> This Kaby Lake-based system comes with Ubuntu 16.04LTS preloaded and features the InfinityEdge display.
If you haven't had the personal experience yet: stay away from new Intel processors on linux for at least a year post release. And if you must purchase something with a new Intel processor - do yourself a favor and pick a rolling-release distribution like Archlinux. -- but seriously I advice against it, I tried an XPS 15 with Skylake a little over half-a-year ago and it was extremely unstable at the time (even running the kernel of git-master).
Cannot up vote this enough. Same experience with a current generation Razer Stealth Blade. Power remaining jumps from 6 hours to 1 on the UI and only lasts 45 minutes at best.
Dual boot into Windows 10 and everything is great. This is 100% a Linux kernel and power management issue.
Usually is a bit strong - I'm only on my third, since I tend to keep them until they fall apart - but I try to look for people selling off company laptops on Craigslist and equivalent. They're usually well taken care of and reasonably good quality. I found a 12" Thinkpad for $250 that was as good as new. I got a new battery, since I prefer 9 cells over 6, but the original still held 90%+ of the charge.
And how do you know it was related to the kernel and CPU combo? Do you have some series of patches that have been landed in the kernel since that claim to fix the issues you've had and have you tried those?
Skylake support only really landed in 4.4 and ramped up in 4.6 to be release-ready, it's fairly well known and you can ready any release vote from 4.4 to 4.7 to see commits pertaining to Skylake or the XPS13.
If you haven't had the personal experience yet: stay away from new Intel processors on linux for at least a year post release. And if you must purchase something with a new Intel processor - do yourself a favor and pick a rolling-release distribution like Archlinux. -- but seriously I advice against it, I tried an XPS 15 with Skylake a little over half-a-year ago and it was extremely unstable at the time (even running the kernel of git-master).