This page describes Debian on the Dell XPS 13 7390 released in May 2020

# dmidecode | grep "Product Name"
        Product Name: XPS 13 7390
        Product Name: 0G2D0W

BIOS Update

Before you install Debian, you should upgrade to the latest BIOS update from Dell.

Power on your notebook and press F12 to get into the BIOS. Choose the "BIOS Flash Update" option. This will show you the revision of your current BIOS.

Dell XPS 13 7390 support page and look for "BIOS". If there's a new BIOS update, download the XPS_13_7390_x.y.z.exe file and then put it on a USB stick (formatted with VFAT). Put the USB stick into your Dell and choose "Begin Flash Update" to update your BIOS. If you already have Debian installed in your machine, you can copy the file XPS_13_7390_x.y.z.exe in the boot/ partition, reboot your computer and install it from there.

BIOS Settings

You have to change some BIOS settings before you can install Debian. Press F12 again when starting your notebook to get into the BIOS.

Choose the first option, BIOS Setup. You must remove Secure Boot to install Debian since Debian currently doesn't support secure boot.

Debian installer

Prepare a USB stick with Debian installer on it. You can consult the manual for more information.

When you connect the USB stick and start your Dell notebook, the installer menu should automatically come up. If not, enter the BIOS and change the boot order.

You can choose "Graphical install" or "Install" (the text-based installer).

Firmware

This notebook requires non-free firmwares files for the Intel GPU, the WIFI and the bluetooth. After the installation, configure the non-free repository in APT.

Firmware upgrades for USB-C/Thuderbolt

In order to keep the driver of the USB-C/Thudnerbolt interfaces up-to-date, the following packages provide command-line tools to check and install them from fwupd.org

Wifi and Bluetooth

02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (rev 1a)

This requires the firmware files iwlwifi-cc-a0-48.ucode, ibt-20-1-3.sfi and ibt-20-1-3.ddc that can be found in the firmware-iwlwifi package.

GPU

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation UHD Graphics (rev 02)

This requires the firmware file kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin that can be found in the firmware-misc-nonfree package.

This card also needs the following packages:

Grub

The following options are suggested to improve the user experience, they has to be added in /etc/defaults/grub to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX as follows:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX = "mitigations=off mem_sleep_default=deep i915.enable_psr=0"

"mitigations=off" Disable all optional CPU mitigations. This improves system performance, but it may also expose users to several CPU vulnerabilities, see www.kernel.org Doc. works for kernels newer that 5.1.13

"mem_slpeep_default=deep" Enables by default the deep mode for suspend-to-ram greatly lowering the energy consumption when the notebook is supsended.

"i915.enable_psr=0" It prevent flickering that was reported to happen with this GPU (POSSIBLE UPDATE NEEDED).

Touchpad

The xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package is needed.