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Ongoing version support?
I bought a Dell XPS 13 9360 last year and it came with Ubuntu 16.04. October came and went and there was no sign of an official Dell 16.10 upgrade that I could see. Now 17.04 has been released and I see no word of an official Dell release yet. I understand it may take a while to get it ready after the Canonical release. And maybe you only plan to support the *.04 releases. I'd just like to know what I can expect.
I've tried other distros with the machine, even vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 and had lots of problems, particularly with sound. So I'm kind of stuck with what Dell provides, unfortunately. Thus, I'd love to know what will be provided going forward. I know Ubuntu is planning some big changes in 18.04 - dropping Unity and replacing it with Gnome. I paid a good amount for this computer and plan on having it at least that long. I'd hate to be stuck on a 2 year old release because Dell gave up on updating it.
An even better solution would be to provide the custom drivers, etc. that make the Dell image work, so that I could install whatever distro I want and still be able to get the sound card to work. One of the main benefits of using an open source OS like Linux is choice. I'm disappointed that I cannot install another distro, and am stuck with a Dell version of one particular release of one particular distro.
DELL-Barton George
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April 17th, 2017 07:00
@bit101,
Yuri is correct. We (Dell) only officially support the LTS's. For the interim releases we will make "best efforts" to support.
thanks for your support!
DELL-Barton George
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538 Posts
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April 17th, 2017 13:00
The drivers are pushed upstream into the kernel so that other distros can leverage them as well. Other places on this forum you can see a bunch of other distros that folks are using in place of Ubuntu.
bit101
34 Posts
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May 15th, 2017 18:00
julio: en.community.dell.com/.../20002634
bit101
34 Posts
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April 16th, 2017 17:00
To clarify a little bit, I love the machine. And I don't really have a problem with Ubuntu. I'm currently running i3wm, so I don't even see the Unity desktop. I would like the choice though. And I really need to know what kind of support will be coming in the next year or two.
Yury Vidineev
64 Posts
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April 16th, 2017 22:00
Hello
As I know Dell supports only LTS releases (12.04, 14.04, 16.04, etc)
bit101
34 Posts
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April 17th, 2017 11:00
Thanks. Actually, I did find another page that listed 10.04, 12.04, 14.04 and 16.04 as downloads, so I figured that was what's going on. Any chance of making the drivers and other special bits available for use in other distros?
bit101
34 Posts
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April 17th, 2017 13:00
Thanks again. I understand that's the concept. I had very bad luck with other distros and even tried to go back to vanilla Ubuntu 16.04. Lots of issues with sound and touch screen. Reinstalling from the Dell image fixed everything. But that was 6 months ago. I know some changes had not made it upstream by then. Maybe that's been handled by now. I have no big reason to change my distro now, but it's good to know that it should be possible.
bit101
34 Posts
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May 6th, 2017 08:00
Just wanted to follow up on this. I just installed stock Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 and so far everything seems to work just great. The only issue was some slow wifi. Set up the new drivers per another thread here and that seems like is better.
julioarguello
8 Posts
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May 15th, 2017 15:00
ThX, can you link the other thread? Regards
julioarguello
8 Posts
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May 19th, 2017 14:00
ThX, very kind of you. I'll probably install LUbuntu 17.04 + The fix in the link above.
dannyjjj
2 Posts
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July 27th, 2018 03:00
Hi, do you know when a do-release-upgrade will provide 18.04 LTS on a dell xps13 developer edition?