Unleash Your XPS 15 — Ubuntu 22.04
I purchased an XPS 15 during the black Friday sales. It was a great deal and the support options were also dicsounted. I haven’t always been pleased with the device though it was good enough. Recognizing I’ve been a bit spoiled from Apple’s devices the past 9 years I forgot what PC laptops were like. I guess I was spoiled with an ultrabook at work for a while too and didn’t notice things otherwise.
Windows Experience:
The bluetooth skipped. Horribly. Every couple of songs. They keyboard is amazing. The speakers are amazing. Materially much nicer than a MBPro IMO — sans a couple of items. The over-saturated display is really a bit much — it’s like built in always-on HDR mode regardless of what color profile you use — admittedly not reconciled by Ubuntu.
Install at your own risk and back up — preferably clone — your Windows install prior.
Probably the easiest way to do so is to use the Ubuntu Live installer — which you’ll need no matter what — and use it to boot alongside Windows. For whatever reason the installation process wasn’t very stable and I ended up with removing the Windows NVMe and placing a different one in to do the Ubuntu intall.
Tools:
This iFixit kit was more than enough — and a technician had struggled more with using a razor blade. If you’re going to open the case I’d recommend starting from the back corner by the hinge of your predominant hand. Specifically there seemed to more of a gap and ease prying things off back the back corner or even back inch of the part by the hinge.
Your install will vary. Drivers will vary. The default Ubuntu package is nice with some simple apps. I ended up doing the minimal install and then having it install all the additional packages and drivers.
Caution:
Don’t give up. I did not get this going in one shot. For a little background, things were going fine with the XPS 15. I even had a clone of Windows on a seperate SSD and burried in a seperate partition on the boot drive. I tried to wipe out the extra partition and put Ubuntu on. In the process I got a couple of blue screens and ran SupportOS to fix my boot record. It erased my harddrive. A technician came out and replaced the hard drive, which made me comfortable opening up the bottom of this computer, and I have a replacement bottom cover too :).
Why not give up? No one would know…
You can really customize Ubuntu once you get going. The panel dock to the left is nice, and you can replicate it on each display — oh I’ll get back to that. However, you can also turn off the panel mode (think Windows) and it looks more like a weird MacOS dock to the upper left, and you can center it! Basically you can do whatever you want with it without someone or something gripping at you.
That’s all in the default settings.
If you’re like me and have to work on Windows and enjoy having a different operating system to come home to — Ubuntu is a great alternative to MacOS. You do need some computer skills and comfort — or willingness to use terminal as that is how most any application is installed.
Getting the features back:
Yep! It’s like having an old kick start motorcycle or pulling the tranny from your stick shift car. Never know how many licks it’s going to take to get to the center of the tootsipop.
Sleep & Hibernate
This one is complicated. If you care at all about whats on your disks at this point I wouldn’t recommend moving on. You can check if the device sleeps with the menu button. Chances are it doesn’t hibernate because Ubuntu wants a swap file as large as your RAM to do so. I’ll give you the articles in a moment but I am incredibly hesitant to place any other bootable device in this XPS 15 again. Having gone through this process several times on my Dev PC — Ubuntu records the drive location it was installed in. Meaning you can only add hardrives to slots AFTER that SSD and not before. For our cases that means Ubuntu goes in slot 1 or referred to by the OS as nvme0n1. For a quick digression I had a complicated scheme going on my Dev PC and had an install on one driver for Windows, the second drive was half of a clone of Windows and half Ubuntu — both of which didn’t see each other. I think it was luck. Eventually I wanted to play the hibernation game and be able to save state between OSs and move back and forth with a reboot. It worked fine in Windows. Once I followed these instructions and update GRUB — all hell broke loose. GRUB will find anything that is bootable, I wonder if it’s a play on the word grubby. It also doesn’t work if you install Ubuntu first and then add Windows later on a seperate disk. It also didn’t work when I made sure Ubuntu remained NVMe01n1 — in fact having any Windows bootable in there at all even through off sleep. I doubt that’s the root cause but it’s the only correlation I can draw at this time. Preceed further at own further risk.
This article is the cleanest and most straightfoward that I’ve found for enabling hibernate. One thing that I think is missing, which can be found in this artcle, is to “Regenerate initramfs”. Copy and paste that phrase into find for the article and you’ll easily find the associated commands. And I could be wrong. I’d continue following that article again though and you’ll find the Extension Manager. For me I didn’t end up keeping the extra buttons on the power menu as I only want the device to hibernate when I close the lid.
It works. It’s not pretty and it takes just as long to wake from hibernate as a full boot up just about but it did just save all of your work to a save state and bring it back up again so that’s definitely worth something!
Risky stuff done.
Touchpad:
Ubuntu has default touchpad controls that remind me a bit of MacOS — honestly I know this XPS 15 has some nice touchpad controls in Windows but I never got used to them and don’t know what they are. Similar to MacOS though it’s incredibly fluid to swipe through your desktops and just have a ton of reading comprehension/retention with what you’re doing etween applications instead of going hunting for the thing you’re looking for while remembering why you’re looking for it and on top of that what you want to do with it and how you were going to do that too. Hold on I’m spiraling.
I did however only notice the default controls were working before rebooting. Similar to my custom built development/gaming PC — something I was looking forward to stopped working on first reboot. At least for the XPS 15 it wasn’t the entire graphics driver.
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As you might be able to tell getting this going is perhaps reminiscent of videogames with the trial and error than the efficiency we sometimes expect from modern day operating systems.
Imaging during Provisioning:
Section here was critical for me as I was provisioning the XPS 15 for DevOps which seems to be similar to tight rope walking in an environment where you’re throwing commands at the sharks but if you type just the right thing you’ll unlock magic. If not, you could crash your system.
This article on how to clone or image your installation is a great resource from Digital Ocean — who I’d also recommend as a library in general for Ubuntu and server provisioning — Digital Ocean has great documentation. Personally I go with the compressed image to a backup HDD. It takes about 45 minutes and you can keep working and provisioning so you’ll almost have a TimeMachine like repository of images if/when things get funny. Oh, things will get funny.
Here is how I was able to get the touchpad gestures back. This is going to be our first introduction to the Extension Manager — which we’ll get back to a few times probably.
Graphics:
Then I was curious what I could do with the Nvidia drivers. At some point through my mayhem I saw options for what driver I what graphics card I wanted to use. When I would right click it would ask me if I wanted to launch the application with the discrete card. See pictures for details.
If they aren’t there for some reason the following command should work.
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-515
I came across a command at some point to force everything onto the Intel integrated GPU — though I doubt it’s necessary to use. I think the reason the option is greyed out is because everything runs on Intel unless otherwsie told in the On-Demand mode.
I have the 3.5k touchscreen model so running the integrated chip honestly isn’t that great. If I really needed the all day battery life I would go for it. For example earlier I had an interview and told Chrome to open on the discrete card before I moved the whole system in that direction. This kept the video call going very smoothly and the fans barely kicked up. We’ll talk about my desk in a bit. And for what it’s worth this display is way over saturdated like perma-HDR.
Battery:
I’m writing this article on Performance mode for graphics and Power Saver for battery — I’m at 91% and it’s estimating just over 5.5 hours remaining so most likely 6 hours on discrete graphics — which I think is great! I’d be happy with 4 hours on discrete. I know battery times are advertised as more for this device on Windows but I haven’t seen that to be the case for my personal usage and I’m not here loading up the RAM and resources on battery — I was using everything Windows and Dell had to throw at the problem. I probably get about 6 hours on Windows with this display. I do feel like Ubuntu could best that with only using Intels, especially if you have a 1080p display.
Can I digress again? Dell put a beautiful 2k matte screen in the Inspiron 14 Plus that I’m so jealous of.
Docks:
For this you should think more like MacOS on ARM than Windows and Dell — even though it’s a Dell their own Thunderbolt 3 WD19TB doesn’t fully function with the XPS 15. Maybe Thunderbolt 4 would though I doubt that’s the problem. Drivers.
I did use all three USB-C ports and did not take advantage of Thunderbolt. It was rock solid with the default charger and my string of an Anker hub tto HDMI and to a USB hub with with my camera, mechanical keyboard, mouse, and conference speaker. All of which worked great and looked incredibly crisp. I used the last USB-C port on the other side to plug in another monitor, this time 2k instead of 4k. Still no problems. I didn’t turn on the camera from the setup but I think it would have enough power. The prior meeting was done with the WD19TB though with one monitor and the laptop as the second screen.
Bluetooth:
I started to write the conclusion without mentioning the single best thing. All those annoying bluetooth problems people are all over reddit about — completely gone.
I was on the couch and turned on my stereo one night and thought — let’s see how long until a skip. 45 mintues later I was completely baffled by the time sink I had fallen into without a single intteruption in music. The connection is HiFi and it connects to a particularly futsy bluetooth receiver backed inside of a stereo receiver motherboard somewhere which I’ve further complicated by putting my center channel on top of and my Wi-Fi on top of that. Signal is strong! Listening to 90s grunge felt like I was there.
Conclusion:
If you’re tired of people locking you out of doing things you want to do with your computer — go for it. I’ve been able to stylize this computer in a way that will last a very long time for me, and hopefully so with the replaceable battery and incredible resources I have in this machine. Ubuntu takes about half the resources of Windows and unlike it and MacOS it doesn’t take on RAM just for the sake of you having RAM. Though I think MacOS is ahead of the game with RAM Pressure. The less resources, potentially the longer battery life.
In the end mine looks like MacOS and I intentionally did so, with the conviencence of having some more PC like keyboard shortcuts. I didn’t find other keybindings to be worth it. You don’t buy 3 cars and make them drive the same. Learn the keys! Your dexterity will thank you.
Note: 4:16 left with 77% battery. I think we’re tracking!
