I'm working on a project to collect in one place the experiences and expertise of folks using Dell's XPS laptops. I've found bits and pieces out there and a few within the Ubuntu community, and just a little on Dell's own forums. Perhaps you know that a huge amount of stuff is flat out missing. Dell won't share their expertise, so I'm striving to reconstruct some of the tweaks they do to make Ubuntu work so well on their laptops.
Background: I bought an XPS 9360 with Ubuntu a few months back. When I tried the official instructions for upgrading from 16.04 to 18.04, it didn't work too well. The system no longer completed booting, getting caught in a loop about half-way. My choice was to use a standard Ubuntu ISO and install from scratch, wiping the drive. That worked fine, but it left me with a couple of niggling issues (volume keys don't work; hibernate and suspend work imperfectly). The system is functional; I'm using it to post this. But in hunting down some answers to these minor issues, I was shocked that no one offered even the most basic information.
For example: What lines should I put into my apt repository for Dell? The ones I've seen for Xenial are varied somewhat from one machine to another, and I cannot discern the pattern when I look at the actual folders on Dell's apt server. And can anyone share with me a list of files that come pre-installed from Dell's apt repository for various models? I'd love to know what you have on your XPS machines that came with Ubuntu pre-installed.
More importantly, I want to collect the various tweaks people have performed to fix common issues such as those I cited above. Best of all would be if we can get some general guidance from someone who actually knows the underlying quirks of how Dell approaches making Ubuntu work on their hardware. I'm willing to write this all up and host it somewhere if necessary, because I'm seeing tons of unanswered questions out there.
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