I am purchasing an XPS 13, but I am curious why Dell ships with Ubuntu 18.04. Why does Dell not ship with the latest version? Can I upgrade on my own? Or is that unwise?
I already have the XPS 13" 9300 developer edition which came with 18.04 pre installed. I would also like to know if and when Dell will be supporting 20.04 so I can upgrade knowing the hardware will all still work and dell will help if anything goes wrong.
I heard that the fingerprint reader may start to get supported around Q2 this year so could that also be around the same time 20.04 is supported too? Since that has fingerprint reader support included.
They might publish an oem version for the xps in 20.04. No idea
Everything should work fine on 20.04. You can image your disk to make a backup. Then upgrade to 20.04 and add the additional repositories from Dell and see what happens.
When you buy the laptop directly with Ubuntu you get support for it, under Ubuntu
You get a Ubuntu + a few packages from Dell like "Dell Recovery" and "Dell Support Assistant" pre-loaded.
Benefiting from the support on Ubuntu requires (if I am not wrong) to buy the machine with a pre-loaded Linux (Ubuntu or RHEL). If you bought it with Windows, you are free to install 18.04 or 20.04 but you will not have the Ubuntu recovery partition nor those few specific Dell programs pre-loaded.
I keep forgetting: what are somervile, melisa, caterpie and all that? should I just add all dell repos for focal or does it depend on my model? I really wish Dell were a bit more transparent that way....
rs.saunders
6 Posts
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Posted May 9th, 2020 11:00
I already have the XPS 13" 9300 developer edition which came with 18.04 pre installed. I would also like to know if and when Dell will be supporting 20.04 so I can upgrade knowing the hardware will all still work and dell will help if anything goes wrong.
I heard that the fingerprint reader may start to get supported around Q2 this year so could that also be around the same time 20.04 is supported too? Since that has fingerprint reader support included.