<disclaimer>Ok, this is truly a geek post, so if you aren’t into extreme geekiness, don’t bother with this one.</disclaimer>

I finally have my hobby Linux laptop where I want it to be! When I bought my Dell 2-in-1 laptop, I’d really wanted to run Fedora Linux with the GNOME desktop environment. I’d been playing with Linux distributions for a while already and had settled on Fedora as my favorite. I like the dnf package manager and I like the fact that Fedora is reasonably current in terms of Linux kernel, hardware support, and the latest versions of most popular packages. Because the laptop has a touchscreen and can be used as a tablet with the keyboard folded away, I decided that I needed the GNOME desktop, which has reasonable (though not perfect) support for touch interfaces without a keyboard.

Unfortunately, Fedora wasn’t quite as up-to-date as I needed. My Dell Inspiron 13 2-in-1 has an Intel Skylake (6th-generation) processor and built-in graphics, which the open source Linux kernel (even the very-recent 4.2-series used by Fedora) didn’t support. Even with “preliminary hardware support” enabled in the Kernel, it frequently froze on my laptop. So for the first few months, I’ve been using Ubuntu 15.10 GNOME. (Apparently, the commercial sponsors of Ubuntu, Canonical, managed to include Skylake graphics support in their 4.2 Linux kernel, even though the open source version didn’t have it yet. Money talks, I guess!)

Anyway, the Fedora team released an update yesterday that included version 4.3.3 of the Linux kernel, with enhanced (and enabled-by-default!) support for Skylake processors and graphics. So, today I decided to try it out. And it worked!

So now I have a 2-in-1 laptop/tablet with:

• 13.3″ 1080p (16:9) touch-enabled screen
• 6th-generation Intel Skylake processor & graphics
• 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD
• Fedora 23 (up-to-date!)
• GNOME 3.18 (latest version!)
• Google Chrome (synced with all my other devices)
• 1Password (synced with all of my devices, including a vault of passwords shared with my wife)
• OwnCloud storage (like Dropbox, but on my own server at home and accessible from anywhere on the Internet)
• Skype (with full audio & video support)
• Steam (for games!)

And aside from a bit of research & experimentation, it was cheap, too.

Whee!