Hello, I see you are looking for technical assistance. If you need our help, you can follow @dellcares and start a private/direct message with us and we will be happy to assist you.

^ Side note: maybe we should disable these automated replies for this particular forum. If you do indeed try to reach out to @dellcares for an Ubuntu issue (as I did), the support you will receive will...lead to intense customer dissatisfaction, to put it politely.

Basically, if I bought the developer edition of this laptop (this, but w/ the OLED option) instead, I could have used the standard OS recovery tools to get access to the custom Ubuntu image; this device was certified using a custom image, not the standard image. But since I purchased it w/ Windows--with the intent to then install Ubuntu afterwards--the OS recovery tools only give me access to the Windows image.

hello, we are here to help you with this problem. Please follow and send a direct message @DellCares for assistance. I look forward to your message!

In a chat with Dell support a while back, I learned two interesting things on how they set up this device.

• They use a stock Ubuntu 22.04 LTS image.
• They don't perform any special post-installation steps.

Assuming this is true, my hypothesis is that the "Install third-party software..." option was checked during the installation process, which is why the "Ubuntu Certifed" page says that it's a "custom image".

Still would be nice to have someone from Dell confirm/deny this hypothesis, though.