Will I need a PPA for my Dell XPS 13 "Sputnik" laptop?

Solution 1:

...from PPA:

ALL FIXES HAVE BEEN INCORPORATED INTO Ubuntu Raring (13.04), so this PPA is not needed for Raring.

Solution 2:

I got this information from Kamal Mostafa, one of the maintainers of the Sputnik PPA:

The two big pieces of functionality that were supplied by the Sputnik PPA were the Cypress Trackpad driver and the i915 backlight control fixes.

The Cypress Trackpad driver is now shipping in stock {P, Q, and just this week, R} kernels and is queued up to land in mainline for Linux 3.9. So the trackpad is now a non-issue -- no PPA is required for that.

Indeed the only thing left in the PPA kernel that isn't shipping in stock Ubuntu is the backlight control (i915 driver) fix.... That fix is still a problem: In its current state, it can't go into standard kernels because it breaks some other backlights. I'm hoping further progress will be made on that in the mainline 3.9 timeframe. In the meantime though, the PPA is and will continue to be necessary to supply working backlight controls.

I do have every intention of maintaining the Sputnik PPA as long as its necessary, for all versions >= Precise. I haven't uploaded a Raring kernel to it yet, but will do so by early next week.

The other kernels in the PPA (P and Q) aren't really falling behind -- I always keep them just behind the stock 'proposed' kernels (hence the PPA indicates "Newer version available" on the days where proposed has just been released but I haven't uploaded new versions yet, like today!) I'll be updating those within 24 hours.

Hope that clarifies the mud! Let me know if you need any more info at all!