My review of Dell XPS 15 as a developer laptop
Sigh... another big hope of mine. I have a Carbon X1 (3rd gen), thankfully a company laptop.<p>I&#x27;m quite disappointed by it, and I was hoping to push our company to move over the XPS line.<p>We got the HD display with touch screen. Although it&#x27;s a decent display, there&#x27;s substantial glare. In fact, scrub the useless touch and get the matte, which also boosts the brightness a little bit. Not to mention, the laptop is so light that attempting to touch the display will just flip the laptop. This is my first &quot;not antiglade&quot; display since the CRT era, and I regret it a lot.<p>After several months of usage, the display developed several uneven backlighting issues (some spots are quite bright), and I noticed the black is not as black anymore compared to an unused one (we have 24 of them with several to spare). We moved from the HP EliteBook series (which also has their issues), and while the contrast is much better than any elitebook I&#x27;ve used, we never had uneven backlighting with HP.<p>The keyboard was a big issue, and I see that XPS does not realize how important it is. In fairness, the X1 keyboard is not too bad, except for the awful placement of the Home&#x2F;End keys. No squeaking and decent feedback. But the small keys such as the arrow keys work very poorly. The rubber dome behind them is so small that if you don&#x27;t press the key with some little extra force it will &quot;pop&quot; but not activate. In particular, this is especially bad for the up arrow, which of the 24 laptops we have was horrifying. If you use bash, remember the up arrow is &quot;recall history&quot;. The problem is that the key is slightly slated (for &quot;ergonomics&quot;), causing the dome to be pressed unevenly. I fixed mine by some careful placement of scotch, but it&#x27;s still not the same accuracy of other keys.<p>The trackpad is awful for some reason. HP was much better here. No amount of tweaking would allow me to perform fine movements.<p>Battery life is the same on both linux and windows (around 7 hours new for random workload), so no complaints here. Power management works. But, the HP EliteBook G4 we where using before has a super-easy replaceable battery, and we changed <i>many</i> over the years. The G4 is around 6 hours of battery runtime. Not much difference honestly. Not to mention the G4 is very easily serviceable.<p>On linux I still have problems with the intel drivers with the carbon. The &quot;old&quot; drivers work, but the modesetting drivers cause &quot;twitching&quot; of the image especially on the second external output. Incredibly annoying to the point that I&#x27;m still using the legacy one. This is a classic issue with intel, and unfortunately it&#x27;s the same for any laptop nowdays.<p>Overall, the display is still a bit better than whan HP offers, but the rest is worse. The laptop is a bit thinner and lighter, but honestly there&#x27;s not much difference here. The appreciated the serviceability of the HP line as components started to fail. Although opening an X1 is not hard, there&#x27;s not much you can swap without replacing the entire laptop.