XPS 15 9530 Ubuntu compatibility

This post on the AskUbuntu page should answer your questions.

Hello @JOcean ,

The post you mentioned is old and I'm worried about the new config (i9-13900H, NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4070 and touchscreen) with Ubuntu 22.04

Thank you in advance

Since Dell supports only Windows 11 on this model, you're on your own with Ubuntu -- you really need to consult the Ubuntu community.

Hi, it's been quite a while since you asked this question, so I don't know if my post will be of any help. I bought this computer and dual-booted Ubuntu 23.10. Everything works fine except the sound. The woofers are not recognized by Ubuntu; I have done a lot of research on this and have not been able to solve this problem. I even contacted Dell but, as @JOcean mentioned, they do not support Ubuntu on this particular model and did not offer me any help.

I hope this information is useful to you.

Hello,

Unfortunately I can confirm the issue with the sound. Subwoofers does not work, they are not recognized by the system. It causes the sound is very poor quality, unusable. I love XPS series but I need Linux for work and if I would know about the issue earlier, probably I could go with MacBook. 

Dell, this is not something not doable, please fix it.

@Przemyslawc​ 

@acplima

Hi, I would also like to buy the XPS 15 with i9 but I am very afraid of poor Linux compatibility. 

Which Linux distros and kernel do you use? I read that someone installed the latest Fedora version and was able to fix the sound problem with a current Linux kernel. I would of course be very interested to know if anyone can confirm this... 

Can I ask if you have had any other problems with Linux apart from the sound? 

Thanks and best regards 

Recently dual-booted an xps 15 9530 with windows 11 and ubuntu 23.04

2 issues 

1 - Sound is horrendous. Really bad. Its kinda ridiculous having a system like this with the sound this bad. 

2 - I had an issue with the boot/EFI partition. It was set to 100MB which by all accounts is normally fine but there were Micorsoft, Ubuntu, and Dell folders on it that came close to the 100MB which made updating the firmware an issue.  

Same problems with the bass-sound on Ubuntu 22.04.

@Dell please help, I don't want WINDOWS :)

you will definitely have audio and mic related issues. You can find many posts about that, one of them is https://askubuntu.com/questions/1486065/xps-15-9530-bad-sound-quality-in-ubuntu-23-04. I installed Linux Mint and Ubuntu and had microphone issue and terrible audio quality there are just tweeters worked and I tried everything from kernel patching to installing pulse audio, alsa mixer and many other tools but no success. The issue related to Realtek drivers. Two tweeters connected directly to Realtek audio codec and two woofers (down facing, provide most of the volume) connected to same codec to same channel via an amplifier and that causes the issues. More info you can find here:
https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/linux-general/xps-9530-firmware-bug-prevents-releasing-audio-fix-for-linux-devices/65774e14dac47011b36c587c

@craicerjack​  Hi, any problem with the battery last? .

In may case (xps 15-9530 i7 13700H, 64GB, RTX-450, dual boot) the battery is exhausted only after two hours using Ubuntu (22.04 in save energy mode).

@sergicuen​ I have the exact same laptop running Ubuntu 23.10. I can work on it 5 to 6h in power save mode, applying powertop tunables, disabled bluetooth and a not-to-bright screen.
It seems lame, but in fact it's comfortable, reactivity in power save mode is just a little bit affected.
For the record, I also run a couple of containers (22), a debian VM (also with 22 VM), 3 PyCharm editors, slack, whatsapp.

Of course build time are slower, but eh if I need performance, I just plug it and it's back to full speed.

It is now fully supported to the best of my knowledge.

The nvidia GPU is always active unless you install nvidia drivers, after you install the official drivers you will notice a huge change in battery life while running linux, and the laptop will stay colder unless you are using considerably the gpu.

For the sound, you need to have kernel 6.8 or newer, and make sure you install proprietary firmware. In particular, you need to make sure you have cirrus firmware installed in your system.

Ubuntu 24 comes with kernel 6.8 and you just need to install the proprietary firmware, which can be done directly at the installation, and boot with the full sound working fine. I don't recall if you can install nvidia driver also directly at the installation stage, I believe so.

In debian is more complex because they don't have kernel 6.8 available yet. You may compile it yourself or find a third party repository/project that provides it, and then copy the cirrus firmware to your system.

The nvidia driver included in debian is old and doesn't compile the module in kernels above 6.7, but it is still possible to "fix" it. I use proxmox directly on top of my debian, which has kernel 6.8 already (based on ubuntu), so the way to fix the installation of the nvidia driver, is to overwrite one file from 6.5 kernel (I know it sound weird and crazy, but if you make a comparison between them you will see that the difference is just removing one thing in version 6.8, so it is not going to break anything...

cp /usr/src/linux-headers-6.5.13-5-pve/include/drm/drm_ioctl.h /usr/src/linux-headers-6.8.4-3-pve/include/drm/drm_ioctl.h

You need to adapt the paths to your kernel/versions... if the versions differs I would suggest to compare the files first and judge yourself if it is a good idea.

You can also install the drivers directly from nvidia website if you want.

For your reference, the laptop, without doing anything, and wifi on, without the nvidia driver installed was consuming more than 25w, after the driver installation, hybrid and intel mode make it to be on 4-6w

I made some charge_now comparison in blocks of 5m, and they seems to be consistent in 48000 drops each 5 minutes for intel only mode, 49000 for hybrid mode and 56000 for nvidia only mode.

powertop was able to tell me that without doing anything, the battery life would las more than 12h, and I only charge the laptop to a max of 70%, so it should last a while, depending on what is your usage.

Be aware that browsers may spawn a lot of process and some pages are very battery hungry, for me, for work, what I care most is about consoles and remote desktops, so the battery should last considerably if don't have hungry VMs running inside...

This measures were done in a fresh debian kde/proxmox installation, without any battery optimization changes.