I think the extra effort he means is that Dell had to hack in additional fixes for the trackpad, wifi, bluetooth and monitor brightness: https://launchpad.net/~

I think the extra effort he means is that Dell had to hack in additional fixes for the trackpad, wifi, bluetooth and monitor brightness: https://launchpad.net/~canonical-hwe-team/+archive/sputnik-kernel https://launchpad.net/~canonical-hwe-team/+archive/sputnik-k... . They were all merged upstream, but if Dell had not done it, it would have been the customer spending hours on google or reading through threads on the ubuntu forums (I can speak from experience).