Dell’s Linux PC sequel still “just works”—but it adds 4K screen and rough edges

Almost two years ago, we closed out our review of Dell’s first Linux-powered Developer Edition laptop with some words of wisdom from my former uber-sysadmin mentor, a fellow named Rick, with whom I worked at Boeing for many, many years. Rick is now retired and living the life of an itinerant world-traveling SCUBA master, but he’s been hacking on Linux since around the time Linus first dropped the kernel on comp.os.minix. I lamented to Rick that I was having a hard time coming up with an angle or hook for the XPS 13 Developer Edition, because it all just worked—Dell got it right, and it was a great piece of kit. It was maybe even a bit boring.

“Isn’t that what you’re looking for in a mainstream product?” Rick told me over e-mail. “In 1996 it was: ‘Wow look at this, I got Linux running on xxxxxxxx.’ Even in 2006 that was at times an accomplishment… When was the last time you turned on an Apple or Windows machine and marveled that it ‘just worked?’ It should be boring.”

Rick was right—he usually is right, which is why he made such an awesome mentor. His words echoed in my head all over again when I recently lifted up the big M3800’s lid. Dell has expanded its Developer Edition offerings, taking what started out as an internal unofficial side-project of sticking Ubuntu onto the new M3800 workstation laptop and making an actual, official supported configuration that you can purchase. Like the XPS 13 Developer Edition before it, the M3800 Developer Edition comes straight from the factory with an Ubuntu LTS desktop release—14.04 this time around, rather than the previous XPS 13’s 12.04 LTS. Everything “just works.”

Well, mostly everything. Unlike the XPS 13, the M3800 has one big optional feature with a bunch of unanswered questions around it: a 15.6″ UHD-resolution 4K display. By default, the M3800 ships with a pedestrian 1920×1080 multitouch screen, but for the no-brainer price of $70 you can replace that with a 3840×2160 IGZO2 display that also offers multitouch. This 4K option makes for a great high-DPI display, and while Windows and OS X are coming to terms with scaling and resolution independence, Linux in its various rainbow of distros and display managers and graphical shells represents a whole continuum of variation when it comes to high-DPI scaling.

We expected that the laptop would work great out of the box. Dell delivered last time, even wrangling flawless functionality out of oft-misbehaving peripherals like the trackpad and Wi-Fi. So we weren’t sure what tricks Dell would and wouldn’t be able to make this new dog do.

The basics

Dell hasn’t done any customization to the “Developer Edition” laptop on the hardware side. This is a standard M3800, same as you could order with Windows on it. The specs are identical. To actually order one, you visit Dell’s store page for the M3800 and tick the “Ubuntu Linux 14.04 SP1” option in the operating system box (an option which actually subtracts $101.50 from the laptop’s price, thanks to not needing to pay for a Windows license). You can do (almost) any of the same customizations to the Developer Edition as you can to the vanilla Windows model, with the one major exception being that the Web store interface won’t let you add a second storage device.

Whether you get the Developer Edition or not, the M3800 is the same large but stylish portable. Upon producing it in public, I had a friend comment that it looked “as big as an aircraft carrier,” which is an interesting meta-comment on the heavily Ultrabook- and tablet-influenced popular image of portable computing. Things have changed quite a bit from a few years ago, when 15- to 17-inch laptops were more common. This laptop is a bit more than four pounds (1.88kg) of rounded aluminum and soft rubbery silicone, with a glass-fronted 10-point touchscreen and a genuine carbon fiber bottom shell.

It feels solid, which is exactly what you’d expect from a device of this size, and there’s plenty of room in the large body to add stiffness. The display stays exactly where you put it without any wobble, and the soft rubbery palm rest—gloriously free of crapware stickers except for a single Intel Core i7 logo—doesn’t creak even a teeny bit when you put weight on it. Typing on the backlit island-style keys is as pleasant an experience as typing on any island-style keys can be; the keys are well-attached and wiggle-free, and the backlight leaks only minimally around their edges.

If I have one complaint about the M3800’s construction, it’s that the hinge is too stiff to support easy one-handed opening. If you set the thing on a desk and lift on the lid with one finger, the entire laptop lifts; it requires some complex finger-jiggle-gymnastics (or a second hand for the less-stubborn or less-silly) to get the lid to separate from the laptop’s bottom half.

That bottom half itself is worth mentioning. The very bottom is encased in a shell of carbon fiber, with a small hinged metal flap in its center, similar to the XPS 13. The flap is engraved with the laptop’s model and incongruously sports a Windows 8 sticker; beneath the flap are all the laptop’s various certification badges, serial numbers, and service tags.

The M3800, standing by for input.

Lee Hutchinson

The M3800, standing by for input. Lee Hutchinson

Keyboard, trackpad, and gloriously un-cluttered, un-stickered palm rests.

Lee Hutchinson

Keyboard, trackpad, and gloriously un-cluttered, un-stickered palm rests. Lee Hutchinson

The M3800, standing by for input. Lee Hutchinson

Keyboard, trackpad, and gloriously un-cluttered, un-stickered palm rests. Lee Hutchinson

The little metal flap on the bottom that hides the serial numbers and things. Linux enthusiasts can hiss and can make the sign of the cross at the sight of the Microsoft sticker (which can be peeled off if desired).

Lee Hutchinson

The little metal flap on the bottom that hides the serial numbers and things. Linux enthusiasts can hiss and can make the sign of the cross at the sight of the Microsoft sticker (which can be peeled off if desired). Lee Hutchinson

Numbers, certification marks, and other identificationary things.

Lee Hutchinson

Numbers, certification marks, and other identificationary things. Lee Hutchinson

The little metal flap on the bottom that hides the serial numbers and things. Linux enthusiasts can hiss and can make the sign of the cross at the sight of the Microsoft sticker (which can be peeled off if desired). Lee Hutchinson

Numbers, certification marks, and other identificationary things. Lee Hutchinson

Back on top, the silicone rubber-coated trackpad is quite pleasant to use. It’s gloriously large, taking advantage of the laptop’s size to sprawl enormously below the keyboard, and its physical click is pleasingly click-y across the entire surface—light, with a nice auditory confirmation to accompany the slight movement. There’s a thin vertical line at the bottom to denote its dedicated right-click zone, and the Linux drivers used support some basic gestures, including two-finger scroll. Using it was a lag-free, easy experience.

The display is nice and bright. Our Spyder colorimeter measured it at 348 nits at max brightness, which is definitely enough to make you blink a few times indoors. Dell says that the UHD panel covers more than 100 percent of the sRGB gamut and 72 percent of Adobe RGB; purely from a perspective of day-to-day usage, the screen was sharp and very pretty. Viewing angles were excellent, with no distortion or color screwiness showing up, even from the extreme sides or bottom. Backlighting looked very even, and I didn’t notice any bleeding around the edges.

Despite its size, the laptop doesn’t give you many more ports than any given 13-inch Ultrabook. The right side of the M3800 has an SD card reader, one USB 2.0 port, and one USB 3.0 port (along with a hole for a Kensington lock). The left side has a connector for the power adapter, an HDMI port, a Thunderbolt 2 port, another USB 3.0 port, a combo headphone/microphone jack, and a light-up battery meter. All of the USB ports are PowerShare enabled, a feature that allows you to charge external devices from them while setting a certain minimum percentage for the laptop’s onboard battery so that your phone won’t bleed your laptop dry of its precious electrons.

With the carbon fiber bottom shell removed, the insides of the M3800 are visible. But there’s a ribbon cable covering up the SSD…

Lee Hutchinson

With the carbon fiber bottom shell removed, the insides of the M3800 are visible. But there’s a ribbon cable covering up the SSD… Lee Hutchinson

….ah, much better.

Lee Hutchinson

….ah, much better. Lee Hutchinson

The inside of the M3800’s bottom housing.

Lee Hutchinson

The inside of the M3800’s bottom housing. Lee Hutchinson

….ah, much better. Lee Hutchinson

The inside of the M3800’s bottom housing. Lee Hutchinson

On the subject of batteries: the M3800 comes standard with a six-cell, 61Whr lithium-polymer battery, while our review unit came with the upgraded 91Whr unit. In casual use, we got about six hours of usage out of the user-serviceable battery, but only with the integrated GPU selected as the display adapter of choice. When we switched to the Nvidia K1100M using the Nvidia X Server Settings applet, battery life was cut in half (more on this in the benchmark section). The 91Wh battery is also physically larger than the 61Whr option; large enough, in fact, that the 91Whr battery occupies extra physical space inside the laptop that, with the 61Whr option selected, is set aside for a 2.5-inch storage device.

It’s also got 2×2 dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 courtesy of an Intel 7260 card. One thing that’s sadly missing, though, is a wired Ethernet port. Dell includes a USB 3.0-to-Ethernet dongle for wired gigabit Ethernet connectivity, but plugging that in obviously eats one of the two USB 3.0 ports. Video out is limited to the HDMI port and the Thunderbolt ports—there’s definitely no legacy VGA port lurking anywhere on the back of this thing to help you out when you’re stuck in the east conference room giving a presentation and the only thing there is an analog projector.

The Ubuntu factory load was configured to run through the out-of-box wizard, which prompted us to create a user account and set a time zone, profile picture, and password. The system’s 256GB Samsung SSD was also pre-partitioned into the EFI boot partition, a 33MB Dell Windows Recovery Environment partition, a 2.8GB “OS Partition,” a 219GB file system partition, and a 34GB swap partition. The system also came with two Dell recovery utilities pre-installed in Ubuntu—one to build a bootable USB Ubuntu restore stick and/or restore the system to its factory state, and another to automatically download Dell hardware drivers for the M3800. Which drivers? We’ll get to that in a moment—Dell actually has a repo of backports that it maintains to ensure (almost) everything on the M3800 works right.

The disk comes partitioned courtesy of Dell, and you can build your own recovery stick using the included utilities.

The disk comes partitioned courtesy of Dell, and you can build your own recovery stick using the included utilities.

The utilities!

The utilities!

The disk comes partitioned courtesy of Dell, and you can build your own recovery stick using the included utilities.

The utilities!

Living in 4K

All right, enough hardware talk. The part that folks likely care the most about here is how Ubuntu functions in 4K on a well-assembled machine. What has Dell done to round off the sharp edges? Is it the fully turnkey experience a consumer-targeted OEM computer should deliver, or are there problems?

The answer is that there are some problems, but they’re not huge problems. If you’re the kind of person who thinks buying a laptop with Linux pre-installed is neat, then these won’t be the kinds of problems that particularly bother you.

Driver-wise, the laptop’s Quadro K1100M GPU uses a standard binary package from Nvidia (ours came pre-loaded with version 340.46). No extra coding was done by Dell, although Dell engineer Jared Dominguez told us that the company collaborated with both Nvidia and Canonical to make sure everything would be compatible and functional. By default, the laptop uses Nvidia’s PRIME functionality to keep the CPU’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 active and the hungrier Nvidia Quadro K1100M GPU offline; this can be toggled with the Nvidia X Server Settings applet. With the K1100M active, the system spins up its fans much more often, even when sitting idly at the desktop.

The UHD-resolution IGZO2 display is sharp and bright (we measured a max of 348 nits).

Lee Hutchinson

The UHD-resolution IGZO2 display is sharp and bright (we measured a max of 348 nits). Lee Hutchinson

Viewing angles are great (sorry about the odd white balance—was shooting a longer exposure without a flash here).

Lee Hutchinson

Viewing angles are great (sorry about the odd white balance—was shooting a longer exposure without a flash here). Lee Hutchinson

Other viewing angle!

Lee Hutchinson

Other viewing angle! Lee Hutchinson

Viewing angles are great (sorry about the odd white balance—was shooting a longer exposure without a flash here). Lee Hutchinson

Other viewing angle! Lee Hutchinson

Other-other viewing angle!

Lee Hutchinson

This is Unity in 4k. The desktop looks great—it’s just the applications that can be problematic.

Lee Hutchinson

Bash has no problems in 4k. Bash is like the honey badger.

Lee Hutchinson

Getting in close with the 100mm macro lens—no pentile layout here! It’s red-green-blue all the way down.

Lee Hutchinson

For the most part, whether you’re using the K1100M or the 4600, Ubuntu 14.04 with the Unity desktop works fine. The operating system does its own high-DPI scaling so that stuff is readable to normal human eyes, and all the core OS features and tools—at least those that take their scaling hints from Unity—are displayed correctly and without problems. I was able to fiddle around with the DPI slider bar and make things hilariously gigantic or unreadably small, and the system adjusted accordingly.

However, glitches abounded. For the first few days, many system effects would appear to affect only the upper-left quadrant of the screen. For example, while the whole screen dims in response to the system’s power-saving setting, the default blank screensaver would fade down only the upper-left quadrant. When waking from sleep mode, the upper-left quadrant would be blank, but for several seconds the rest of the screen would display the pre-lock image, giving anyone and everyone a look at whatever you were up to prior to entering sleep mode.

Prior to installing an update, the lock screen displayed on awakening would usually display really tiny text (though the status bar is scaled properly).

Lee Hutchinson

Prior to installing an update, the lock screen displayed on awakening would usually display really tiny text (though the status bar is scaled properly). Lee Hutchinson

Chromium mostly worked out of the box—except for the right-click context menus and a bit of oddness around the settings menu.

Chromium mostly worked out of the box—except for the right-click context menus and a bit of oddness around the settings menu.

An update that fixed some other Unity scaling issues then broke Chromium’s interface scaling.

An update that fixed some other Unity scaling issues then broke Chromium’s interface scaling.

Chromium mostly worked out of the box—except for the right-click context menus and a bit of oddness around the settings menu.

An update that fixed some other Unity scaling issues then broke Chromium’s interface scaling.

With the browser window maximized, some controls remained stubbornly invisible (and the browser status bar stayed almost below the screen).

I managed to do this to myself while fiddling around in the Unity scaling systems. Fortunately, if this ever happens to you, you can alt-drag the (enormous) window around to get the scaling slider visible again and fix things.

LibreOffice looked great without any tweaking at all—fire it up and it just works.

Sysinfo was one of the rare included utilities that just did not play well with display scaling.

The Eclipse IDE’s default view. Some devs might actually find this level of tininess desirable.

I was going to do some benchmarking in Octane (which didn’t work out).

Firefox didn’t get any scaling love by default, so Ars looked like this.

Here’s the fix.

Much better!

A few days later, the majority of these glitches vanished after pulling the latest set of packages and updates. “Some packages had to be backported to Ubuntu 14.04. This is part of our standard process when an LTS Ubuntu release does not have sufficient hardware support,” explained Dominguez. “They get installed as ‘FISH’ packages. If you look at the apt sources on your review unit, you’ll notice that there’s a Canonical-hosted package repository to keep these changes up-to-date until they are merged into the vanilla Ubuntu repositories.” It’s likely that one or more of these updates are what cleared up most of my display issues.

Applications, though, are another story. The default bundled Web browser, Chromium, has serious high-DPI scaling problems. The right-click context menus don’t render correctly, and a package update broke scaling for most of the browser’s UI. “This is still an open issue upstream,” said Dominguez. “Chromium/Chrome are unique in that the codebase is rather special in what libraries it uses since it’s designed to also work on ChromeOS, where HiDPI works. So, it doesn’t handle scaling in the same way that other modern X Window applications would.”

Many other applications render with “native” DPI text—Firefox as an alternative to Chromium starts out this way, but it can be fixed by modifying a flag in about:config. Most other things we installed to look at were hit-or-miss: the popular Eclipse IDE started off with some pretty tiny text and menus, as did the (unfortunately non-functional) Octane 3D rendering benchmark tool. It’s possible that some apps can be tamed by digging into your X session settings, but we didn’t want to go that far—I was mainly interested in observing the out-of-the-box behavior without falling too far into the tweak zone.

The 3840×2160 IGZO2 display also includes multitouch, a feature that’s perfectly functional in Ubuntu 14.04 but for which I found very little practical use. Tapping and dragging worked as it should, and Ubuntu’s multitouch gestures fired off their expected actions without delay or lag. But once I’d verified that they worked, I didn’t use them any further.

Thunderbolted

The presence of a Thunderbolt 2.0 port on the M3800’s side raises the obvious question: does that work in Linux?

No, it doesn’t. Well, it sort of works—but not really.

The most complexified Thunderbolt devices I had immediate access to were the pair of Apple 27-inch Thunderbolt monitors I use with my day-to-day iMac. When I connected one of them to the M3800, I was surprised to see that within a second or two the display was detected and the M3800 spanned its desktop to it (though with the same DPI settings as the built-in UDH monitor, so all the OS elements and text were very large). Further, the display’s built-in speakers showed up as an available audio output device, though they were labeled as “HDMI/DisplayPort 2” on the M3800.

Spanned desktop with an Apple Thunderbolt monitor connected to the 3800. The screen part works, at least.

Once connected, lspci showed three new devices named “PCI Bridge: Intel Corporation Device 157e” and one new device named “Intel Corporation Device 157d;” neither number corresponds with any PCI device we could find, but clearly something was showing up on the bus. However, we were unable to get any further functionality out of it. Aside from audio and the screen itself, none of the other ports (USB and Ethernet) on the monitor worked.

We suspected at first that the basic connectivity we observed was simply due to the Apple Thunderbolt Display falling back to DisplayPort mode; Apple’s product page for the Thunderbolt display and their Thunderbolt FAQ are both silent on whether the devices are capable of operating in standard DisplayPort mode (and this StackExchange question flat-out says the devices are not). When we asked Jared Dominguez about the half-functioning Thunderbolt port, he said that one way or another, full Thunderbolt operation in Linux is out of Dell’s hands. “A newer kernel is likely needed. 3.16 is much better. 3.17+ is even better. But we need to make sure nothing else breaks in the process before we officially support that.”

Benchmarks and battery life

Although the M3800 Developer Edition has an Nvidia Quadro K1100M with 384 CUDA cores, we had trouble coming up with a GPU benchmark that would yield useful information. Several that we tried (not naming any names) refused to see the Quadro at all even after verifying we had it selected in the included Prime settings pane in the Nvidia X Server Settings applet. Instead, these benchmarks attempted to run their tests against the CPU’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600; others simply refused to run.

Fortunately, the K1100M is a well-benchmarked part first released in mid-2013. The GPU is based around a Kepler GK107 chip with 384 CUDA cores, clocked at 700-705MHz, with 2GB of 2800MHz GDDR5 video memory. Its performance is more than sufficient to keep Ubuntu and Unity smooth at UHD resolutions; because the drivers used by Dell are Quadro drivers from Nvidia, there should be no compatibility issues with media production applications or CAD/3D applications in Ubuntu. Performance should be in line with benchmarks that can be found all around the Web.

We did get Geekbench scores, along with our standard set of battery tests. The battery life times reported by our benchmarks aren’t particularly stellar compared to recent Ultrabooks, but that’s not unexpected; the power-hungry combo of the Haswell CPU and the K1100M GPU (when enabled) slurp up electricity very quickly. Even with the K1100M forced off, the longest battery test run we got still wasn’t all that great.

What about the rest of Project Sputnik?

When we looked at the XPS 13 Developer Edition in 2013, the laptop and Linux customizations were only part of the story—a big part, but only a part. We also spent a bit of time discussing the other Linux-y things Dell’s Barton George and his Project Sputnik team had been up to. There were two nifty little tools that stuck out: Cloud Launcher and Profile Tool.

Profile Tool was the most interesting: the idea is that it would allow a developer to create a deployable image of their local environment, including not just installed applications but also all the specific configuration customizations one does when getting deep into developing with a specific tool or set of tools. Then, other Profile Tool users could “install” that image, getting a fully configured development environment without needing to tweak dozens of config files, shortening the almost unavoidable adjustment phase that occurs when a developer transitions to working on a new project and needs to settle in with new tools.

Cloud Launcher sounds a lot like Ubuntu’s Juju cloud deployment tool—in fact, it originally took the form of a Ruby gem that used Juju and LXC to spin up virtualized application instances to do testing with. We last spent time fiddling with this kind of stuff in July 2014, when the Canonical team brought one of its Orange Box cloud testing servers over to my house for a few hours. The Cloud Launcher’s presence on a Developer Edition laptop was intended to give similar functionality to developers.

Though Dell was optimistic two years ago about the two tools’ development, neither is yet in a customer-ready state; you can check on their progress on Dell’s Project Sputnik GitHub page, but they’re not ready for use yet. “We have plans for them that are in the works but I don’t want to make any promises at this point since we aren’t sure of the timing,” said Barton George when we asked for an update on the tools.

The inevitable comparison to a MacBook Pro

It’s impossible to close out a review of the M3800, Developer Edition or otherwise, without bringing up comparisons to Apple’s MacBook Pro. This isn’t just navel-gazing or speculation—Dell’s press release announcing the 2015 M3800’s launch mentions the MacBook Pro six times, with each mention including some sort of quantitative comparison. You’d have to be blind not to see that the M3800 is aimed squarely at potential MacBook Pro customers.

In a lot of ways, the M3800 Developer Edition makes an even stronger play for those potential customers than its Windows-loaded standard configuration. One significant reason why technically minded customers might lean toward a MacBook Pro is because of the Unix-like environment you get for “free” with OS X; folks who don’t want to purchase Apple hardware but do want a portable workstation with a Linux distro on it can purchase the portable of their choice and load the Linux distro of their choice on it, but Dell pre-loading Ubuntu and working through (almost) all of the configuration kinks removes a lot of the potential hassle.

Plus, the M3800 has several MacBook Pro-league features—most notably the UHD display (which has more than twice the pixels of the MacBook Pro’s 2560×1600 screen) and a fully operational Thunderbolt 2 port—fully operational in Windows, at least. It also has upgradeable RAM and upgradeable storage, features that tend to weigh heavily on the minds of developers or other heavy users. Build quality is a factor as well, and while this isn’t a unibody aluminum MacBook, it is a well-built plastic and aluminum and carbon fiber piece of kit.

Right ports: SD card reader, USB 2.0 port, USB 3.0 port, Kensington lock slot.

Lee Hutchinson

Right ports: SD card reader, USB 2.0 port, USB 3.0 port, Kensington lock slot. Lee Hutchinson

Left ports: Power adapter plug, HDMI port, Thunderbolt 2 port, USB 3.0 port, headphone/microphone combo jack, and battery meter.

Lee Hutchinson

Left ports: Power adapter plug, HDMI port, Thunderbolt 2 port, USB 3.0 port, headphone/microphone combo jack, and battery meter. Lee Hutchinson

Right ports: SD card reader, USB 2.0 port, USB 3.0 port, Kensington lock slot. Lee Hutchinson

Left ports: Power adapter plug, HDMI port, Thunderbolt 2 port, USB 3.0 port, headphone/microphone combo jack, and battery meter. Lee Hutchinson

AC adapter atop the M3800.

Lee Hutchinson

AC adapter atop the M3800. Lee Hutchinson

USB 3.0-gigabit Ethernet adapter.

Lee Hutchinson

USB 3.0-gigabit Ethernet adapter. Lee Hutchinson

AC adapter atop the M3800. Lee Hutchinson

USB 3.0-gigabit Ethernet adapter. Lee Hutchinson

Performance-wise, Dell definitely wants everyone to know that it doesn’t see itself playing any kind of catch-up game to Apple. The company commissioned a study wherein the M3800 was benchmarked in a number of media-production-centric workflows against a MacBook Pro, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the M3800’s performance exceeded the MacBook Pro’s in the areas where the study focused.

However, while the M3800 Developer Edition we’re looking at is close from a hardware perspective to the one tested in Dell’s study (ours has a smaller SSD), the machine in Dell’s study also was running Windows 8.1 Pro. Ours, of course, is running Ubuntu 14.04. While it’s possible to make generalizations and inferences about performance between the two operating systems on the same hardware, it’s impossible to make solid comparisons—they’re running different operating systems with different drivers. The M3800 Developer Edition might be “faster” than a MacBook Pro, but we don’t have any solid data one way or another.

None of this really matters, though. It’s not often that a person purchases a piece of hardware—especially something like a laptop—for purely quantitative reasons. When the decision is “buy a Dell or buy a Mac,” it will be the rare prospective customer who will lean entirely on specs and benchmarks. Base requirements will often dictate system choice, along with a person’s web of feelings and opinions about operating systems and OEMs and whether BSD beats GNU/Linux and so on and so on. Dell has done an excellent job of building a machine that offers rough hardware feature parity to a MacBook Pro, but it’s doubtful that it will sway folks who are tied (emotionally or otherwise) to the Apple ecosystem. On the other hand, folks who would never purchase an Apple product might indeed be more likely to pick up an M3800 preloaded with Linux now that the option exists.

Should you, or shouldn’t you?

For $1,533 out of the gate or about $2,080 as tested, is the M3800 Developer Edition worth it?

Sure—if you want a fast, well-built, well-equipped 4K laptop preloaded with Ubuntu, with most of the potential edge-case configuration issues already taken care of, with an active set of developers working to ensure that the necessary repos are kept current, and with an actual, for-real OEM warranty and support. The M3800 Developer Edition is what an OEM-loaded Linux laptop should be, and it’s got the added bonus of being supported by Barton George and a small, dedicated group of Linux enthusiasts at Dell. Those folks are backed by Dell’s significant resources and are in constant contact with Canonical.

The value proposition is pretty clear there, but the question is whether or not that value proposition is worth the extra money versus buying a less-expensive base laptop and loading the Linux distro of your choice. There’s going to be a lot of overlap between the M3800 Developer Edition’s target market and the segment of potential customers who have no problem with just rolling their own Linux installation on a Thinkpad or even on a MacBook. For those folks, how much is it worth to have Dell do the heavy lifting?

It’s kind of a waffle-y answer to the “should you buy this” question, but it’s the best one we can give: The M3800 Developer Edition is a solid piece of hardware with some very smart folks at Dell committed to keeping it working well. If you want something that’s like a MacBook Pro but with more expandability and with an OEM-supported Ubuntu install, then this is definitely your bag.

The Good

• Ubuntu 14.04, factory-preconfigured to just work
• Barton George and the other Dell engineers worry about packages and drivers so you don’t have to
• High-quality build: no squeaks, no rattles, no shimmies
• 16GB of RAM, the potential for a large SSD, and a Haswell i7 CPU mean it’s got plenty of guts as a developer’s workstation
• Reasonable amount of upgradeability
• Display is bright, beautiful, and works with Ubuntu 14.04 (including the multitouch functionality)