The notebook arrived today. I booted a prepared Ubuntu Mate 18.04 system from a USB3 drive, and everything seemed to be working well. BIOS was out of date, but it has an "update from a USB stick" feature so I used that to install the latest (just over a month old) before doing much else. That ended up updating the BIOS as well as numerous other internal firmwares (eg. the Power Delivery manager chip, etc.).

The BIOS itself has lots of useful looking settings, including a choice of "charging modes" for good battery maintenance. I chose "normally plugged in" for the charging profile here, but "adaptive" might also be good. Dunno. Estimated run time on the battery varies by load of course, but seems to be in the 10-17 hours range with the brand new battery pack.

Next I swapped out the internal 256GB NVMe SSD (about 1000MBytes/sec) for a larger 512GB Samsung EVO 970 (about 1500MBytes/sec in this system), and then cloned my USB3 drive to it. Rebooted from the internal SSD and then sorted out a couple of small issues:

(1) The MATE desktop is now built on Gnome 3 (gtk3), and the GNOME idiots have decided to force all computers to behave like macbooks, treating the Dell's 2-button touchpad as if it had only a single button. It took a bit of research to track that down, but a single line configuration change took care of it:

Code:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method areas

(2) The "Killer Wifi" card was badly under-performing in throughput. This seems to be a known issue, but with the "fix" deemed unacceptable upstream. I applied it locally though, and now the Wifi is a proper screamer on 802.11ac.

Code:

--- old/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath10k/htt_tx.c        2019-01-02 21:58:01.585749801 -0500
+++ linux/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath10k/htt_tx.c      2019-01-02 21:59:05.303016069 -0500
@@ -1466,6 +1466,7 @@ static int ath10k_htt_tx_32(struct ath10
                               sg_items, ARRAY_SIZE(sg_items));
        if (res)
                goto err_unmap_msdu;
+       skb_orphan(msdu);
 
        return 0;
 
@@ -1673,6 +1674,7 @@
                               sg_items, ARRAY_SIZE(sg_items));
        if (res)
                goto err_unmap_msdu;
+       skb_orphan(msdu);
 
        return 0;
 

No problem using a TB3-to-HDMI adapter for my external monitor, and everything else I have plugged in works just fine. I like that there's a keyboard toggle (Fn-ESC) for swapping the F1-F12 keys with their "media" key counterparts (Logitech, are you listening??).

The SD-Card reader supports the latest very fast cards. The best I have at hand is a 64GB EVO Plus, and Linux reads from it at about 82MBytes/sec. Some people use these as bootable SSDs for alternative operating systems.

That's Linux pretty much all sorted. This machine has never booted any other O/S since it left the factory, and probably never will either! The WD15 dock is still in transit somewhere. I'll post again once that arrives here.