I am planning on buying a dell xps 12 at the end of the week so i can replace my laptop and my tablet and have both all in one device. I am very attracted to this concept, however I love ubuntu as opposed to windows. This will be a huge selling point as to whether i do purchase the computer or not. I have researched this and keep getting mixed answers on the subject so I figured I would go straight to the source ans as Ubuntu themselves. Is there any way to put the latest ubuntu onto the dell xps 12 and still have full functionality on it in both laptop mode and tablet mode?
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Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! What do you mean "tablet mode"? Do you mean "will the touchscreen work"? Because, as far as my understanding goes, there are no "modes", it's just flipping the screen and "converting" the laptop into a tablet. A quick Google search led me to this YouTube video showing that Ubuntu runs normally. Also, this question addresses a question about multi-touch support, but the first answer tells us that the touchscreen generally works (as also showcased in the video). – Alaa Ali Sep 02 '13 at 20:05
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I bought XPS12 couple weeks ago specifically with Ubuntu in mind. I tried couple versions from 12.04 to 13.04 both 32 and 64 bit. Most of things work out of the box. I didn't have any issues with sound, network or bluetooth etc. Even touchscreen works. There are some limitations though. Plain Ubuntu supports touch but not multitouch (I don't use that anyway so for me it's unimportant). For 12.10 there is a project Sputnik. It's some Italian guys that have repo of updates for 12.10 that makes multitouch work, and some other improvements for touchpad and function keys. This does not work on 13.04 last time I tried. Also there is a little annoying bit on 13.04 that it boots up with screen brightness to 0, so looks like broken graphics driver, but Fn+F5 to bring brightness up corrects that. One thing that I can't get running at all is the accelerometer, so screen won't flip or rotate on it's own. You have to switch that yourself, or make a script that does that and assign it to some button for easy operation. Overall I like my little Ubuntu XPS. I'm using it also for games from Steam. I'm looking forward to 13.10 to see how touch works with MIR, and if there are any improvements for me.
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I got the touchpad working perfectly fine including multitouch on Ubuntu 14.04 by using touchegg, which I got working with the manual by domester answer on this threat: How can I disable arbitrary default multitouch gestures in Unity? I couldnt figure out how to define multitouch gestures for the touchscreen though. In my case it uses exactly the same gestures as the touchpad which makes it usable but not very intuitive. So yes, latest Ubuntu (14.04) works good on the XPS 12 but not perfect, still good enough for me to not even think about getting back to win8.1.
