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Dell also sells computers with Ubuntu installed. And I trust Dell.
That said, Ubuntu isn’t my favorite flavor, so I’m likely to wipe it and install a different distro no matter what.
I've had such a miserable experience with the XPS 13. Kind of bitter about it.
Thanks for the warning. I’m looking to replace my Inspiron, and the XPS series seems to be a contender.
I’ve had a couple of issues with the Inspiron (the hinge broke just after the warranty expired and the keyboard has a busted spring that blocks five keys from working), but it also lives on my backpack for teaching, so I probably can’t really complain.
Why? What wasn't working right?
Still haven't gotten the camera working. They seem to load up their custom firmware in their Ubuntu build but I wanted Arch btw. Also have some issues with recovering from sleep but can't say for sure if it's hardware/driver related.
Non-Linux related, it's only got 2 USB-C ports for external connectivity. Temperatures also seem to be all over the place. All might be forgivable if the keyboard wasn't basically a flat sheet of plastic where your fingers can't tell the keys apart.
Man if you insist on Arch that's a you problem and not a hardware platform problem. I'm not a Dell fanboy but my XPS 13 is doing great, six years in with a battery change running of all things Win10 with WSL. It's hassle-free dev environment.
Is DBAN still the go to for a clean wipe?
Doesn't the installation of the new OS do the wiping? I was wondering because I never did it differently.
I haven't a clue, I just never chanced it. When I'd sell a PC I'd always DBAN it.
It all depends on how sure you want to be that whatever was there previously is unrecoverable.
DBAN is up to DOD standards if I remember correctly.
Pretty sure it's still a functional option at least... Seems to remember it still being there on the last Hiren's boot I used.
I’ve never used it, but it seems to have good recommendations. Honestly, I just rip out the HDD/SSD before letting the machine out of my sight. That’s the only method I really trust.
For wiping before a Linux install, I usually use gparted or the installer’s tool.
Curious - what do you prefer wrt other distros? I'm just fascinated by what drives people in their individual directions. (I used to exclusively install Debian on things, but recently revitalized an old laptop by wiping windows and putting on Ubuntu. Have used CentOS too, but the Debian package stuff is just easy for me...)
Personally, I use Fedora KDE Spin because it's stable, has an aggressive update schedule and if I want something from AUR or something, I'll just use its OCI in distrobox and get it anyway. I also prefer flatpaks over snaps.
Much obliged!
I prefer Mint for ease of installation and use. It comes in Ubuntu or Debian flavors.
I also have a RaspberryPi that runs Raspbian (Debian based, I think) and a tiny Linode server that runs Debian. Honestly, I tend to go with the easiest or most lightweight, depending on hardware.
I tend to like Debian-based. It's just more familiar for me. Ubuntu has been nice because it seems to add in a few of the quality of life defaults I'd have done manually in Debian (things like aliases in bash, sudoers memberships, 3rd party repos, etc). Easily done in Debian, but slows down initial setup...
I ran CentOS for a while, but I feel life's too short to learn yet another package management system! (not that is hard, I just have finite brain cells...) 🙂
I hear you about finite brain cells. I had a group of international students several year ago who ran Zorin on their laptops. As the tech coordinator for our academic department, I tried to learn enough to help them out. But it was apparently the first thing I flushed after they left. :)