Still waiting for Dell to fully support Ubuntu in their 2015 XPS 13 model. I made the switch from a Thinkpad after Lenovo burned me too many times. While the keyboard isn't quite as excellent it's still top notch and it's one of the best laptops I've ever owned.
That being said getting everything working in Ubuntu has been a bit of a fiasco [1]. Luckily after some firmware upgrades and the new kernel in 15.04, a lot of issues have been fixed, but the laptop still does strange things waking up from sleep. The worst issue though is that audio still seems to not work in a dual boot configuration. The laptop can't produce sound from the speakers or headphone jack in both Windows and Ubuntu when booting between the two OS's. It seems the hardware gets put in a strange state by either OS and it takes two full reboots after switching from Windows<->Ubuntu to get the audio device to be recognized.
Also HDPI support in Ubuntu is still a little lacking so the beautiful higher-than-retina display sometimes makes things absurdly small. I've seen a lot of progress on this front though.
I really love this device but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the excellent out of the box hardware support for Thinkpads in Ubuntu.
How did Lenovo burn you? Even minimal distros such as Arch with various DEs/WMs work great out of the box on my T450s, because all of the hardware is supported in the kernel. Reading the 2015 XPS 13 Ubuntu guide made it seem like a painful process that involved downloading drivers, etc.
If you mean that from the left edge of the keyboard you have Fn and then Ctrl, then yes it's correct, however I checked my Bible and (un)fortunately God decided that the order of keyboard keys just wasn't worth divine inspiration.
You need to reboot twice due to change in operating mode for touchpad (I2C vs PS2) and audio (I2S and HDA). In Windows 8 (_OSI=Windows 2013), it is running as I2C/I2S devices, in Linux and Windows 7 (_OSI=Windows 2009) in PS2/HDA mode. This is not Dell specific.
That being said getting everything working in Ubuntu has been a bit of a fiasco [1]. Luckily after some firmware upgrades and the new kernel in 15.04, a lot of issues have been fixed, but the laptop still does strange things waking up from sleep. The worst issue though is that audio still seems to not work in a dual boot configuration. The laptop can't produce sound from the speakers or headphone jack in both Windows and Ubuntu when booting between the two OS's. It seems the hardware gets put in a strange state by either OS and it takes two full reboots after switching from Windows<->Ubuntu to get the audio device to be recognized.
Also HDPI support in Ubuntu is still a little lacking so the beautiful higher-than-retina display sometimes makes things absurdly small. I've seen a lot of progress on this front though.
I really love this device but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the excellent out of the box hardware support for Thinkpads in Ubuntu.
[1] - https://major.io/2015/02/03/linux-support-dell-xps-13-9343-2...