Now that I've had my XPS 15 a couple days, I can post my experience with it. I got the top model.
First off, I've installed Linux Gentoo, so my experiences will be based entirely on a Linux install on this laptop, but there might be some useful information for everyone in here.
I'd like to say that Linux is great on this machine, and the compatibility out of the box is amazing.
I haven't managed to get Optimus working, and it seems like acpid is throwing some sort of error when I use optirun, but as I wasn't planning on using opengl for anything besides desktop effects, I'm not really worried. For now, I've been disabling the Nvidia card on boot. I also haven't tried to get the touch screen working, as I don't really care about it.
When using the Intel xf86 drivers, make sure that you have sna enabled, as uxa is extremely slow and laggy (which makes sense, as this is a Haswell chip).
Battery life with medium to heavy usage (watching videos, messing with the video card, streaming video on Firefox, manipulating photos with Gimp, wireless on the whole time, bluetooth off the whole time) puts me around 5.5 hours, which is amazing for such new hardware on Linux. This is an actual test I've run by letting the batt drain while I used the system. I'm also running on the 3.12.0 kernel, if anyone is interested. I was messing with the graphics card for about an hour to an hour and a half, which has the battery reporting 25W usage. With the internal card off, and around 20% screen brightness, and even in KDE with desktop effects enabled, I'm around 15 W. I'm pretty sure I could get 6-7 hours of battery life easily with light usage, and I'm pretty sure I could pass 7 hr if I was careful and had wireless disabled. When the screen is off and the CPU is idling (but wireless is on), I'm seeing around 10W consumption. All in all, extremely good. With the system plugged in, and all components set to performance mode, everything is extremely smooth, and when using Firefox full screen and scrolling using the mousepad, there is no noticeable lag. Desktop effects also perform without lag as expected.
My impressions on the screen is that it looks great, but KDE requires a lot of configuration to get the various fonts to look bigger, and I'm not really sure someone new to Linux is going to have a great time getting the screen to play well with applications/ttys. I've also noticed that my screen has three clumps of dead pixels, two groups which are off, and always display as black, and one group that has its blue component stuck on. The pixels on this screen are so small that the dead pixels are extremely hard to notice, but in certain conditions they stand out. If you don't have good eyesight, however, it's unlikely you'll notice at all. I plan to contact Dell on Monday to see if I could get a replacement screen. I don't really mind the pixels too much, but if I'm going to pay 2k+ usd for a laptop, I might as well have it perfect. After taking a picture with my camera and zooming the picture in, I can tell that one of the groups of dead pixels is due to some sort of impact in the screen--it looks like something impacted the screen, leaving a diagonal mark going across about 4 pixels. This is somewhat concerning if you think about how this had to happen in the first place. I recommend everyone checks their screen carefully for dead pixels.
The keyboard is pretty easy to type on, though I don't really like the fact that the home/page up/page down keys are on the arrow keys, and the function key must be held down to utilize them. I also find the keys and touchpad tend to collect grease very easily, so I expect this laptop to require constant cleaning. The touchpad under Linux is extremely responsive, expect for two finger touch, which sometimes doesn't register if you hit it the wrong way, but I think I've gotten decently used to it. If you don't plant your fingers exactly on the pad, it won't register as a right click. The scrolling required some adjusting in the settings screen, but there's nothing in Linux that doesn't require adjusting.
The wireless seems to work extremely well. I've had some issues with range in the apartment I'm in, but the XPS 15 seems to outrange any wireless device I've had in this environment. I have a wireless AC router, so this might also have something to do with it. I haven't tested b/g/n performance. I also haven't tried running any actual speed tests, but with simple file transfers I'm getting 20-25 mb/s, which is good enough for anything I'm doing. The file transfers are over sshfs, so it's possible raw transfers might actually get better speeds.
Sound quality isn't the best I've heard, but it's definitely pretty good for a laptop. I don't feel I need headphones, which was definitely the case with most systems I've had in the past. Watching and streaming videos actually sounds pretty decent, and the system is definitely good enough to stand on its own without any additional equipment. If all you had was this one laptop, I think you'd be able to survive pretty well.
I've noticed the laptop is also ridiculously quiet. Even when compiling/updating the system (which on Gentoo Linux uses all cores to the fullest), the system for the most part remains at a whisper. It picks up from time to time and is audible, but I'm a pretty light sleeper, and was able to fall asleep with the system compiling.
The webcam is recognized by Linux, but I haven't really tested it out. It seems to work fine in Skype, but I've only used it for a couple seconds. The USB 3 support also works well, and I was getting about 110 mb/s doing a disk-to-disk copy from a SSD connected via USB 3 to the 512 GB SSD in the machine using dd (bs=4096).
A naive test using dd gives me the following to the local SSD (the 512 GB SSD):
Code:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=4096
^C1335304+0 records in
1335304+0 records out
5469405184 bytes (5.5 GB) copied, 12.8108 s, 427 MB/s
This is on top of LUKS (serpent encryption w/ multi-threaded operation on), LVM, and ext4. Pretty good.
Here's some additional hardware information (if anyone would like it):
Code:
# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell DRAM Controller (rev 06)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell PCI Express x16 Controller (rev 06)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 06)
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell HD Audio Controller (rev 06)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Device 0c03 (rev 06)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 05)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point PCI Express Root Port #1 (rev d5)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point PCI Express Root Port #3 (rev d5)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point PCI Express Root Port #4 (rev d5)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point LPC Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point 6-port SATA Controller 1 [AHCI mode] (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Lynx Point SMBus Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point Thermal Management Controller (rev 05)
02:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 750M] (rev ff)
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 08b1 (rev 6b)
07:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 5249 (rev 01)
Welp, hopefully this helps someone out.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
