Arch Linux on Dell XPS 13 9360

I recently installed Arch Linux on my new Dell XPS 13 (9360). Since I favor Linux over other operating systems and I ordered the XPS with Ubuntu 16.04 pre-installed. I must say that Canonical and Dell did quite a decent job on the Linux support and if someone is looking for a Linux laptop I would say go ahead and order it. I also hope that Dell and Caninical keep up the good work and extend their Linux support to more systems. My main focus is software development (OpenGL, Vulkan, Android, Java, C++) and of course browsing websites and reading mails.

Although Ubuntu 16.04 is fine I wanted to run a distro with up-to-date kernel (4.11, NVME power saving) and software packages (Arch) so I wiped the disk, created an encrypted LVM spanning the whole disk (except for the EFI partition) with a root, home and swap partition on top. The boot directory is also encrypted as part of the root partition. The setup works like a charm. I decided to use Gnome 3.24 along with Wayland as my desktop environment. Power consumption can be tweaked and depending on current usage the Gnome battery indicator states that the system can be used for about 12:30 h. I would take this with a grain of salt though, I did not run tests on it and the value is not quite stable (decreases and then goes back up again). The first impression is quite good.

One thing that surprised me was the sound. It was far better than I expected and even seems to be independent of the angle from the device to my ears.

This post started off as a description on how to get Android Studio working but turned out to be a rather rough description of the setup. More on Android in another post.