Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (7390)

Feb 15, 2020

My third laptop and third Arch instasll: Late 2019 Dell XPS 13, 2-in-1 (7390).

My first non-Thinkpad laptop, and the hardest laptop to install Arch on so far. It seems like every other kernel has some issues involved.

I can’t find the “beginners guide install guide” on the Arch wiki anymore.

A few big takeaways from my 2019 install:

  • yaourt is gone! Apparently I’m pretty behind on the times, since yaourt has been officially deprecated since 2018. I’m using yay now, and also trying to avoid AUR packages more than I had previously.

The nice parts:

Everything Else

The other main things other than the base OS configuration: login, boot manager.

refind

https://github.com/EvanPurkhiser/rEFInd-minimal

lxdm

yay -S lxdm-themes

Level 2 Configuration

# Brightness control
pacman -S xbacklight xf86-video-intel

# Touchscreen (surprisingly) worked out of the box

# Status bar
pacman -S conky python

pacman -S wget
https://github.com/aruhier/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized

pacman -S feh evince redshift pavucontrol keepassxc python-pip
pacman -S gvim # needed over vim for system clipboard

pacman conf: add color and ILoveCandy

pacman -S base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

Web Browser

I’ve started using Firefox (and Tree Style Tab) for my main browser.

pacman -S firefox
pacman -S noto-fonts noto-fonts-emoji ttf-dejavu

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks#Enable_touchscreen_gestures:

Add MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 DEFAULT=1 to /etc/security/pam_env.conf.

I installed Chrome too, but it actually doesn’t work: it doesn’t actually redraw the screen correctly.

TODO

  • I should seriously consider running i3-gnome instead of plain i3.
  • My on-startup scripts are fragile, and probably aren’t running correctly.