Dell Precision 5530 Impressions & Review

A beastly Linux laptop, with some caveats

I recently raised funds for a new beast of a development machine for my work on elementary OS. After receiving the laptop, installing elementary OS, and using it for a while now, I’m ready to share my thoughts. A video is also coming soon as promised, but that takes a bit more time to prepare. :)

tl;dr

In a nutshell, this is a beast of a laptop and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a relatively thin and light workstation-type machine. Over all it works wonderfully with elementary OS Juno, and should work great with any Linux-based OS shipping a recent hardware stack. There were some small Linux compatibility concerns, but I’m in contact with Dell and getting them worked out.

Unboxing & First Impressions

I was super impressed with the initial unboxing and presentation. The packaging was very compact, which was impressive for this relatively-large laptop. Compared to the packaging from System76 it was more sleek, though perhaps a bit soulless when compared to the excellent illustrations and fun spirit provided by Kate Hazen. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the extremely straightforward and efficient packaging. And it fits Dell’s high-end products’ brand image pretty well…