Linux Mint on a Dell XPS 17 9720

[Mike H]

The short version of this post would be "it just works beautifully"

I've been using Linux Mint for a number of years on an old late-2011 Macbook Pro. Although it had been very reliable for many years, it was beginning to show its age and there was evidence that the Radeon graphics chip was dying. For this reason I had to find a new laptop that would run Mint as well as the old Macbook.

Although the 15-inch screen of the Macbook was OK, my preference was for a 17-inch screen - preferably with UHD resolution, so the Dell XPS 17 9720 popped-up to the top of my list of potential replacements.

The configuration I chose was:-

Dell XPS 17 9720
i7 12700H processor
17-inch UHD touch display
64GB DDR5 4800MHz
2TB M.2 PCIe SSD
Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics
Intel Killer WiFi 6 1675 (AX211) + Bluetooth 5.2 wireless card

I had dithered for weeks over the decision to buy this laptop because although there are forum posts that say it's "possible" to run Linux on it, there were also reports of problems getting it working. I needn't have worried.

The process of getting it all up and running was very easy. Because the new laptop has a 4K screen I needed to be able to use display fractional scaling, otherwise icons, text, etc would be far too small. Fractional scaling is supported on Linux Mint 21, so my first task was to upgrade the Macbook Pro from Mint 20.3 to 21.

Having got the Macbook upgraded to Mint 21, I used Clonezilla to clone the entire Macbook disk onto a spare USB drive.

I booted the Dell using a Mint Live USB (Mint 21). Not too surprisingly, it failed to boot on the full version of Mint 21, so I had to use compatibility mode. It then booted OK, but the trackpad was unresponsive, so I plugged in an old, trusty USB mouse. I could then change the display setting to use fractional scaling and use Gparted to blow away the Windows installation. Using Gparted to clear the Dell disk was probably unnecessary because, as far as I know, Clonezilla would probably have done that anyway.

I then booted Clonezilla from a USB stick on the new laptop and cloned my temporary USB drive onto the SSD.

Job done!

The Dell booted into Linux, I changed the display setting to use fractional scaling, connected to my WiFi network and it all worked. Well, that's maybe a small exaggeration, but to all intents and purposes it was fully working. I later changed the laptop name (it was "Macbook Pro"), and changed the keyboard settings from Macbook to English UK because a couple of the keys were transposed.

I haven't finished testing everything - I have to check that bluetooth works and, so far, I haven't yet installed a driver for the Nvidia graphics card but, given how easy it's been so far, I don't anticipate any problems

Mike