My adventure in the world of Linux continues and I’ve come to the point where I have purchased a Dell XPS 13 non touch and went ahead and installed Ubuntu 16.04 on it. It’s important to note that I did not spring for the Dell Developer Edition, since there was a sale on the regular (read Windows 10) version of the machine and since my intention was to immediately upgrade to 16.04 once I got the machine.

My first day working with Mate, things were great, but there was a lurking problem hidden by the fact that I was running my XPS to an external monitor that entire day. You see the XPS model that I have has the newest Skylake hotness in it. Unfortunately, Skylake has been problematic in terms of screen flickering issues on Windows 10 due to driver issues – the Linux situation is just as bad if not work. The screen flickers every few seconds and is basically not usable unless connected to an external monitor.

Because of this issue, I was forced to use the recovery tool provided by Dell to reset my machine back to Windows 10 and am using it with Windows without issue. This is a pretty disappointing problem but is not necessarily the end of my adventure. My plan is to simply wait until the community or Intel provides a driver that resolves the issue. In the meantime, I’ll be checking out Windows 10 as a development environment and try out that BASH on Windows stuff.

Let me know what you think on Twitter.