Many things work out of the box on the XPS 15 9520, but a few tweaks are necessary to get the most out of the machine. For reference, here's the config I got:

CPU: i7 12700H
RAM: 32 GB
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3050Ti
Monitor: 3.5k OLED

Set SSD to AHCI/NVME to save battery

For some reason, setting the SSD to AHCI/NVME in BIOS (instead of RAID which was default for me) causes power consumption in idle and light workloads to absolutely plummet. Consumption dropped by as much as 20-50% for me, depending on the scenario.

With this tweak, I get around 6-8 hours of battery life with light use and screen brightness at 50%. I find that perfectly acceptable considering I have the OLED screen and a power-hungry i7 in the machine.

Intel and NVIDIA Graphics

• Kernel parameters: nvidia_drm.modesetting=1 ibt=off
  • ibt=off was required for me to be able to start the X server with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, see this issue
• Intel driver config:
  • Must use DRI2, as the default DRI3 causes all kinds of problems with 3D graphics acceleration

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "intel"
  Option "DRI" "2"
EndSection

The above config mostly works, but some applications still experience some glitchy graphics. For everything to work perfectly, The modesetting driver must be used. However, this interferes with PRIME offloading s.t. the NVIDIA GPU is always active which severely impacts battery life.

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver "modesetting"
EndSection

Touchpad

The touchpad worked great without any configuration with the exception of tap-to-click. I don't have any problems with lag that I've seen some other people have.

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "touchpad"
Driver "libinput"
    MatchProduct "VEN_06CB:00 06CB:CE7E Touchpad"
    Option "Tapping" "on"
    Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
    Option "ScrollMethod" "two-finger"
    Option "NaturalScrolling" "on"
EndSection

Media controls

Using xbindkeys, the example config works great for volume. xbacklight can be used for brightness controls.

# ~/.xbindkeysrc

# Volume controls
"pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +1000"
   XF86AudioRaiseVolume

"pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -1000"
   XF86AudioLowerVolume

"pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ toggle"
   XF86AudioMute

"pactl set-source-mute @DEFAULT_SOURCE@ toggle"
   XF86AudioMicMute

# Brightness controls
"xbacklight -inc 5"
    XF86MonBrightnessUp

"xbacklight -dec 5"
    XF86MonBrightnessDown

Referenced from

• Arch Linux on Lenovo T14S Gen 3 (Intel)