I'm not too bothered about this because 14.04 is running just fine and I really like the machine. I'm just confused as to what the problem with upgrading the machine could be. I remember reading that these new machines (M3800, XPS13 2015) were fully supported by a standard vanilla Ubuntu install and that all of the necessary fixes had been submitted upstream.

I really would cherish the freedom to run the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu if at all possible.

Just curious which docking station you are using? I tried the one recommended for the m3800 but it doesn't work with displays (it seems the underlying tech isn't supported in Linux).

I use this dock (https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/Dock/OWC/Thunderbolt2-Dock/) 

it uses thunderbolt so the display looks like a displayport slot to the OS. Other posts are correct that the dell dock uses displaylink usb graphics which is hostile to open source (I'm not sure why dell would go that route on a laptop that uses thunderbolt). Everything on the OWC dock works out of the box for me, all I do is plug my thunderbolt cable in

Thanks for that -- I didn't realize thunderbolt could be used in this way. Well, I'm assuming that everything is going through the thunderbolt connection but perhaps not?

I upgraded (see my list of issues further up)

15.04 runs kernel 3.19 which included some fixes to thunderbolt hotplug (they may have just been for macbook devices though). I'm not sure what kernel 14.04 is on but basic thunderbolt support has been around for a while and on non-apple laptops thunderbolt is exposed to the OS as pci, so thunderbolt hotplug translates to PCI hotplug which has been working for even longer.

If you're interested I would definitely recommend looking into it further  

Yes everything is over the thunberbolt connection, when I "dock" my latop I set it down on my desk and plug in the power cable and the thunderbolt cable which gives me all my peripheral devices plus my external monitor

Does the Thunderbolt port work with the pre-installed 14.04 Ubuntu version, or did you upgrade?

Yes the HDMI output and all the other outputs work great (I haven't actually tested the firewire port though because who uses firewire anymore). That being said my external monitor has thunderbolt support so I use that for the display (since it uses DP it gets a 10hz faster refresh rate and I can daisy chain to more thunderbolt devices). 

14.04 comes standard with 3.13 kernel.

But just to clarify, the Thunderbolt dock HDMI out works with Linux 3.19 kernel for you?  If so that's amazing...and now I am really regretting the fact the XPS 13 9343 doesn't come with a Thunderbolt port...

Amazing...this might be reason enough to get me to abandon the 13 and it's awesome battery life to go with the 15...but we will have to see.  At this point I am wondering why I didn't just get a Mac and take on the hardware support diagnostics myself...

As of 3.19 I think even the mac wont give you much trouble but I haven't looked to deeply into it

I've purchased the OWC dock and am not having success with the headphone output or the USB devices being detected by the OS. So right now I'm having a hard time seeing any value but perhaps I've failed to configure something?

And your usb devices are not working? I am on 15.04 and it worked fine for me on kernel 3.18 (I'm now on kernel 4.0.4 with no issues)

The audio issue is expected though, I'm not sure what causes it but you can reverse the channels in pulseaudio. 

Kernel 3.19 is now available for 14.04 LTS, but you may have to get a newer NVidia driver from xorg-edgers. To install the kernel:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-vivid