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. 

Ubuntu 13.10 on XPS 12

I recently got my laptop, after over 2 weeks of waiting. Immediately I removed Windows 8 in favour of Ubuntu 13.10. As the XPS 12 does not have a built in CD drive, I had to make a live USB and in that process I bricked 2 USB sticks which I luckily had gotten for free. Anyway for installation there were a few minor annoyances. I had to turn off SafeBoot in BIOS and for good measure I turned off UEFI as well. I never did try to boot in UEFI mode, but the BIOS never recognized my live USB as a UEFI disk, so I figured it was just as well not doing it that way.