On Wednesday, 5 October 2016 17:19:54 BST Patrick Wigmore wrote:
> That would fit with my experience buying a laptop from Dell,
> with Ubuntu installed, in 2008.
>
> A year or two passed before everything in the laptop was
> supported by standard Linux distributions, without Dell's
> customisations. I suspect that some of the people who had
> bought one ended up contributing the support for it into the
> kernel (or elsewhere), to scratch their own itches.
It was always this way, especially before PC vendors started supporting Linux
Back in 2008 (AFAIR), Dell were only just starting to support Linux, so were
probably at the other end of the process that they appear to be ending this
year.
My main gripe with Dell in this instance is that they actually charged more
for this machine than its Windows counterpart, but provided less support.
Windows customers get access to downloads of the driver, utilities and an
image of the factory installation for recovery purposes.
If you drill down into the Support pages for recent versions of the XPS-13
Developer Edition and other Linux laptops, they *used to* provide support. I
don't recall the specific product numbers, but several have support for not
one, but several versions of Ubuntu, eg 10.04, 12.04, 14.04 and you can
download Factory images from their website.
This one (designated 9350) has none of that and the Restore to Factory
Defaults hot-key is not active, even though the recovery image occupies a
partition on the machine. When I naively upgraded my machine to 15.10 and
thereby lost all the Dell Drivers, they were unable to tell me how to get at
that recovery image or provide me with a copy of the image, even though the
factory must have one. Initially, I was told that they couldn't help me
because this Operating System was unsupported. In the end I took legal advice
and they gave me a new machine, but they still don't support it.
How not to keep your customers happy.
--
Terry Coles
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