The Dell web page for the XPS 13 developer's edition says: "Save time: Dell has already verified and preinstalled all drivers for you so there is no need to spend time finding the right driver for your laptop."  Based on that, I bought an XPS 13 developer's edition with Ubuntu 14.04 in mid-July, with the expectation that the usual linux driver and other issues would have been resolved and that it would "work out of the box."

 I thought my needs were modest, because I mostly wanted to use it in a "desktop mode" with an external display and keyboard.

The external display was a nightmare.  I was using a dvi-vga connector from Microsoft.  I verified that my new Windows Surface Pro 3 identified the display I wanted to use, and another, with no problems.  The XPS 13 couldn't recognize either one and defaulted to 1024 x something resolution.

I was able to fix this manually using cvt and xrandr, some of the time.  But I could not get it to happen on boot with the display plugged in, which is the use case I really cared about.  I tried putting the same commands in various startup files, which either had no effect or reported mysterious errors on the screen during boot.  Advice about this problem on the web is all over the place: change your .xproflie, change xorg.conf, change xorg.conf.d/something, change boot flags in grub.conf (because of kernel modesetting), etc.  I didn't try all of the possible grub options, but I tried all of the non-grub options and turning off kernel modesetting in grub (after that, it couldn't find the external display at all).

All of this was made more difficult by the extensively discussed touchpad problems, which were not high priority for me except that I wanted to use the laptop keyboard and touchpad to get the thing set up.  Click and drag and click and drop just didn't work at all.  This indicates a complete lack of testing.

Finally, after going to the forums, I see people going to heroic measures to install multiple bios upgrades, recompile new kernels, etc.  If I wanted to do that, I would not have bought a laptop with linux pre-installed.

After the value of the time I spent messing with this thing exceeded its price, I finally admitted defeat and called for shipping label to return it.  The person asked me what the problems were, and before I finished my litany, offered to redirect me to support because she was "sure they could fix it."  In a moment of weakness, I agreed.  Then, after 45 minutes of waiting to talk to someone in support, I called back, got my shipping label, re-packed everything and dropped it off at UPS.

I'm a linux devotee, but I no longer have time to recompile new kernels to make things work.  Had Dell not advertised this as more solid than it was, I'd have saved 10-15 hours of messing around.  I hope that I really get the full refund without restocking fees, etc., but, in the best case, I'll never get those hours back.

For people who are willing to mess around for hours to get it to work, linux on an XPS 13 might be a fine idea.  But Dell should stop advertising this as working out of the box unless they're willing to test it enough to make sure that statement is (reasonably) true.