Linux

Even apple's most io-limited macbook ever had a headphone jack. Dell is really trying to outperform them.

Project Sputnik didn't start yesterday. It started in 2013 and Dell XPS was much different back then.

Dell love pretending they're the Apple of the Windows/Linux world, except the issue is that for one, people specifically bought their stuff for the things you mentioned, and that the build quality was not exclusively just black plastic. The current XPS is everything that people hated about the "Macbook" from almost a decade ago. The one with the first butterfly switches

Oh no, I see the mistake, just let me

$14.00

there we go

Is it supposed to be submersible? WTF no jacks or ports?

Non upgradable SSD & RAM?

So Dell is trying to out-stupid Apple. Maybe they'll come out with their own maps.

Dell - best known for good-quality mass-produced PCs -

I'd disagree with the "good-quality" part, but they certainly are mass-produced

Popularity makes all forms of support infinitely easier. I'd struggle to come up with any technical reason that could be worth giving up the ability to easily google for issues or install software. That doesn't mean I think you shouldn't use other distros, just that I believe Ubuntu is the best choice for a default install targeting average people.

If you want it to stop being a standard, help your distro do a better job at marketing. Ubuntu is one of the few that do some actual market research and dedicate resources to getting the OS into the hands of people by getting them interested in it. It's one of the things we are looking forwards to doing better in Fedora.

As much as people don't like Ubuntu, for users who aren't enthusiasts they don't want a million different options to choose from

If we keep changing the standard it'll drive people away and leave behind support

There may be, but realistically it's probably the most well known.

I'm just happy to have Linux as a standard at all. If it works on Ubuntu, there's a high chance it works on other distros and can be easily replaced

Ubuntu sucks for many reasons, but new user experience is on the better side. I don't want to use Ubuntu over Debian myself but I feel like it's the mandatory corporate evil that can make Linux more appealing to more than just techies while also making Linux desktop more appealing to corpos in Microsoft's ecosystem. Intune already has some rudimentary support for managed Linux Desktop, with Ubuntu currently supported.

This one is tough for me. I'm opposed to any distro being considered the "standard". It feels so antithetical to what makes Linux great.

But it's also probably what we need for better user adoption. I don't know which I'd pick if I had to, but I know it wouldn't be Ubuntu.

It's fine, I bought an XPS 13 years ago with Ubuntu and immediately put OpenSuSE on it. At least I'm not paying Microsoft. I still have that laptop, and it's great. I think Lenovo deserves an honourable mention here, too - we buy T and X series laptops at work with Ubuntu and they work great too.

such as?

Agreed, still when you sell a laptop and want to put in an OS that's going to be supported for the whole lifetime of the device then there are not options for people who don't tinker.

Do you have a source for this that I can read more about?

The selling point of xps is that they are light. Many of us just need light laptops nowadays, as almost any hardware is more than capable of any task with the exception of gaming. But I have never gamed on laptops

Same, we got several small batches of XPS13 over a period of several years and just about all had problems. We had issues with batteries, drivers, random hardware failures, or total failure. We switched ThinkPad X1 Yoga and Surface Laptops 13 and have far fewer issues now.

Precision are much better than XPS