I have 2 in the XPS line - a relatively old 15 inch and a new(ish) 13 inch.
They're perfectly fine machines.
Dell officially supports linux on them (admittedly, only Ubuntu), you can get 32gb of RAM, and they perform just as well as any other intel based laptop (which is to say - I wish they sucked less power, but they're fine on the performance scale).
I'm... not a clean person with my machines, and I've never noticed any issues with the keyboards.
I have zero issues swapping wireless to wired (Arch linux) - it's basically instant for me, but I don't actually know how you're testing that, since none of the newer 13 models include an ethernet port (I use an adapter). Have you considered that you have a bad usb-ethernet adapter? Every one I've used is fine. Alternatively - are you sure you're not thinking of the Latitude line? Those are very different machines, which I also avoid.
Basically - I'd take an XPS every time over anything Lenovo puts out. I don't even really care about the hardware, I just think Lenovo can't be trusted a god damn inch. Chinese company selling computers with rootkits/MITM pre-installed. It was a sad day when IBM sold their personal computing line to them. I know a lot of folks still like the Thinkpads - but it's not worth it, IMO.
I've had an eye on the Huawei Matebook X Pro on Swappa. My other eye is on the XPS, new from Amazon. The latter is certainly more expensive and yet, doesn't impress me as much as the Matebook.
But as we all know, Huawei is not trusted much here lately in the U.S. Is this in fact another Chinese company that's best we avoid? I was considering starting an Ask HN just for Huawei given not much has been posted here on this topic for a couple of years now.
Yes I remember the router situation where they accidentally left telnet listening on the WAN.
I worked at Vodafone and all the routers get a security review, so it is highly doubtful that they left it in on purpose because they would have known that it would have been found. It was test engineering firmware that got left on some routers, and makes spurious claims even though in the article it points out that Vodafone didn't believe it was a backdoor.
And your first link talks about how someone appears to have added an additional chip to the design, which is unlikely to have come from Huawei. Sounds suspiciously similar to this
I would say that the Wireguard issue is worse than the speculation that pre-production firmware on unreleased routers was backdooring as they actually shipped it.
Of the three links about Huawei, one is someone in India claiming IP theft, one where they made up a claim of backdooring which the original security researchers rejected that claim, and one where it appears that hardware may have been tampered at the manufacturing stage by Americans.
Not exactly smoking gun, Huawei are evil and want to steal your data. I don't trust them, but then I don't trust a lot of the networking providers to not be compromised by a state actor.
Otherwise, they are probably the best of the bunch, purely because of the stack being mostly BSD.
They're perfectly fine machines.
Dell officially supports linux on them (admittedly, only Ubuntu), you can get 32gb of RAM, and they perform just as well as any other intel based laptop (which is to say - I wish they sucked less power, but they're fine on the performance scale).
I'm... not a clean person with my machines, and I've never noticed any issues with the keyboards.
I have zero issues swapping wireless to wired (Arch linux) - it's basically instant for me, but I don't actually know how you're testing that, since none of the newer 13 models include an ethernet port (I use an adapter). Have you considered that you have a bad usb-ethernet adapter? Every one I've used is fine. Alternatively - are you sure you're not thinking of the Latitude line? Those are very different machines, which I also avoid.
Basically - I'd take an XPS every time over anything Lenovo puts out. I don't even really care about the hardware, I just think Lenovo can't be trusted a god damn inch. Chinese company selling computers with rootkits/MITM pre-installed. It was a sad day when IBM sold their personal computing line to them. I know a lot of folks still like the Thinkpads - but it's not worth it, IMO.