Hi,

I’ve been a dell customer since October last year, and let me tell you I’m pretty happy with my XPS13 (ubuntu edition) and let me express my gratitude that a company like Dell is actively pursuing and pushing the linux desktop. This means a lot to the linux/ubuntu community and in my personal opinion you have „upped your karma“ ;)

A company that offers a product line that (in theory) works great with a linux distribution is a wonderful idea.

I intentionally said „in theory“ because there are a few things that are still to this day very very painful and would need to be looked at.

One major advantage is that Linux is open-source and thus has a broad community that actively submits bug-reports and supplies patches for these. I’d even go as far as saying the average linux user is probably easier to work with in the sense of troubleshooting a problem.

Two major bugs that would need to be looked at by Dell:

•  the number one problem is the touchpad. When using the touchpad the cursor permanently freezes, however if you plug in an usb mouse or connect via bluetooth then the frozen cursor becomes active again. A quick/temporary workaround would be a reboot.

How is this still a problem?

• I’ve recently purchased the Dell USB-C hdmi/vga/ethernet/usb adapter DA200 thinking that if I buy an officially endorsed product from Dell then it ought to work together smoothly with my Dell XPS 13.

Little did I know that this adapter does not work on Ubuntu 16.04 …. After a bit of googling I found numerous bugreports saying that this adapter does not work on Linux (however ethernet and usb seem to work, but the video ports hdmi and vga are defunct).
Thankfully in the bug reports they also supply a patch, but however that has not been released for 16.04 yet….
From the customer side, I’d really appreciate it if Dell sells a product (something as crucial as a video adapter because the Dell XPS13 has no additional ports due to its thinness) that this product also works on Ubuntu Linux. I don’t know if this is too much to ask for, but it’s troublesome to run into these problems over and over again. I was at a conference and wanted to do a presentation. If a colleague didn’t lend me his Apple USB-C adapter then I’d have been screwed. This Apple USB-C adapter worked out of the box.
The bug reports and the patches are available at:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93578
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94567
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92932                              this one has the patch!!

Any chance of Dell integrating this into any of the 16.04 updates or does this need to go upstream?!