Hi Dorienh,

Did you upgrade your BIOS to A05?

When you say 3-4 hours with a dimmed screen, what kind of work are you doing? I get much more than that.

My bios was A03. I'll upgrade the bios and get back to you. Thanks for the suggestion. 

- After opening certain software: synaptics center, installing tlp, musescore,... my screen starts to flicker uncontrollably. The mouse cursor doesn't work at all anymore too. This usually ends with a kernel panic (blinking caps lock). I have to reboot a few times before this goes away and I usually also type this:  sudo apt-add-repository ppa:canonical-hwe-team/sputnik-kernel sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install linux (is this the right command btw to activate the latest sputnik kernel? How do I make this stick?)

This was a PPA for the XPS 13 two generations ago. You can use either the Ubuntu 14.04 factory image (assuming you purchased the Developer Edition) or the kernel in Ubuntu 15.04. There's also a test kernel mentioned in this PPA for a bug in the Broadcom wl driver, though the fix from that is in the process of being integrated into the standard Ubuntu kernel: bugs.launchpad.net/.../1415880

Great! I think there were indeed some important fixes. I don't remember reading about fixes for battery life though. Another thing you can try with battery life is to use cpufreq an put the setting on 'powersave'. For me this actually happens automatically (I've never set it myself). I'm not sure if that's good or not, but it does lead to very nice battery life.

Great! I think there were indeed some important fixes. I don't remember reading about fixes for battery life though. Another thing you can try with battery life is to use cpufreq an put the setting on 'powersave'. For me this actually happens automatically (I've never set it myself). I'm not sure if that's good or not, but it does lead to very nice battery life.

Up until recently, I used laptop-mode-tools. I've been trying tlp more recently since it's in Ubuntu 15.10. I typically get 7-10 hours of battery life with the display at about half brightness, which is honestly bright enough for most of my uses. The only other thing I do is blacklist intel_powerclamp because honestly it's a misguided driver.

Sorry for the late reply, I was out of town without wifi access for a week. 

I'm trying to flash the bios, but I haven't succeeded yet. I made a freedos usb with unetbooten. When I copy the file 

9343_BIOS_Rev_A05.exe on it and boot the usb stick, the file does not show. Any ideas? I've read on some forums that I need to  extract the exe file first? I've been searching this forum for a how to, but no luck yet. Thanks for any pointers.

I've been reading and searching so much why the files on my freedos drive don't show up. Should I extract the exe file somehow? I tried opening it with wine, but it fails. 

Sorry for the late reply, I was out of town without wifi access for a week.  I'm trying to flash the bios, but I haven't succeeded yet. I made a freedos usb with unetbooten. When I copy the file  9343_BIOS_Rev_A05.exe on it and boot the usb stick, the file does not show. Any ideas? I've read on some forums that I need to  extract the exe file first? I've been searching this forum for a how to, but no luck yet. Thanks for any pointers.

It sounds like you have the 2015 XPS 13 model (if not, you're using the wrong BIOS update). You don't need FreeDOS or Windows at all. Put the 9343_BIOS_Rev_A05.exe file on a FAT32 formatted USB stick and boot into the BIOS update boot option (press F12 during POST to get the BIOS boot menu and then select the BIOS update option).

I managed to upgrade the firmware, using systemrescue usb stick. The process is described here. I also did a fresh install of kubuntu. The flickering and crashing every 5 minutes reappeared after installing oracle 8 sdk and chrome. I isntalled openjdk 1.8 and removed chrome. Will keep you updated.

More info here; dorienherremans.blogspot.co.uk/.../dell-xps13-2015-updates-and-bios.html

After the Bios upgrade the trackpad went noticeably smoother. However, my screen kept flickering and computer kept crashing. After a while it occurred to me that this started happening after installing java oracle 1.8. 

I did a new clean install of Kubuntu and used open jdk now. The computer is workeable again. However, about 1/3 times on suspend it will still go into kernel panick, or the mouse will dissapear.

Battery life goes around 6h on low brightness, I read about TLP clashing with broadcom drivers so I don't want to mess up my system and this will have to do for now.

If there are any thoughts on the suspend thing, I'd be happy to hear them. I know there is a post suggesting to disable wifi and suspend manually, but I prefer to just wait for an update.

Oh no... it's been about 2 weeks now and it started happening again. I can work for about 10 minutes. The screen flickers uncontrollably and goes wild and when I hit the shutdown button there is a kernel panic.

I noticed it first after I installed a software called Tony for my job. It has the following dependancies:

What is your kernel version? Has it been updated recently?

Maybe it updated automatically, I'm not sure, but the kernel is:

it seems to be related to everything that runs or is built in java, I think... (