New Laptop

charlie.corder

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Good morning all,
Last week I purchased a new XPS 13 9320 directly from Dell.
It came with Windows 10 installed, which I dumped the next day, and replaced with LinuxMint 21.1 MATE.
My assessment of how this XPS works with LM - I could not be happier.
It comes with a backlit keyboard, which is nice.
16 GB RAM, which is the most I have ever had - and it is fast!!!
It has a touch screen, which works very well.
So far, everything works well.
The only thing I have to get accustomed to is the Thunderbolt C ports. It only has two and no USB ports. Must use adapters.
Would I buy it again? You bet I would.

Old Geezer
Tango Charlie
 


On your new computer, the ports with the small oval connectors are both Thunderbolt and USB-C ports. Any USB device should work with them. If you have older USB devices with connectors that do not fit, an adapter is needed to fit the small oval ports, but they are still USB.

One word of wisdom:
I prefer USB-C adapters that have a short 1 inch (2.5 cm) cable. I DO NOT recommend the solid plastic adapters. The solid USB-C adapters are convenient, but they can act like a tiny lever and put a lot of stress on the micro-solder joints that connect the USB-C port to the motherboard on your laptop. The solid adapters can be thicker than the bottom of some laptops, so that the laptop edge rests on the adapter, not the flat bottom of the laptop, which puts a LOT of stress on that delicate port.

Get adapters with short cables. The adapters with short cables flex at the cable and have tiny plugs for the port. They relieve physical stress at the port much better.

P.S. Added later:
I was referring specifically to the Dell XPS 13 9320 model computer mentioned above. Some computers may have the same small oval ports, but they may support USB only (USB-C) and not Thunderbolt (or DisplayPort?). That describes some Mac models, but I do not know about other brands. Making matters worse, some cables that fit in those ports do not support all the different uses, either. The charger cable that came with my Mac is very very slow at transferring data. They included a warning about that.
-> The point here is to read the specs for your device ports and cables carefully.
 
Last edited:
Good morning all,
Last week I purchased a new XPS 13 9320 directly from Dell.
It came with Windows 10 installed, which I dumped the next day, and replaced with LinuxMint 21.1 MATE.
My assessment of how this XPS works with LM - I could not be happier.
It comes with a backlit keyboard, which is nice.
16 GB RAM, which is the most I have ever had - and it is fast!!!
It has a touch screen, which works very well.
So far, everything works well.
The only thing I have to get accustomed to is the Thunderbolt C ports. It only has two and no USB ports. Must use adapters.
Would I buy it again? You bet I would.

Old Geezer
Tango Charlie
I bought a Dell Inspiron 15 5510 last year and had the same result. I ran Mint 20.3 on it until recently. I updated to pop_os! 22.04. Everything worked right out to the box. With a little work on Mint the finger print sensor works.

I did a lot of research before purchasing this machine. The specs are very close to several of the Clevo machines that System76 and Tux sell and Dell offers Ubuntu on the machine if you purchase it outside the United States.

I decided to try Pop_os! when it came time to upgrade. I think pop_os! fits my workflow better on the laptop. I am still running Mint 21 on my desktops.

Bob
 

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