Dell has got to be one of the most frustrating companies that put out a linux laptop. They put out a laptop certified for ubuntu but then never support newer releases. A big part of their hardware is always proprietary drivers like webcam, fingerprint reader etc… Then you update to a new LTS release because lets be serious 20.04 at this point is going to sunset in a couple of years… However after you update the webcam stops working, or some other hardware stops working. Then you are constantly troubleshooting to get it working and every kernel update it breaks again. If you ever did ask support they will just tell you to go back to 20.04 image from dell. Not to mention all their OS tools are made for windows even the ones for making linux recovery images… like WTF! I am two years in on this laptop and I am just getting rid of it I cannot put up with this nonsense anymore from them.
I don’t think you’re right on this. When DELL is branding a laptop as “linux supported”, then the hardware normally works out of the box with at the very least, Ubuntu (and probably by most other distros too). If you’re seeing hardware incompatibilities, it’s probably because the Linux kernel itself might have dropped some of the older hardware drivers from its list of support. I’m writing this on a DELL Latitude 5480 from 2017, and I have installed the latest ubuntu without any hardware issue whatsoever. Everything’s just supported out of the box. No special image from DELL was ever required. So if you’re seeing your hardware stop working, you should look if DELL provided closed source drivers or firmware for your laptop’s hardware. If that’s the case, then you didn’t have a “linux supported” laptop, you had a laptop with specifically-added Linux support after the fact. I wouldn’t have bought that in the first place.
I do want to make this point as well even though I know this thread is old. A lot of the issue comes down to very new hardware that isn’t in the mainline kernel yet but may be in the future. So the case of a 2017 laptop being fully supported is not that surprising. The question is if you could get a 2024 laptop from dell to run on mainline kernel with no extra drivers and the answer is likely mixed. The majority would likely work however things like webcam and the fingerprint reader would likely not work. You might still be able to get the drivers directly from dell and get it to work but it can be a hodgepodge and difficult to support. For instance the dell I had when I wrote this I could run on the latest Ubuntu however I had to download the debs for the webcam and fingerprint reader and screw around with the settings and config files to get them to work. Sometimes I would get an update that would break them and then I would need to mess around again to get them working. It’s linux so many things are “doable” however I wouldn’t say that it was user friendly or simple a lot of times. I am on system76 now and a whole lot happier to be honest.
