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I bought a Dell XPS 13 2016 with a i7-6500u (SkyLake).
This notebook is not officially linux-supported but I found a few articles on how to get it up and running.

But I cannot find an answer to this question.
Current ArchLinux has the Linux Kernel 4.2.5 but Skylake-Support was added with Kernel 4.3 (article).

How is it possible that I can run Arch on a LiveUSB or even install it on that Notebook?

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    Had I to hazard a guess, this is because skylake is still an x86_64 CPU. So, when people say that “Skylake-support” was added, what they probably mean is “support for all the fancy new stuff that Skylake adds”. The support for the architecture was there already.
    – HalosGhost
    Dec 10, 2015 at 14:20
  • This actually sounds reasonable.
    – JDurstberger
    Dec 10, 2015 at 15:05

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I bought MSI gs40 that has skylake 67000hq with intel HD 530 inside. I was able to run even 1 year old kernel from liveusb and you should be. Everything except X should run without any issues since as was mentioned Skylake is x8086 and kernel supports it.

Another thing that intel integrated graphics are not properly supported yet. 4.3 kernel has some improvment but it's still buggy yet. You can install it with linux-pf aur package. You also need to add i915 to initramfs and i915.preliminary_hw_support=1 to kernel params. But it won't help you a lot. I tried different desktop envriroments (gnome, kde...) and some of ubuntu line os. Xorg hangs in the end of the day, sometime right after start, sometimes after a few hours of using.

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