Run Fedora 29 on Dell XPS 15 9570


Here’s a list of things to do to get Fedora 29 running optimally on Dell XPS 15 9570:

First, disable Secure Boot with the stock Windows 10 and in BIOS otherwise Fedora installer on a USB stick won’t boot. I still don’t really see the necessity to have this Secure Boot, except to buy more time for Windows obviously.

Then I need to set SATA mode from RAID to AHCI in BIOS, or the Linux installer can’t find the drive. The SATA mode was set to RAID ON, which probably makes more sense if there’s 1 more drive in the laptop.

Hit F12 to choose boot device and install Fedora 29 using a USB drive, then the laptop will be booted into Fedora Live.

There were some warnings regarding nouveau drive so I had to disable nouveau and turn off nvidia device at start. The way bbswitch is installed has changed a bit so I installed it following this. After the nvidia device disabled at boot, the laptop is much much quieter.

According to Arch Linux Wiki, the laptop uses S2 suspend instead of S3. This can be fixed by added mem_sleep_default=deep to kernel parameters and then

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

and reboot. The result can be verified by

$ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]

I’ll see how long the battery can hold up. 🙂

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2 responses to “Run Fedora 29 on Dell XPS 15 9570”

  1. So how did it go?

    Planning to do the same but I would like to have the nvidia gpu at hand. I heard the proprietary drivers work fine.

    An alternative is to install Archlinux, it seems to be stable as well.

    • Hi, Fedora 29 runs well on 9570. Arch should do even better from my experience, I had an older XPS running on Arch.