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XPS Developer Edition: What are the cons to installing stock Ubuntu?
I just bought an XPS (13 inch, 7390) running Ubuntu 18.04.
I'm contemplating overwriting the OS with stock Ubuntu or even another distro but I'd like to understand the pros and cons to doing so first (in fact, I may create a separate partition to do just that while keeping the Dell image just to find out).
Why would I want to do this? One of the reasons is I'd like to enable full disk encryption and a boot-time password as I do with my other computers running stock Ubuntu. (I've never tried to enable this feature on an existing install, only on new installs so I'm not sure if that's possible).
Also, I think I could recover several GB of disk space.
Cons: What do I lose in terms of Dell drivers/software utilities? I haven't seen any proprietary drivers, so I don't think that will be a problem
hperrin
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December 10th, 2019 16:00
If you want to make a backup of your internal drive to an external drive before you try this out, use dd.
https://www.linux.com/tutorials/full-metal-backup-using-dd-command/
speedstep
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December 11th, 2019 14:00
Dell only supports the OS that it shipped with.
Gilbou92
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May 7th, 2020 02:00
The Ubuntu that comes with the XPS has a few Dell specific programs
You also have a few repositories added that are not in the standard Ubuntu ones
If the Ubuntu site reports your machine is supported, everything should work
Some hardware components might require additional software, so you will have to manually add the missing apt repositories for your machine to download those.
The ubuntu that comes with Dell has all of this, so I would suggest to use the Ubuntu provided by Dell, that contains everything required, added to the very same Ubuntu you could download on your side.