Project Sputnik has sought to prove the viability of offering to developers a highly-portable, factory-installed-Linux laptop that is fully supported by Dell. As a contributor to the project, I know that while energy has been focused on the XPS 13, there has been a lot of interest from the community for a larger, more powerful version as well. When I saw the Precision M3800, the Linux enthusiast in me was excited about trying to run Linux on one. My day job is as a software engineer here at Dell working with Linux and PowerEdge, but I have the good fortune of sometimes being able to get my hands on the latest laptops--even if only as short-term loaners. :)
Dell currently factory-preloads Linux--whether Ubuntu or RHEL--on most of ourbusiness-oriented laptops, such as the 15" Precision Mobile M4800 or the 17" Precision Mobile M6800 and the several Latitudes we offer.(We also offer Ubuntu in select countries on our consumer-oriented Inspiron line.) I've looked at those, and while the Precision Mobile M4800 and M6800 offer plenty of power--and in fact many of the Dell Crowbar developers develop and run test clouds on them--something lighter appeals to me, especially after having personally owned an XPS 13 for the past year and a half.
Having been a "full-time" Linux user since the late 90's, I understand that, while having a system pre-loaded with Linux has many benefits, that's not going to stop early adopters from going ahead and wiping out Windows--in my case I never even boot into it--and installing their favorite Linux distribution. I put "full-time" in scare quotes because I owned a "TiBook" for a few years, originally intending to run Linux on it and ending up running MacOS X on that laptop for a couple years until the wireless card was supported in Linux. I never was fond of the closed nature of OS X nor with the extremely limited Unix experience it offered despite the OS's Unix heritage. Experiences like that helped me appreciate the effort people at companies like Dell have put into Linux and open source, and since owning that TiBook, I've stuck to hardware with better Linux support.
So, while none of this should be construed as official Linux or Ubuntu support on the M3800, or likewise the consumer-orientedXPS 15, in the hope of helping others like me, I have put together a list of what does and does not work well with Ubuntu on the M3800 as well as the XPS 15. I know not everyone uses Ubuntu--personally I mainly use both Debian and Ubuntu--but know that it has the widest audience.
Here's a rundown of my findings:
For the most part, everything I tested works. This is thanks to Dell's work with Canonical and hardware component makers to ensure hardware support for the other Precision mobile systems and for the XPS 13 DE.
Since these are Haswell systems, if you're running Ubuntu, you'll want to run Ubuntu 13.10--at least until Ubuntu 12.04.4 is released in January. Ubuntu12.04.3 and 13.04 don't have support for the Haswell Intel Wireless chipset in these systems. Depending on which configuration you have, you may need to specify the nomodeset boot option if you're going with Ubuntu 12.04.3 or 13.04.
Running in legacy BIOS mode or in UEFI mode both work, but for now you'll need to enable "Legacy Option ROM" in the BIOS if you're running in UEFI mode because of the display's backlight. This is because of an issue with the Intel i915 driver that currently affects several systems from many vendors. If you don't enable this BIOS option, the backlight will be stuck at the lowest setting in Linux.
On Ubuntu 13.10, I found that both Nouveau and NVIDIA's proprietary driver worked fine, though like with Linux on any system with both NVIDIA discrete and integrated Intel graphics, you probably want to give bumblebee a try to improve your battery life. I briefly tried nvidia-prime, but battery life was suboptimal since nvidia-prime keeps the discrete graphics always on. On an XPS 15 configured with only Intel graphics, this paragraph doesn't apply to you.
The Synaptics touchscreen and touchpad both work thanks to the collaboration of Dell, Canonical and Synaptics for the Haswell version of the XPS 13 DE (a.k.a. Sputnik), which uses Synaptics hardware too. However, for the time being, in order for the touchscreen to be properly detected, an option needs to be passed when loading the usbhid driver. Kent Baxley from Canonical has kindly put together "quirk" packages so all you need to do is install the appropriate one (Quad HD+ or Full HD depending on your display):
http://linux.dell.com/files/ubuntu/contributions/synaptics-fullhd-touchscreen-quirk_1_all.deb
http://linux.dell.com/files/ubuntu/contributions/synaptics-quadhd-touchscreen-quirk_1_all.deb
Lastly, the SD card reader on both the M3800 and the XPS 15 does not function properly under Linux, including with the 3.12 kernel. After discussing the bug with my friend Chris Ball, who also maintains the SD/MMC/SDIO subsystem of the Linux kernel, Chris agreed to volunteer time debugging the Linux driver for this card reader. I'd like to thank both Chris for his help and the Precision team for loaning a laptop to Chris. With any luck, I will follow up on this blog post once the SD reader issue is resolved.
Hopefully this post is helpful to anyone buying one of these systems with the goal of running Linux. I'd like to hear from those who buy and run Linux on the M3800 or the XPS 15. Feel free to post here or on the Dell TechCenter forum about your experience.