Make no mistake about it. The 2016 Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop is wonderful. It’s fast, its display is gorgeous, and, at less than three pounds, you can carry and code with it anywhere. But, oh, that price tag!
The system itself is powered by a dual-core, 2.2GHz 6th Generation Intel Core i7-6560U Skylake processor. This is one fast system. It’s meant for developers and they need all the speed they can get.
It boasts 16GBs of DDR3 RAM and a half a terabyte, PCIe solid state drive (SSD). This also helps make it a fast system.
How fast? Using the installed Ubuntu Linux 14.04.3 with its developer tools I was able to compile its Linux 3.19 kernel in about three minutes. If I’d optimized my tools I think I could have dropped that to less than two minutes.
Of course, you can compile Linux faster. To really compile in a hurry try an Intel Xeon E5 chip. But on a laptop? I don’t think you’re going to do much better.
The hardware is only part of the story here. Besides using Ubuntu 14.04 as its default operating system, this system is designed for developers. If you just need a system to roam the web or to do day in and day out office work, look elsewhere. This is a laptop by programmers for programmers.
Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-best-linux-laptop-the-2016-dell-xps-13/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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