Last month, Dell announced that the next-generation XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop with Alder Lake built in was certified for Canonical’s Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. But while it was still shipping Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to customers at the time, Dell has now switched to pre-installing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS directly from the factory.
The latest generation of Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptops feature Intel Core i7 12th generation “Alder Lake” processors, up to 32GB of system memory and 2TB of NVMe storage, a choice of FHD+/3.5k OLED/4K displays, Intel Wi-Fi 6E support and other modern connectivity. Dell’s new order will now offer Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS for those who choose the “Developer Edition”, sold alongside the standard Dell XPS with Microsoft Windows 11.
The Dell XPS 13 Plus is priced at $1,299 for an entry configuration of a Core i5 1240P with 8GB of RAM. Or an optional Core i7 1260P processor with 16GB of RAM is available, with pricing starting at $1,599. Interestingly, ordering the flagship Core i7 1280P model with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS pre-installed is currently not allowed in the US market.
It’s worth pointing out that this Dell XPS Alder Lake model is one of the models that uses the newer Intel IPU6 webcam technology, which currently requires binary blobs to use non-lite code on Linux. Therefore some community techs have advised against using these laptops as proper open source support may take a year or more.
