For those who think US Army is above this kind of torture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

Docker is a moderately sized step beyond VM.

I might recommend setting up VMs with something easy like VirtuaBox. When you have that figured out move on to Docker.

If your a casual user VMs are likely sufficient.

I used awk to migrate users from one system to another. I created template scripts for setting up the user in the new system, I dumped the data from the old system, then used awk to process the dump and create scripts for each user in the new system. That was a fun project.

When you have battery life beyond 5s next year you’ll be thankful

Yeah, I’m sorry to say that is a result of good marketing. I work at a university and we have experience with a good number of XPS laptops.

We saw at least a 60% problem rate, and Dell’s support was dog slow. Batteries being the weak spot. Because it’s thin it is more fragile, we saw a number of broken screens, and keyboards. One survived a Gatorade spill, but another failed after a water spill. Go figure

A three year warranty helped, but we were out of a laptop for months at a time, more than once on the same laptop.

Ultra thin laptops look cool, but suck in almost every other way. If you need thin then get a MacBook Air.

The XPS line was popular at work. Desk candy to compete with Mac books. However the engineering did not complete at all. The battery was the biggest fail point, we had a high percentage of battery issues under warranty, and they would take months to get replaced by the vendor.

We stopped buying them, if someone wants desk candy these days it’s mostly Mac book pro as expensive as your budget can handle.