Doubts about xps 15

One of my friend needs a performace beast
He will be using windows 7, ubuntu and mac(for iphone development)
He will be running emulators of android sdk, bada and ios. He will also be running visual cpp and other coding related softwares.
He needs a performance machine and should be durable enough to last atleast couple of years without any hiccups. he also stressed that it should have good cooling system too!

I recommended his xps 15 which comes with i7 and ruled out hp because of recent experience of sub par cooling system. But I have few doubts:-
1. Will he be able to switch manually between onboard and dedicated GPU or it will be automatic only?
2. I heard there is no driver support for optimus in ubuntu. So, he will be able to use only onboard GPU?
3. Does this xps has enough juice to handle mobile phone development emulators and other heavy coding softwares?

 

I'm pretty sure he can install bumblebee on the ubuntu very easily.

The XPS runs just fine, software development mostly need just raw cpu to reduce compilation and simulation times. The 1080 screen is outstanding for programming.

On the Windows side of things.
It pretty much still automatic switching but the user can change which application can use which card or default everything to a specific card.

The linux part if you use bumblebee, you can manually select application to use the higher power card without the need to restart x11.

The cooling is ok. But it doesn't feel hot to the touch like the HP dv6 models.

 

Make sure he gets the 1920x1080 display upgrade. The laptop is not worth it at all if you get the 1366x768 screen. In fact, it's a waste of money if you buy the XPS 15 without upgrading the display especially if he needs it for programming.

This is both because the 1366x768 screen is really bad quality, and if he's doing any type of programming then he needs all the screen space he can get (so more code fits onscreen at once). For programming, you can almost forget the CPU and the RAM compared to the importance of the screen.

Make sure he upgrades the screen if he gets this laptop.

 

If you go read up on "bumblebee", it is far from perfect. Kernel panic while switching is very frequent. No/Poor Optimus support is the reason why I still haven't installed Ubuntu on mine.

1. There is no manual/hardware switch period. The switch is a configurable software switch.
2. Very poor right now, but yes.
3. Any modern computer with i7 and a dedicated graphic card will. Neither of those tasks are particularly computing intensive.

 

OK, So optimus support for linux is quite poor. But onboard graphics will run with any hiccups?
This config is overshooting his budget but I will still ask him to compromise a little bit on other things and go for full HD display