I have been using the Dell XPS 15 9560 in a dual boot configuration for a few weeks now. I am running Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04. It all works fine, except the finger print reader under Ubuntu, which I didn't manage to have detected.
I mainly use it for programming, and for machine learning I use Tensorflow and the laptop GPU. I haven't yet run battery intensive applications (e.g. games) while under battery, but I can say that, under Ubuntu, switching from NVIDIA to the integrated graphics (under NVIDIA X Server Settings) and lowering the display brightness, I would get an estimated battery life of 6-8 hours. With NVIDIA GPU and display brightness maxed out, 2-3 hours.
Installing Ubuntu Desktop from USB was quite easy, just had to disable the RAID support under BIOS (the provided SSD is anyway not a RAID). I had tried installing Ubuntu Server, that usually detects and handles RAID at installation time, but with this laptop it didn't.
Under Ubuntu I am running the latest NVIDIA drivers automatically installed by Ubuntu updates, 375-51; under Windows, the latest NVIDIA drivers available.
Since you are using the nouveau one, you might find this thread useful. The original post is a startup error, but the 2nd answer mentions your exact shutdown error and also solved it with the nVidia binary drivers.
NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#2 stuck for 23s! [plymouthd:305]
You may need to blacklist or remove the nouveau drivers. You can do that with the appropriate portion from this post, adding it in /etc/modprobe.d/
Install Nvidia driver instead of nouveau
For example, I have:
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-384_hybrid.conf:blacklist nouveau
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-384_hybrid.conf:blacklist lbm-nouveau
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-384_hybrid.conf:alias nouveau off
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-384_hybrid.conf:alias lbm-nouveau off
Best Answer
The Dell XPS 15 9560 has an Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU with 4GB RAM dedicated memory, but maybe the GTX 1050 doesn't have a proprietary driver installed for it. If you can't login to the desktop environment to install the proprietary Nvidia graphics driver, you can access a virtual console and install the graphics driver from there.
From the login screen before entering your password logging press the keyboard combination Ctrl+Alt+F3 to access a text-only virtual console.
To login from a virtual console:
At the
login:
prompt type your username and press Enter.At the
Password:
prompt type your user password and press Enter. After you have logged in, you can run commands from the virtual console.The proprietary Nvidia graphics driver can be installed in Ubuntu 18.04 from the terminal/console with the following commands:
When installing a proprietary graphics driver, it is not necessary to uninstall the built-in open source graphics driver. The two graphics drivers can be installed alongside each other allowing the open source graphics driver to be used as a fallback alternative in case there is a problem using the proprietary graphics driver.
The
ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
command installs drivers that are appropriate for automatic installation including their dependencies, and the Nvidia driver will also be updated automatically when an update is available.