me

Arch Installation on Dell XPS 13 (7390)

20 Apr 2021

This post serves as an account of, as well as an instructional reference for, the quirks of installing Arch GNU/Linux on the XPS 13 7390.

I recently purchased one of these machines new, and decided that I wanted Arch to be the OS that I would install on it. Previously I had installed Arch on my ThinkPad X220, but that machine’s age and ubiquity meant that I didn’t really run into any hiccups - most things “just worked” thanks to native kernel support. Since the 7390 revision of the popular XPS 13 is less than 2 years old at the time of this writing, there were a few extra things to work through.

Firstly, the community wiki is the definitive reference for getting Arch running on any compatible machine. In addition to the installation guide, there are also many individual pages dedicated to device-specific issues and tips. See these pages for the usual procedure for installation of the base system. I’ve also found the wiki to be an excellent reference for other popular software, and for Unix in general.

Disabling PSR

Panel Self Refresh is a power-saving measure that aims to cut down on unnecessary display refreshes of static content. With Intel’s i915 chipset, a kernel bug (?) causes the display to flicker on some machines. On mine, the display would randomly corrupt completely. Adding i915.enable_psr=0 as a kernel option fixes this issue, at the cost of the battery life it would otherwise save.

Fixing GTK3 Scaling

Although the configuration I purchased includes a 1080p screen at 96 DPI, I found that I had scaling issues on Firefox. Initially I believed this to be an issue with Wayland (I’m attempting to leave X behind), but Firefox appeared incredibly tiny in both Sway and i3. The fix I landed on was setting the environment variable GDK_DPI_SCALE to 1.3. This seemed to be the best option, as Sway does support fractional scaling for the whole display, but seems to discourage it in their documentation. A similar fix may be required for apps running QT frontends; I haven’t tried one yet.

Adjusting Display Brightness

The Arch wiki page for this machine advises installing the acpilight package, and setting a udev rule, in addition to adding acpi_backlight=vendor as a kernel parameter. However I found it was much easier to install brightnessctl and add the keymap bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec brightnessctl set +2% and a similar mapping for lowering the brightness.

Overall, the installation went very smoothly, and there aren’t too many gotchas to be concerned about. I may do a followup to this post in the future if I run into more unexpected and/or obscure issues, though.

2019, Ian Wright. ⚖ MIT

Arch Installation on Dell XPS 13 (7390)

20 Apr 2021

This post serves as an account of, as well as an instructional reference for, the quirks of installing Arch GNU/Linux on the XPS 13 7390.

I recently purchased one of these machines new, and decided that I wanted Arch to be the OS that I would install on it. Previously I had installed Arch on my ThinkPad X220, but that machine’s age and ubiquity meant that I didn’t really run into any hiccups - most things “just worked” thanks to native kernel support. Since the 7390 revision of the popular XPS 13 is less than 2 years old at the time of this writing, there were a few extra things to work through.

Firstly, the community wiki is the definitive reference for getting Arch running on any compatible machine. In addition to the installation guide, there are also many individual pages dedicated to device-specific issues and tips. See these pages for the usual procedure for installation of the base system. I’ve also found the wiki to be an excellent reference for other popular software, and for Unix in general.

Disabling PSR

Panel Self Refresh is a power-saving measure that aims to cut down on unnecessary display refreshes of static content. With Intel’s i915 chipset, a kernel bug (?) causes the display to flicker on some machines. On mine, the display would randomly corrupt completely. Adding i915.enable_psr=0 as a kernel option fixes this issue, at the cost of the battery life it would otherwise save.

Fixing GTK3 Scaling

Although the configuration I purchased includes a 1080p screen at 96 DPI, I found that I had scaling issues on Firefox. Initially I believed this to be an issue with Wayland (I’m attempting to leave X behind), but Firefox appeared incredibly tiny in both Sway and i3. The fix I landed on was setting the environment variable GDK_DPI_SCALE to 1.3. This seemed to be the best option, as Sway does support fractional scaling for the whole display, but seems to discourage it in their documentation. A similar fix may be required for apps running QT frontends; I haven’t tried one yet.

Adjusting Display Brightness

The Arch wiki page for this machine advises installing the acpilight package, and setting a udev rule, in addition to adding acpi_backlight=vendor as a kernel parameter. However I found it was much easier to install brightnessctl and add the keymap bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec brightnessctl set +2% and a similar mapping for lowering the brightness.

Overall, the installation went very smoothly, and there aren’t too many gotchas to be concerned about. I may do a followup to this post in the future if I run into more unexpected and/or obscure issues, though.