The new Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is the little Linux laptop that can - snydercalkin

Installation Linux on a laptop is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to adoption of the Bone. After all, taking a perfectly effective PC, nuking Windows, and replacing it with an unfamiliar OS give the axe seem a lot like performing open-tenderness surgery to an inexperienced user. When you take into account that there are preciously few laptops with Linux preinstalled, it's no wonder that desktop Linux acceptation numbers are so grisly. (There are other reasons too, but I South Korean won't go into those here.)

One of the few laptops to come even out with a Linux OS is Dell's XPS 13 Developer Variation. I got a chance to bench mark the 2015 model few months agone, and really enjoyed playing with the little ultrabook. Physically, it's virtually identical to the consumer version of the XPS 13, only it came tiddley with Ubuntu 14.04. Flash self-assertive, and Dingle has updated its Developer Edition with Intel's Kaby Lake CPU and Ubuntu 16.04. I have to say, in that location's not often to dislike approximately the revamp.

(If you're curious, Gordon Ung put a Nub i5-equipped Windows model of the 2016 XPS 13 through its paces, too.)

Hardware changes

The act to Intel's Kaby Lake line of CPUs is the most far-famed computer hardware change in the new XPS 13. The model I tested came with an i7-7500U, which out of the box offers a 500MHz jump in pedestal frequency over the i7-6560U Skylake-based CPU in the previous model, and 300MHz more in turbo frequency, while staying at a cool 15W of TDP (Beaver State thermal output). What's unputdownable to note is that you get along this extra power at the high-end with extra efficiency.

Alex Campbell

When the CPU isn't below heavy load, IT's able to pull back on the throttle to save king. (This is called configurable TDP-weak.) Using this technology, the 6560U in the early model could be set to sip power with a TDP of 9.5W. The 7500U in the new model goes dispirited even further to 7.5W, netting 2W of efficiency.

The other big hardware shift Charles Frederick Worth noting is the move away from Intel's Wi-Fi to Qualcomm's. The previous model had an Intel 8260 radio card, for good reason: Intel's Wi-Fi implementations experience been intimately-supported in the Linux kernel for some time. And that's none small matter. Wireless hardware support on Linux was still a headache as recently As 2014 (and a target of make fun from Windows users I know), which ready-made hardware (read: laptop) survival of the fittest a big batch back then. Seeing as the older XPS 13 model shipped with Ubuntu 14.04 and the 3.19 kernel, the Intel wireless card made sense.

Note that both of the Kaby Lake entries are the same machine. The single to the left was tried with an encrypted filesystem.

The new XPS 13 ships with Ubuntu 16.04 and the 4.4 kernel. The Linux 4.4 kernel has better support for the ath10k driver, which opened more choices for Dell, hence Qualcomm's Atheros QCA6174. Unless you're getting a really exotic laptop, in that location's a very good happen that whatever laptop you buy has either a Qualcomm or Intel Wireless chip in it. Improved abide for newer Qualcomm ironware agency that Linux users can feel a lot more confident in their choices of wireless hardware.

Benchmarks

When it came prison term to test the new XPS 13, I opened up Phoronix Test Retinue to run the same tests I did with the 2015 machine. In some all test, the Kaby Lake mannequin outperformed its Skylake-based sib, as should be expected given the extra 300MHz it has to bring on with in its turbo mountain range.

An overview of the benchmarks that were run. Note that the third and fourth columns are the same machine, simply the third newspaper column represents the XPS 13 with its storage encrypted.

I was most goggle-eyed by its carrying out in Unigine Heaven, which tests game-like artwork rendering. (For the platte, 3DMark is DirectX-settled and won't test natively in Linux.) The XPS 13 is non billed as a gaming PC, and only managed 8.1 frames per second on average in my testing. Arsenic bad as that sounds, that's about 2.3 frames per second faster than the older model. What's surprising here is that the i7-7500U's embedded artwork are less to the i7-6560U's on paper. (The 7500U has HD Graphics 620, while the 6560U has Iris Graphics 540.) I also noticed that the actual render quality of the 7500U had fewer errors and looked a lot better.

Unigine Heaven performance in frames per second.

In more mainstream computing tasks, the updated XPS 13 did very well. While playing (decoding) H.264 video, the sunrise XPS 13 had slightly less CPU utilisation than the previous model. When encoding, the two CPUs performed about the same.

In number-crunching tests, the Kaby Lake CPU showed some in truth good numbers. The laptop compressed a 2GB file with Gzip about 12.7 per centum (roughly 2 seconds) faster than the previous model. Compiling the Linux marrow and encoding a WAV file to FLAC was 12 percentage (or so 30 seconds) and 25 percent (about 1.9 seconds) faster, severally.

Gzip compression completion clip in seconds.

FLAC encoding fourth dimension in seconds.

Linux kernel compilation metre.

I ran a basic battery rundown test too by performin a 1080p H.264 file happening a loop with VLC. On the first consort, I socialistic the brightness at full (close to 400 nits). Even with the silver screen pushing out photons at full power and the Wi-Fi enabled, the battery held out for 321 transactions (about 5 hours, 21 minutes)—nothing special, but prolonged enough for a fledge from Los Angeles to Atlanta. I ran the same test again with PowerTop installed and the screen brightness cut by half (about 200 nits), which yielded 392 proceedings (about 6 hours, 32 minutes), or an additional hour of time. At 200 nits, the screen is still plenty glistering, and could be usable at even get down settings.

You can get yet longer aliveness by enabling screen dimming and other power-economy options if you like-minded, but I turned off those options for examination. (It's a bit pointless to rivulet a movie along loop with the screen dimmed or overturned off.) I also had to keep the Badger State-Fi radio dormy and running for the test, which was run by having another PC ping the XPS 13 until its IP became inaccessible.

Close

One of the great things about Linux is that you can run it on hand-me-down hardware. But that doesn't mean Linux users can't have big new PCs overly. The Dingle XPS 13 Developer Edition is a fantastic little PC that is a joy to work on, and is designed to run Linux. If you've wanted a Linux laptop but can't stand belligerent with unsupported hardware, the XPS 13 is the best (dare I say, lone?) Linux laptop you'll find from a mainstream manufacturer.

While the Skylake-based XPS 13 from a twin years ago is still a great PC, the 2016 model offers a pocket-size more efficiency and power in the same bundle.

This clause has been updated to include results from a battery track down-down test with power-saving settings enabled and reduced screen light.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/411830/the-new-dell-xps-13-developer-edition-is-the-little-linux-laptop-that-can.html

Posted by: snydercalkin.blogspot.com

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