First impressions
1. the blue thingy is super annoying. Why is it so damn bright... I guess it must be a gaming/visual thing that makes no sense for engineers. (I was able to disable the LED from the bios later)
2. besides that, it looks awesome, lots of USB slots, a nice video card, HDMI interface, and lots of PCI slots to add more stuff if I need to.
After opening it
1. apparently it only has 2 HDDs slots... more would be nicer. I'll just use my external stands I guess.
2. holy sh*t the NVME disk is tiny
Installing GNU/linux
- The first issue is that by default, it won't let you access the BIOS... no matter how many times you press the F2 button. It immediately boots windows, and gets you that incredibly ugly and hard to use "compulsory" setup screen.
For god's sake, windows is annoying.
So, we have reset the CMOS so we can enter the BIOS setup screen, and choose another disk to boot (and disable the UEFI "secure" boot thing). Let's do that... - Resetting the CMOS is pretty easy actually. You just open the cover, and move the jumper from the PASSWD slot to the CMOS_CLEAR or something slot. Here is a reference document: https://www.dell.com/support/article/ja-jp/sln284985/how-to-perform-a-bios-or-cmos-reset-and-clear-the-nvram-on-dell-systems?lang=en#Shortcut_2
- now we can see the bios screen, yay. You will need to:
- disable UEFI secure boot (so you access your GNU/Linux install disk prob)
- change the SATA controller from intel RAID to AHCI (so you can actually use your NVME disk from linux)
- that's basically it. Now you can just insert your USB stick with the GNU/Linux install (I recommend Debian 10, whatever you choose, just no f*cking ubuntu ok?), and it should boot on it by default. If that doesn't work for you, access the BIOS again, go to the boot order screen, and make sure your linux disk is at the top.
Partition notes: If you want to boot from your NVME disk, remember to create an EFI on the partition guide. Otherwise you'll have to boot from an external disk just for the boot loader.
Warning
One more really annoying thing, is that apparently windows rewrites the bios settings once you boot it. So if you by mistake boot in windows, the next time you start your computer you won't be able to access the BIOS again. So you'll have to do the CMOS reset once again... really really really get rid of that piece of sh*t OS.
Message for Dell
Please sell it to me cheaper, and without windows. That's a real win-win situation.
I also didn't need the mouse and keyboard... which is not even in a keymap I can/like to use.
