Dell XPS 13 2015 Developer Edition

What a pain in the butt this machine has been. For a machine that comes with Linux pre-installed, this thing sure doesn't play nicely with it. Out of the box, it comes with Ubuntu 14.04 installed, and mine came with the A03 BIOS. When I first booted, the installation tool crashed halfway through, leaving me with a semi-working system. I had to re-flash the machine back to the factory settings, and then try again (luckily it didn't crash the second round through).

Even after getting Ubuntu set up, there is a horrendous bug in the touchpad driver that makes the cursor jerk wildly around every few minutes. I tried to solve this issue by upgrading the OS to 14.10, but that had the unfortunate effect of nuking the networking and leaving the machine in an unbootable state! YAY! Finally, doing a fresh install of 15.04 actually got everything working. With this, the thing is actually pretty sweet. The HW is amazing, from the screen to the battery to the keyboard. After a day of frustration, I'm pretty satisfied. I'll be posting updates to my experiences here.

Update 20/07/2015

I still was occasionally finding keyboard or mouse events repeating themselves. After updating to BIOS version A04, this has completely gone away. Great.

Update 01/08/2015

I had been noticing some unusual intermittent kernel panics, almost always during suspend, but once or twice just during use.

Update 11/08/2015

Applying the patch suggested here appears to have completely solved the kernel panic problem.

Update 13/06/2016

Upgraded to 16.04, and now essentially everything works. Woohoo!