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I am planning to buy a Dell Latitude 7490 to use as a daily computer for web browsing and school, and I am wondering if Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will work on the device with no issues? The device will ship with either Windows 10 or 11. It isn’t on Canonical’s list of supported hardware and on Dell’s support pages it says that it supports 16.04 LTS. I am planning to use single boot and remove Windows. If there are any issues, do they have relatively easy fixes?

TheMysteriousD
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1 Answers1

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I've installed several versions of Xubuntu on Dell systems, some that came with a Windows hard drive. My plan has always been to purchase an appropriate internal hard drive seperate from whatever is bundled with the system. When I first get the system, I turn it on pressing F2 to get the BIOS menu - also being careful not to start booting the installed operating system. While in the BIOS menu I take care of a few items.

  1. Verify your mouse and keyboard work.
  2. Set the BIOS time. In all instances I've found the system shipped from another time zone or for some reason, the BIOS time is not currently accurate.
  3. Switch to legacy boot.

Now, after turning off power, I remove the original hard drive, replacing it with my recent hard drive purchase. I then boot the system using an Xubuntu USB 'try or install' thumbdrive. After poking around a bit (further insurance all hardware is fine). I select the install icon. I allow it to decide what formatting and partitioning is appropriate on the just installed replacement HDD.

When the next Long Term version is available (current is 24.04 so that would be 26.04), I'll probably remove the 24.04 HDD, replacing it with the original (and now two year old) HDD as I again do a complete install of Xubuntu 26.04 from the 'try or install' USB thumb drive.

Not too long ago my Xubuntu 16.04 and Xubuntu 22.04 were running on Dell 755s. I purchased two Dell 7020 towers (one at a time). In that case I swapped my existing HDD into the new tower and it ran immedately. The only noticable change was a performance improvement. Should I suffer a significant hardware failure, my plan would be to purchase a Dell replacement system and pop in the existing HDD to immediately get running again. For the towers, it would be at or after Dell 7020 and for the Laptop, it would be a Dell 5767 or later, which the specific system in the original question would be a candidate.

The short answer is that I would expect a Dell Latitude 7490 can run one or more flavors of Ubuntu (mine is XUbuntu) without any difficulty, in fact, my backup strategy depends upon it.

quill
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