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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 with battery such as Dell RD859 Battery, Dell PR002 Battery, Dell UD260 Battery, Dell PD942 Battery, Dell Latitude 131L Battery, Dell 8F871 Battery, Dell 2G218 Battery, Dell Winbook N4 Battery, Dell F0590A01 Battery, Dell 7T670 Battery, Dell Latitude D400 Battery, Dell CEF2H Battery, 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 1920x1080 multitouch screen, but for the no-brainer price of $70 you can replace that with a 3840x2160 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.