Ubuntu 13.10

I have been using Ubuntu 13.10 for a while, so I can finally sum up my thoughts on how well the Dell XPS was performing on this release. In terms of hardware, it is pretty much well supported, everything more or less works out of the box, except the multi touch on the touch pad, at least I can not get any of the gestures to work properly. It also seems to have a bit of a sweet spot in terms of right clicking, which I struggle to hit at times. In terms of the touch screen, it works, but Ubuntu is not made with this in mind, so it is a limited functionality. For example, there is no multi touch zoom, and a touch is only registered as a left click, nothing more.

Mageia 3 on XPS 12

In part of my newest acquisition, I tried out Magiea 3 on a XPS 12. As I only went for the live experience, I never got to try the full experience as I never decided to install it. The reason? Basically a lot of the hardware was not working, unfortunately. The touch screen was not working out of the box, but to me that was not really a big deal, as no Linux distro so far have been able to use that efficiently. The touchpad was not working at all. As it is basically a multitouch pad, you need the multi touch functionality enabled to make it work, as you cannot click it if it doesn’t work. This did not work, which was the biggest deal breaker for me, especially since a quick Google resulted in a forum post recommending to submit to the bug tracker.