Hello. I have an Dell XPS 15 9560, it has secure boot and TPM 2.0 and a fingerprint reader and a 4K screen and a 2TB NVME SSD and a NVIDIA 1050GT video card. It currently runs Windows 11 Pro very well. it used to run Windows 10 Pro. I would like to run a KDE Linux on it. I see that old NVIDIA cards are not supported, will they ever be supported or is KDE Linux only going to pull a Windows 11 maneuver and support hardware with a cutoff point? I want to run a Linux distro that is very hard to screw up and is locked down and I like what I see with KDE Linux. I am currently running KDE Linux in VirtualBox on my Dell XPS on Windows 11 Pro and it’s pretty cool. I am considering installing KDE Linux on my mom’s PC which is a System76 Wild Dog computer and that PC only has Intel graphics. But I would like to know if my Dell XPS laptop will ever be supported by KDE Linux or if KDE Linux only supports hardware that’s of a certain age and newer similar to Windows 11.
I have a Dell XPS 15 9560 as well. I run OpenSUSE Slowroll on it and everything is functional. I like OpenSUSE for its package management and it has easy btrfs snapshots set up by default, so you can sudo snapper rollback on a snapshot if you ever make a mistake.
For the 9560 there is a useful guide at: Dell XPS 15 (9560) - ArchWiki
This guide is for Arch but is also useful for other distributions, especially since KDE Linux is based on Arch.
The most complicated thing to get set-up is the switchable nVidia graphics; you need to set the nVidia up properly so it powers off so it doesn’t drain the battery. I used the older bbswitch/bumblebee method (also requires a kernel parameter to be set for this laptop). There is a newer and easier switcher tool called switcheroo which I use on a newer laptop with nVidia, but I don’t know if this works with the nVidia GTX 1050 in the 9560 or not.
Thanks for the reply. I will definitely look at that ArchWiki. And I didn’t know it was that easy to roll back on OpenSuse. Thanks again for the helpful information.
If all you are interested in is a stable immutable distro such as KDE Linux, you could always try something like Bazzite, which has a branch with support for older Nvidia GPUs. You can try out the legacy Nvidia branch and see if that works for you.
Do you have the fingerprint reader working? That was the only thing that stood out to me as far as hardware that wouldn’t work since the majority of Dell fingerprint readers are proprietary and don’t yet have working reverse engineered drivers.
I got KDE-Linux installed on the Dell XPS 15 9560. it uses the Intel integrated graphics, so the NVIDIA card does not have 3D rendering. The fingerprint reader works perfectly.
Interesting. I thought the 95xx models all used Goodix sensors; seems Dell used Synaptics prior to Goodix. Shame, because that means mine still won’t work. Thanks.
I have an NVIDIA Quadro K1100M (in an HP ZBook 17 G2, around eleven years old), which would use a legacy 470.xx driver https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/, although I have a vague idea that nouveau might be used.
Postscript: sorry, I just realised, the KDE Linux context. Maybe an old card is not as well supported in KDE Linux as it is in Kubuntu.
Won’t KDE Linux work with the in-kernel ‘nouveau’ driver? I have a GTX560 working on Fedora/KDE on the open nouveau driver and it works. That’s a 2011 era card. The driver that doesn’t go back as far is the closed Nvidia driver. For me the closed Nvidia driver is not an option because I like to use the latest kernels but that frequently breaks the closed driver for weeks until nvidia fixes it and releases a new package. The nouveau one is built into the kernel so that’s not a problem.
