I've been using the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (AKA “Sputnik 3”) for about a week now, and it's time for a follow-up to my first impressions review. All in all, I think I hit on most of the critical points in that first review, but there are a few things worth clarifying or reiterating, and some new experiences to relate. That's what this post is.
Overall impressions
All in all, I'm still very pleased with this machine. I have a few gripes about the system software, some annoyances with the finish (more on that later), and a tiny bit of lingering sticker shock, but I am happy with its performance, portability, and apparent durability. I think it was a good selection for my needs, and I doubt I could have done substantially better.
Software
The experience of reinstalling Ubuntu 12.04, its supposedly supported operating system, woke me up to the fact that not all is entirely happy in Linux laptop support-land. I was unable to get a different distribution installed with some limited futzing (although I'm pretty confident it can be done, given some effort), and 12.04 is getting a little long in the tooth, so that's a little bit annoying.
Aside from that, I tried out both Unity and XFCE 4 before ultimately returning to my old standby, FVWM. Neither of the former two did anything for me, and both had fatal flaws with respect to window focus and placement. However, the combination of needing/wanting various “laptop-y” features and the desire to generally refresh my desktop integration experience has led me to spend a bit more time putting FVWM together with the desktop infrastructure that has sprung up since the last time I paid much attention. I'm still using FVWM and rxvt-unicode as my primary (non-Emacs) environment, but I've now hooked in NetworkManager, gnome-keyring, libnotify, and various other functionality to a greater or lesser degree. I'm using stalonetray for a notification area (I was previously using a program called wmsystray, and the original author expressed amazement at its continued existence some years ago), some sort of policy kit daemon for gnome-keyring support, and nm-applet to talk to NetworkManager.
Some people wouldn't call that “desktop integration,” but it's a step forward for me.
The sound situation is not ideal at all. ALSA card 0 is the HDMI output, which is inconvenient, and Pulse does some sort of weird thing where if I mute any of three separate channels on ALSA card 1 (the regular sound card), it mutes all three. Unfortunately, unmuting requires unmuting each one individually, and all three (master, speakers, and PCM) are required for sound output. I was able to work around that by using alsamixer -D pulse, which presents exactly one playback and one record channel, and mutes appropriately. Oh, and the reason I wound up using alsamixer at all? I couldn't find a system tray audio control that even had mute.
Suspend and hibernate work fine once the xfce4-power-manager applet is loaded, which is fine, because I'm using it for battery and charging status indication anyway. It doesn't notify me of impending suspend due to low battery, though, so that's taken me by surprise a couple of times. Its preferences suggest that it will, but I haven't seen it.
Other than sound quirks, and some agedness issues stemming from Ubuntu 12.04, I'm finding little to complain about in the software department. I mean, it's Linux.
Drivers
We've been over the networking thing already, so I won't repeat it here, but it's a little annoying. Still, I expect it to get better as time goes on.
There are some more annoying driver (or perhaps more correctly, driver integration) issues. For example, the Fn keys on the keyboard. Some of them work perfectly (display brightness, for example), but some of them do nothing at all. None of the media keys (play, volume, etc.) generate a keysym that I can tell, and neither do they just Do their Thing. I assume they use some sort of new-fangled communication mechanism to talk to DE software (they work in Unity, for example), but I've been unable to figure out what it is. It's not X keysyms, it's not ACPI button presses, and it's not dbus. Suggestions are welcome on this front, because I'm not really sure where else to look. I'd really like for at least the mute and volume up/down buttons to work in FVWM.
The touchpad, while generally awesome, has its driver disappointments as well. For example, three- and four-finger gestures don't seem to generate any X11 events, although the touchpad seems to recognize them (because they don't generate motion or click events, either). For the most part it's fine, though, after getting cozy with synclient — I initialize it with synclient TapButton3=2 HorizTwoFingerScroll=1 VertEdgeScroll=0 on each login.
Other than those few things, Everything Just Works. No complaints about that!
Hardware
It's awesome. That's really the bottom line. It's small, light, has an expansive screen in spite of it, and (relatively speaking) screams when it spins up those cores. The battery life is 6+ hours (sometimes as much as 7-8) under realistic (for me) loads. The qualifier there is that, while I'm a deep systems guy for a real-time Java vendor, and I do a lot of editing for development on my laptop, I actually do my compiling mostly on dedicated compilation machines. My typical CPU load is pretty low. That said, it will play streaming video or do Google hangouts for extended periods of time without complaint.
I still think the touch screen is gimmicky. I've tried to use it a few times, but a laptop screen just isn't in a particularly good location for poking with a finger — particularly when it declares itself to be 96x96 DPI and everything is tiny. It also doesn't act like a touch display in a lot of ways. For example, touch and drag doesn't scroll, and neither does two finger touch and drag. I'm pretty sure the hardware is multitouch, but it doesn't seem to multitouch. Maybe something will come along to change my mind on this front, but as of now I don't get it.
The top surface (palm rests and bezel) and keyboard both show fingerprints like it's their job. I mean, it's actually kind of amazing they can print with such minimal contact. It makes the thing look a little bit grungy and well-used, even though it's almost brand new. My hands aren't normally greasy or sweaty, either.
The built-in camera is pretty underwhelming. Its contrast is distractingly high in almost all indoor lighting conditions, and it displays a fair amount of noise. It works, but it could certainly be better. On the other hand, I've heard no complaints about audio quality from the associated microphones, so that must be OK.
Conclusions
As they say on the 'bay, A++++++ would buy again; great transaction!. A little bit of software love from Dell (say, an update to 14.04 when it comes out in April, and completed multitouch for the touchpad) would improve the experience even more.