It’s been a long and frustrating road, but I have finally resolved the touchpad issues that have plagued me for seemingly forever in Linux. By installing libinput and using it in favor of the Synaptics touchpad driver, the touchpad sensitivity issues that have often plagued my sessions of heads-down programming have come to an end.
On the flip side, however, the latest kernel build for Dell/Ubuntu 16.04 has destroyed Bluetooth support on this laptop.
I opted to encrypt my home directory in Linux some time after setting up Ubuntu on my laptop. My home directory went flawlessly, however, it is also recommended that you encrypt your swap partition afterwards, and that did not go so swimmingly. Thankfully, this guide was able to help me out, and I was able to reboot with no further issues. Hopefully if you are unable to create an encrypted swap partition under Linux, this will help you too.