So I got my XPS 13 Developer Edition (FHD, i5, 8GB RAM) yesterday and I have been tinkering with it, here are some first impression notes:

As others have already noted, the machine itself is beautiful and well built. I have not noticed any defects that have been written about in this subreddit. No dead pixels, creaking noises, coil whine, etc. The touchpad is flush with the palm rest and its surface is quite smooth. The screen is gorgeous and very bright.

I'm coming from a many-years-old XPS 9343 which I loved and I have to say the keyboard on the 9300 is a little bit less satisfying to type on, but I will probably get used to it. I can type quickly and without errors, but it makes more noise in my opinion.

One thing I was mildly concerned about was the heat. Actually before I bought this laptop I had a ThinkPad T495s which I have returned due to the way it heated up during normal use (web browsing, videos, text editing). Lenovo's laptops have a single fan on the right side of the laptop, which results in a noticeably uneven heat distribution, and this drove me crazy. I'm much happier with the dual fan & backwards exhaust of the XPS. And in fact the fans almost never turn on, which is nice. The machine does get a little warm on the bottom cover (maybe a few degrees above ambient) but it is evenly distributed and does not bother me at all.

After checking out Dell's Ubuntu installation and after reading reports of other users saying that everything important worked out of the box with the stock kernel, I installed my preferred distribution which is Arch Linux. I'm happy to report that the vast majority of things work flawlessly with the exception of resuming from sleep. Instead of automatically resuming when I open the lid, I have to press the power button to wake it up. It's a minor thing and will probably be fixed soon.

Speaking of the power button, it has a very different tactile feel compared to the rest of the keys. It requires more force to activate it and the feedback (tactile and noise) is unusual, but again I'll probably get used to that.

It seems that the laptop goes into s2idle sleep instead of s3, but I have not noticed any battery drain during s2idle sleep. I left it sleeping overnight and did not notice any battery loss during the ~10 hours. Compared to the T495s, which lost 10% overnight, that's great!

In terms of power consumption, it gets down to 2-3W on idle, and around 5-10W during active use.

One negative thing I have noticed is that it seems my out-of-the-box battery capacity is 94% compared to the design capacity. I also saw this figure somewhere using Dell's Ubuntu installation but I'm not sure. I may have to investigate further and ask Dell support for advice:

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[jdiez@SISP ~]$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full_design

6707000

[jdiez@SISP ~]$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full

6307000

Let me know if you have any questions! :)