> The 'it just works' narrative applies to Microsoft better than any other company right now, and consumers are noticing.
Can anyone who's recently transitioned to a Surface from a MacBook Pro / Air testify to the validity of this statement? I am dreading the day I need to upgrade my 2014 MBP, I'm just not compelled by the Touch Bar Macs and the tax they add to the new lineup, but I still hear horror stories about BSOD, bloatware, and the surprise update you can't back out of that I'd want to return to far less.
Actually I just switched from a Surface Book to a Macbook Pro and the mac is a huge improvement, both from a hardware and OS perspective.
Biggest complaints about Surface Book:
- Its battery management is horrible. I don't know if the hardware or the OS are more to blame for this. The worst part: I can pretty much expect that if I close the lid and open it some hours later the thing will be dead. Whereas the MacBook (so far) seems to be at the same percentage each time I close then open the lid.
Other complaints:
- Windows' split brain approach with fullscreen metro apps vs traditional windowed apps continues to annoy me.
- The pencil is a gimmick to me since the apps (like OneNote) are very poorly designed for serious work with a stylus.
- Windows is still considerably behind on multi-desktop workflows.
- WSL still has some serious gaps and isn't as productive as Linux / OSX for *nix-style programming tasks. It's getting better though.
- Windows update continues to be a bad experience. Whereas I actually look forward to macOS updates. (EDIT: My updates are managed by MSFT IT which is more aggressive than normal Windows Update so my experience might not be representative. But I'm not using the Insider or beta builds.)
- For example: My Surface Book just updated and now it's stuck on a Windows 8 looking home screen and I haven't yet figured out how to get back to my "normal" desktop.
- Windows continues to advertise "Bubble Witch 3" and "March of Empires" etc. in the home screen. This is unacceptable to me.
Other observations:
- I haven't noticed many BSODs with the Surface Book, so that's improved.
- So far I actually like the touchbar, large trackpad, and keyboard. But I've long ago remapped my keyboard shortcuts to never depend on the fn keys. Esc is still easy to hit on the touch bar for me, in fact the hit-box is bigger than on the Surface Book. If you need it frequently, remap caps lock.
- For MS hardware, there isn't bloatware unless you count MS software which I generally don't.
(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft in the Azure org.)
Re split brain: I can't believe they haven't resolved this. How do they justify having two completely different settings interfaces for so long? I kinda forgave them for it in Windows 8, but we're several updates in to Windows 10 now... It's really a bad look.
Re everything else: Thanks for the heads up. Good to know.
And every major Windows update have undo my setting to bring it back. I've reported it to MS, MS attempted to fix it (listed in some Windows 10 update) and they're still failing to fix it.
How about not doing it in the first place, period?
In both cases the views are largely correct; end users aren't the main or motivating purchasers for lots of the industry, their employers are, so the users literally are not the customers, and often have interests poorly aligned with the actual customers.
Thanks, I'm now out of tablet mode! But the fact that it took another person on the internet + a HowTo guide for someone who is a MSFT developer w/ 18+ years of experience using Windows to get me unstuck kind of makes my point...
I work in the Azure org, writing multi-platform dotnet core and C++.
Weird. The device should auto-switch between tablet and desktop mode whenever you dock the screen to the keyboard, and it's generally a feature very easy to notice (it also should have a switch in the notifications/actions bar). But I guess, it's not easy enough.
The notification icon isn't an intuitive place to find system controls like this. I almost never use the notification bar but every once in a while something like this happens.
I love windows, but multi-desktop is nicer on mac because it's all controlled with touchpad gestures. The way we (or I at least) interact with windows and apps makes sense that we can just see all apps as thumbnails and then drag them to any desktop we like
This. Also on Windows, all monitors switch desktops together whereas I really like being able to switch desktops on monitors independently, and I like being able to drag desktops between monitor which I seem to remember not working on Windows. And on Windows I can't drag to rearrange desktops. I don't know if rearranging desktops is possible at all.
I have had a Surface Book for a couple years now. And this definitely does not match my experience.
-The battery is great, virtually never have to plug it in. Can go a whole day working from home without power. Or even a whole weekend of light use. Although I have found that on occasion it does not sleep correctly when you close the lid, hitting the power button when closing the screen has prevented that problem. But I have never come back to a dead laptop, just a few percent less.
-I don't think I have seen a fullscreen metro app in...well a long time if ever. So not sure what apps you are using that this happens with.
-WSL has no gaps where I need it. I use it for Linux Web development all day long with no issues. Especially due to recent updates.
-Maybe I have been lucky, but I have never had an issue with windows update. Perhaps it is being more aggressive than normal.
-I just unpinned everything from the start menu, and haven't seen any ads for anything since I did. Am I missing them somewhere?
> Can go a whole day working from home without power
Perhaps mine has a defect, but I feel lucky if I can get 2-3 hours of solid work done.
> So not sure what apps you are using that this happens with.
The various windows settings are split between both modes and by default the settings window will open maximized. Also, there are two latest versions of OneNote (which is annoying) for example and the UWP one likes to open fullscreen. I think all UWP apps do.
> WSL has no gaps where I need it.
- I believe if you clone a git repo in WSL and then try to use git for windows or any windows app like VSCode or Visual Studio, it'll get very confused.
- Also I think I remember having several weird file permission issues.
- My WSL terminals open very slowly due to something in my bashrc I haven't pinned down (my terminals open lightning quick in iTerm2 or ubuntu.) And performance in WSL is a good deal slower than an ubuntu VM or native Windows.
> I just unpinned everything from the start menu
I'm sure this works, but there are enough annoying issues like this in default Windows 10 that it really hampers the experience.
The hardware is great, except for battery management.
The OS is stable and performant, but a usability shit show.
I feel like a lot of Mac users probably see beautiful, static screenshots of Windows 10, make the switch and then realize screenshots don't tell the usability story.
I won't even go into the occasional ads in the OS, the games and apps installed by default, and the fight to disable all the telemetry. All the while with Microsoft working against you and hiding and changing the settings around.
Windows historically was incredibly developer friendly, assuming that by "developer" you mean "application developer" instead of "web developer". That's part of the reason their OS became and maintained its dominance.
It is the distinction between developMENT friendly verses developER friendly. Windows is incredibly developMENT friendly in terms of writing software, but it hasn't historically been developER friendly (i.e. power user).
They've been doing a lot recently to address that, including the Power User Menu, "For Developer" Settings, WSL, Task View (multi-desktop), better multi-monitor support, etc.
MacOS still has advantages, but the gap has narrowed.
> but it hasn't historically been developER friendly (i.e. power user)
I have no idea on what basis you are making that assertion. I feel like until Windows 10, Windows enabled me as a user far more than any other contemporary OS.
I've still not gotten Linux to work well on my surface pro 4. There are some out of tree patches - but there's no fixing the poor wireless hw (well, you could use an USB dongle). In fairness wireless is flaky in win10 too on these.
But Linux does work - I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 with a custom kernel - display is pretty - pen is so-so under Linux.
I was hoping to use it w dark table and a couple of drawing programs under Linux - but so far I've never gotten it to the quite "just works" point (compared to say, a refurbished ThinkPad).
Isn't it up to Linux Distro's and hardware OEMs (Intel, Nvidia, etc) to make sure you have a smooth experience? Microsoft doesn't block you from installing Linux on their hardware, just as Apple doesn't, but in both cases neither Microsoft nor Apple do much to support Linux.
I believe the point of the question was to ask if drivers are readily available for the specific combination of hardware Microsoft uses, not to imply that Microsoft should support it.
In answer to that question: I'd stay well away from the Surface Book if you want to run Linux, too many proprietary "magic" drivers for the screen disconnection functionality.
The Surface Laptop uses fairly off-the-shelf hardware (shared by other ultra-portables) and you will *likely have a better overall experience.
I don't have experience doing a native Linux install on the Surface Book, but I use(d) VirtualBox and use Linux every day for development (on Surface Book and Mac). With virtualization technology being as advanced as it is, I don't think there is any appreciable performance difference to a native install assuming you have enough RAM for the extra OS.
Virtualization technology is advanced but not perfect. Some of my own programs are 2 or 3 times slower doing CPU stuff under virtualization than under the raw machine.
Depends what you're doing, honestly. Some software won't tolerate running off a network mount at all for various reasons, if so you're sunk.
Some is just slow because it's inefficient. It's been a while since I had to resort to this, but accessing a big svn checkout over cifs is so slow as to be useless.
> WSL still has some serious gaps and isn't as productive as Linux
I wonder how well Linux runs on (semi-)recent Surfaces.
I'm spoiled by the very good Linux support on Thinkpads, but recent Thinkpads are not what they used to be. OTOH Surface hardware is pretty pleasant, judging by the short periods when I had a chance to play with it.
No, I wouldn't say so. I almost begin to think that the competence of their hardware unit was above that of their software people. I remember them making good optical mouses once upon a time, but they in the end always have to make some kind of a bombshell mistake like that.
>Microsoft now has the best hardware lineup in the industry
No, their hardware people are incompetent. Until things above change, that will not be the case.
Aside from the battery issue you described, which is 100% spot on. Most of your other gripes sound like Windows 8 and would be resolved or different on Windows 10.
> Its battery management is horrible. I don't know if the hardware or the OS are more to blame for this. The worst part: I can pretty much expect that if I close the lid and open it some hours later the thing will be dead.
Often times web browsers are to blame for this. I have seen more than 1 browser keep my laptop from sleeping if there is some sort of embedded video content open in a tab somewhere.
The OS is limited to what the software running on it tells it to do.
On the flip side of this, I have also had pending Windows Updates keep my computer from going into hibernate. Because apparently that makes sense. :/
You can run the command
powercfg -requests
at an admin prompt to see what is preventing sleep. For example, right now Opera is keeping my machine from sleeping with an active WebRTC connection.
> - The pencil is a gimmick to me since the apps (like OneNote) are very poorly designed for serious work with a stylus.
I have done very serious work with a stylus in OneNote. It really depends on your use case. For most office work? Meh. For math class? OneNote + Stylus is an incredibly powerful combination.
> - WSL still has some serious gaps and isn't as productive as Linux / OSX for programming tasks.
I have been programming on Windows my whole life, no WSL. Right now I am doing NodeJS and React Native development. In the past I've done C++, Python, and C#. Obviously C# is best of class, but I rarely had issues with the others.
What I did miss from C++ was having access to the wide range of tools, such as Valgrind, that are widely supported in the *nix ecosystem.
The debugging tools on Windows are top notch, and I'd be more than willing to put a talented WinDBG user up against the equivalent on any another platform.
Windows is not some sort of developer wasteland. For nearly two decades, the majority of software written in the world was written by developers using Windows.
> - For example: My Surface Book just updated and now it's stuck on a Windows 8 looking home screen and I haven't yet figured out how to get back to my "normal" desktop.
You're in tablet mode, lower right corner, tap (or do a left swipe from off screen to on screen from the right side of your monitor) and deselect tablet mode.
Or un-dock and re-dock your keyboard, that should kick it into gear.
FWIW my mother loves tablet mode, and loves her touch screen. She found tablet mode on her own and is rather annoyed when Windows exits it. The feature is not made made for us, it is made for consumers who have only a few apps open, and who naturally want to poke at their screen.
> - Windows update continues to be a bad experience.
It is 30 minutes or less once a month, with much of the work done in the background now days. Heck the monthly security patches often take less than 5 minutes to install end to end.
The large feature patches can be a nightmare, but major version revs aren't fun anywhere, user forums for all major desktop OSs are full of complaints about things that break during major patches, Linux, Windows, and macOS. Windows has an order of magnitude more users, there is an order of magnitude more complaints.
Also if you at at Microsoft, with MSIT managed hardware, you are not getting the end user upgrade experience. You are getting MSIT's upgrade experience, some of their releases have been super buggy messes, while other times they have gone the extra mile to make the internal upgrade experience better. On top of all that, odds are you are signed up to one of their beta-testing tracks, so getting pushed a buggy internal release, and then a fix for that buggy internal release a few days later, is not going to be the best experience.
Then again my previous smart phone was an LG made Nexus 5x, which literally had a non-trivial chance of hard locking/bricking itself after rebooting for updates, so my expectations for OS updates may be a bit low.
> - Windows is still awful at multi-desktop workflows.
Install one of the utilities[0][1] that add more multi-desktop shortcuts. The built in ones are quite anemic, especially compared to the otherwise awesome shortcuts for managing windows and multiple monitors. (Related, I actually wonder if at some point the global shortcut namespace is becoming too crowded, I do have problems finding new unique key combinations for global shortcuts!)
None of your actual complaints appear to be about the Surface Book, which is odd, because, at least the first generation Surface Book, is a rather buggy piece of hardware! My friends who worked on it or who worked with the teams that made it, were not recommending it to their friends/family.
> Often times web browsers are to blame for this. I have seen more than 1 browser keep my laptop from sleeping if there is some sort of embedded video content open in a tab somewhere.
I use Chrome and the same electron apps (like Teams and VSCode) on both my macbook and surface book. macOS still handles this much better.
> I have done very serious work with a stylus in OneNote [...]
That's good to know. Maybe I'll try it again if I'm doing something similar. I tried to use it for software diagrams and had a bad experience.
> Windows is not some sort of developer wasteland.
This is true. I started my development career using Visual Studio and powershell, but I've since moved to a *nix style of programming and I feel more productive for it. Right now I'm writing mostly C++ with some C# and TS.
> Also if you at at Microsoft, with MSIT managed hardware, you are not getting the end user upgrade experience
You're right, I'll update my original comment to make this clear.
> Install one of the utilities[0][1] that add more multi-desktop shortcuts.
Thanks, I'll try this. It's a bummer the out of box experience isn't better.
> None of your actual complaints appear to be about the Surface Book
I have had hardware issues around going into/out of tablet mode. It seems to run hotter and louder than I would have expected. The hardware is bulky (especially with that hinge.) Battery life (not just the lack of suspend) isn't great. Trackpad isn't as smooth as a mac. But you're right, those are lower order to me than the Windows issues.
Right. Because you personally don't find the touchbar useful/find it actively worse than the physical keys it replaces, and the comment you replied to only detailed a dozen or more things that they personally find better, the entire account must be dismissed.
This is personal preference. I just bought a 13” mbp with the touchbar and I’m not complaining at all.
Whenever I was to use the standard F keys on the mid-2015 mbp, I had to look at them before pressing anyway. No change in workflow.
I use a MBP at work and just bought a Surface Book 2 to use for side projects. It's everything I want a MBP to be, good battery life (you can go almost a full day on a single charge), a touch screen that works exceedingly well, and function keys that are...keys. Using the stylus also changes your workflow, instead of screen shotting, opening in preview, and annotating, you just kind of draw on the screen and share the image.
Only major downside I've run into is that there do not seem to be any native terminals for Windows that even come close to rivaling iTerm 2. Cmdr is decent, but has some weirdness around colors and ligatures; Hyper is also decent, but has some rough edges. Suspect that'll change as more devs start needing decent *nix environments to develop on.
Yeah, completely agree on my Surface Book being the MBP I wanted to buy Great hardware (including touchpad and keyboard), Win 10 and WSL have come a long way, and the touchscreen and stylus option became part of my workflow much quicker than I expected. Probably the best laptop I've ever owned, including the 2010-2015 era 15" MBPs.
Regarding native terminals, I've had the best success with ConEmu set up to drop into WSL zsh by default. Easy to launch into cmd or powershell for Windows native stuff to boot.
I'm building a terminal for Windows, part terminal envy and part learning Direct2D. It's currently bloody fast, renders minimally (so battery-friendly), has ligature and color font support and works in remote sessions (read: where there isn't a GPU available). It isn't yet a terminal, though - I'm still working on the VT parser.
The terminal situation will hopefully improve shortly; Microsoft just recently overhauled their console API with a backwards compatible API that behaves much closer to how *NIX works.
It's hilarious to see Microsoft educate their audience about things Unix and Linux users have take for granted for a long time. Like leaving their parallel universe after all those decades. Also interesting to see their jumping through hoops to get there.
Who said wrong? I think it's funny to see. Loosen up downvoters.
It's not like Unix was hidden somewhere for the last 50 years. It's just that Windows users didn't seem to bother. For what it's worth the OS course at my former university did cover Unix and NT (based on the Stallings book).
Also moved from Mac to Surface, 2 years ago. Used iterm2, which I believe is one of the highest quality pieces of software ever made. Before that gnome terminal pn various Linux OSs.
I regularly check out ConEmu, Hyper, Alacritty, etc for their current state on Windows (cmder isn't a terminal, but it includes ConEmu which is).
I might add vscode to this. You probably don't want it running solely as a terminal, but I've become used to it while developing and it's pretty nice on both Windows and Macos.
This is a bit of a terrible hack, but what I do is install an X server for Windows (I use VcXsrv, but there's a couple options), then from WSL launch Gnome terminal or whichever terminal emulator you like from Linux.
After 16 years on MacBook Pros (and PowerBooks before that), I bought a Surface Book 2 earlier this year because the 2016 MBP 15" was such a lemon for me.
Like others have said, the Surface Book hardware is what I wish the 2016 MBP had been. I'm perfectly happy with the OS as well. Haven't seen BSODs or forced bloatware. My new work-provided MacBook Pro is more fickle with occasional wakeup problems. Battery life on the Surface Book 2 feels on par or better than the MBP.
The Linux subsystem works well enough for me. Today you can run unmodified Ubuntu binaries on Windows with zero effort -- this has been pretty mind-blowing because my mental image of Windows is mostly from XP and before.
But as some others also mentioned, Win32 terminal options are not that great. Terminals are still stuck in the old Windows days: tiny toolbars, lots of options in endless GUI menus, weird usability howlers hiding in the corners. The feel of running those Linux binaries isn't 100% up there with a Mac, even though I prefer Linux to Darwin. Here's a business opportunity for someone — a Windows terminal for us Mac refugees?
This is all strictly in my experience ... but anecdotally, colleagues and friends have similar experiences.
BSOD tended to be more in those halcyon days of a very diverse and disparate OEM ecosystem ... similar to what we have with Android nowadays. But the Dells of the world are pretty solid with both stability and support these days. This is of course not to mention the first party stuff (surface et al).
Bloatware ... this was another thing that was exacerbated by the runaway OEM ecosystem. It was the wild west, and they loaded anything and everything on that hardware. Things are a lot more streamlined these days IMO.
As for updates ... with the latest windows, you can schedule when the update happens. So just tell your PC to update when you're sleeping when the notification pops up. Updates will always be a thing, but this makes it easy to work around.
I've been running the same non-BigOEM Win7 laptop at home for nearly 7 years now. Don't think I've seen a single BSOD in all that time. Windows/PC definitely has its annoyances, but I think this one is Of The Past now.
The 2007-vintage MBP that preceded it suffered DVD drive failure, incurable sleep mode apnea, and at one point a meltdown that needed a complete motherboard replacement. Maybe I was just unlucky, but I was not at all inclined to try another one.
I don't know ... maybe I reboot more often than you do? While I've definitely been annoyed by this in the past ... I feel like it hasn't happened or been a problem for a long while for me.
I haven't used a MBP. However, I do own a Surface Book 2. I have never received a BSOD, and AFAIK it has never executed an update without my permission. BSOD was most commonly a driver panicking the kernel, and that doesn't happen often with MS hardware. It's also a lot less common now in general, because MS has hardened Windows against drivers panicking.
As far as bloatware goes, it does have the crap like Candy Crush or whatever in my start menu, even though I have never touched that game on any platform. But there aren't really a lot of installed applications that you wouldn't expect to be present in an OS.
If you do switch, take some time to learn PowerShell. Yes, it's not a -nix command line environment. It follows a completely different paradigm; it's object-oriented instead of text-oriented. But there is tremendous power there, if you learn to harness it. And if you really do need your -nix command line, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Surface Pro 3, 4, and Surface Book were both BSODing like crazy for a long time after launch, out of the box. It was so bad that MS publicly apologized. Wireless problems as well.
So, I haven't transitions, rather I've augmented. I have a MBP and recently purchased a Surface Go as my secondary device.
The Surface Go work fantastically, but I still run into a lot of UX/UI issues deeply entrenched into the Windows way of doing things.
I think the most succinct example is setting management - particularly with bluetooth. Windows has this slide out with quick access to important setting like Wifi, Bluetooth, etc. Similar to Android's setting center.
Long pressing the Bluetooth icons opens a secondary menu (basically treats it like a right click) with a singular option to take you to Bluetooth settings. On Android, a long press takes you directly to the Bluetooth settings because they know that's what you're looking to do.
That's not a deal breaker, but it's certainly a clear example of how MS still hasn't stepped up it's UI game.
----
On the flip side, I'm finding all sorts of stupid issues with my Mac lately. It seems like every new OS upgrade brings a slew of new problems.
I went into the purchase with very clear expectations about what I'd be using it for. It's not a full blown laptop (like it's Pro cousins), it's a tablet/netbook. I'll browse the web, do like document work, and watch Netflix on it. I won't be multitasking or doing anything crazy.
For me, it's basically a digital notebook which is exactly what I want it to be.
Surface book can't draw enough power from its own brick to power its video card at full draw, so when doing graphics intensive stuff the battery drains.
Other than that, it's a dream machine, minus that I hate working in windows. Usually will just work in a VM in virtual box with Debian. I can't get wsl to work well for me - for example, I'll be using git in there, but vscode will be open directly in windows, and get super confused with it's own git implementation.
The reason I went with the surface like was stylus+touchpad. I'm a huge annotator and handwritten note taker. The better platform for this turned out to be thinkpad x1 yoga, cause I could just install Ubuntu natively.
Edit: by the way, windows update has fucked me more than any human. That was a big reason to switch off for me. That and Candy crush.
A master woodworker will buy a tool that is appropriate for the job he needs to complete. Buying a computer should be the same, don't buy a tool and try to find a job for it, realize what you need to accomplish and buy the tool that will help you get it done. One reason I do not buy apple is that they try to tell me how I should be using a computer, vs me buying a computer to do what I need/want to do with it. We've had extremely successful implementations of the surface pro with managers and executives, but not with developers.
I was a PC user long ago, and I moved to mac _because_ it felt like a tool built by a master woodworker (so to speak) as both a general user and a dev. When I first got any PC, I always had to do a fresh install of the OS to clean out the adware, regularly run some cleaner on the registry, and if it was a laptop, it was unpredictable what would happen if I closed the screen to name just a handful of sources of frustration.
When I tried a mac, it really "just worked". You get it, you open it, and you're running. If you need to, close it, and pick up where you left off when you open it next. My current MBP is 4 years old and feels as snappy as day 1, and I've had no part in maintaining that. As a dev, I have a *nix environment right out of the box, which is incredibly helpful.
I'm hoping Microsoft has finally relieved some of those frustrations and gotten these things right as well.
We have wildly different experiences to OS X. It’s never “just worked” for me and it crashes often. I love my 12” MacBook but OS X just isn’t like it used to be. It used to be rock solid. Never crash. Always fast. But it really feels like it’s becoming windows xp. Windows 10 runs better on my 12 MacBook than OS X... I do miss my original retina MacBook tho. That was the last true good laptop Apple made.
Sorry to hear that! I’ve definitely noticed a steady decline in the joy I experience with macOS with newer updates (i really miss Spaces), but it’s still head and shoulders above any experience I had with windows.
I disagree. I was a Linux guy before I was a Mac guy and now I find myself a Windows guy.
My Surface Book is solid hardware with a great keyboard, all-day battery, etc. WSL is to the point where there is less weirdness building libraries in WSL than there is on the Mac.
Its not perfect, but the perfect machine doesn't exist.
I find that WSL requires a ton of hacks and workarounds to emulate a real Unix system. For example, I need to run Docker containers.
To do that, I install docker in WSL, then I have to run a Go binary I compiled as root, that lets WSL talk to Windows pipes, which then talks to Docker for Windows.
WSL makes using Windows somewhat tolerable, but it's not even close to having a regular old Unix.
I am using Docker for Windows, the problem I'm solving is I want to produce Docker images from within my WSL. I don't want to do all my work using vim/tmux from within WSL, only to open a Powershell window to actually build the container.
So I have to set up the strange hack I described in order to use docker inside WSL as a client to Docker for Windows.
Since WSL debuted, this is a rather debatable claim. WSL provides a really nice interface and I never had issues except doing the most obscure things (which were buggy on nix too).
Windows treats you like the product now, it's not your device. Try to defer an update (which takes forever) or dial back the information they get sent. It's just not going to happen
Not to mention the constant battle with windows defender, which slows npm installs and webpack compiles to an absolute crawl due to the large number of filesystem requests, won't respect a whitelist, and re-enables itself every 4-24 hours depending on the phase of the moon
> Not to mention the constant battle with windows defender, which slows npm installs and webpack compiles to an absolute crawl due to the large number of filesystem requests, won't respect a whitelist, and re-enables itself every 4-24 hours depending on the phase of the moon
I'm not a huge fan of Defender (although it is less like malware than most anti-viruses I've been forced to use), but npm and webpack are not blameless here. It's completely flipping absurd how many tens of thousands of files a medium size front-end project that uses these technologies spawns and kills every time it is rebuilt. I'm tempted to RAM-disk those folders, because even with fast SSDs, IO speed becomes a gating factor in my workflow.
Quite a few years back, someone did a test compiling a large project on Windows, and on a Linux VM running on that same Windows box, all using the same compiler tool chain.
The Linux VM compiled the project faster. :/
The conclusion was that NTFS may have issues with thousands upon thousands of small files.
I'd really like to see an updated comparison, it'd be a fun set of benchmarks to run and investigate.
Honestly Microsoft's hardware has been a rocky road. I own a Surface Pro 3 and Surface Book, and in both cases they were unstable for almost six months until receiving firmware and driver updates.
After they were patched they've been stable as a rock and "just work." But it has felt like Microsoft shipped half baked hardware.
Plus while Windows 10 is stable, it feels like a moving target with large feature patches that also don't always feel fully baked.
In-spite of the above I really like Microsoft's hardware and oddly would recommend it. It is definitely heading in a good direction, but isn't up to the height of Apple's "just works" period (which I don't believe we're still in).
I have a Mac now, use Windows regularly, and used a Surface a while back. I can't comment on modern Surface hardware, but I can comment on my feeling bouncing between ecosystems.
I use Windows because it can do more: it can play games, it can do VR stuff, it can run almost any program.
However I prefer using a Mac when I can because it feels like the people who made it actually care about attention to details and design (even when they fail).
With Windows it feels like elegance and great design is never a core priority until it measurably begins to damage metrics. Popups will constantly be telling you about the newest feature with no thought for how that might be distracting you or interrupting your flow as a user. You can turn off most of these popups, but it's on a case by case basis and they're always introducing more.
Something like "settings" in Windows is a convoluted mess of generations of settings pages, presumably kept this way under a "If it's not broke, don't fix it" mindset.
Windows gradually is peeling control away from the user, and not in an Apple "we know best" kind of way. Things like the login screen default to an image chosen by Microsoft each day, which is actually kind of cool! The lame thing is that there are popups explaining the newest thing they want to advertise, or how to use some Windows feature. I virtually always ignore these, but they certainly don't make me excited about buying a $1,000+ Surface just to see ads on the lock screen of my premium device each day.
Updates in Windows have lately felt as if you're dealing with a pushy negotiator and you never know what the terms you agreed to actually are. The updates feel like they serve Microsoft's purposes, not yours, if only because of how they try to trick you into agreeing to them. Meanwhile the language of the updates attempts to sound friendly, but it comes across as insultingly disingenuous because of the actual behavior of the UX. They've slowly improved this experience, but only after countless negative news articles.
And then the computer comes with a bunch of bloatware preinstalled. Sure it's not as bad as buying a laptop used to be, but it's discouraging because Surfaces are meant to feel like premium products. Now Windows 10 comes with a bunch of lame games installed and by default put on your start menu. You have to cleanup the start menu when you get the computer.
There are dozens of further examples I can cite, but what I'm getting at here is Windows as an operating system doesn't feel like a personal elegant operating system to be paired with a premium device.
I switched from a Macbook Pro to a Surface Book a few years back. It was, and probably will remain, the worst technical decision I've made. The hardware, drivers, and dock were had death by 1000 cut type glitches. Additionally, I (and a few others who owned one) experienced out of warranty hardware failures. For me it was a defective latch/hinge. Other's had the screen peel off the front (yes I said peel off). I know they've since improved things, but I'm still not really impressed. I sold it and switched back to a Macbook Pro this past year and am not looking back.
I have a surface pro 3 right next to a x1carbon, often my wireless goes on on the surface and it is increasingly frustrating. That being said, I like the surface, not a fan of the keyboard but it is very portable and powerful for its size with great battery time. the keyboard is becoming more and more frustrating but I am a very picky person (I've had it for 2 years now) I run a couple vms at the same time to do some work as well.
because of the keyboard I will likely get a dell latitude or xps series next if I need a new laptop. otherwise, I am sticking to my full desktop keyboard :-)
> I still hear horror stories about BSOD, bloatware, and the surprise update you can't back out of that I'd want to return to far less.
Everyone's experience is going to be different because Windows doesn't benefit from the vertical integration that MacOS does.
Bloatware is 100% an OEM issue and so Microsoft's Surface line doesn't suffer since MS is the OEM. There is a "Signature Edition" of Windows that some OEMs will put on systems that's bloatware free however it's not widely deployed because OEMs actually receive money to preinstall bloatware. If you want the SE edition you'll end up paying more and have limited options.
I honestly can't remember the last time I got a BSOD on any of the Win7 based or Win10 based PCs or Servers I use. Again that's highly dependent on a number of factors like hardware, drivers, and even the cleanliness of the PC both on software and hardware fronts.
The surprise update you can't back out of is a conflation of a couple things and sort of true but also false. The update policy for Windows 10 has changed a lot since it's inception but the crux is that a lot of people are upset that updates are automatic and not easily/entirely disabled.
As of today Windows 10 will automatically install updates and will reboot itself when necessary. Reboots aren't random, you define active hours where a reboot will 100% not occur. Reboots will not occur without first showing a notification and giving you the opportunity to delay/postpone the reboot. A reboot can be delayed for up to 5 days and you can actually schedule a specific day/time for the reboot to occur. There is a setting to enable enhanced notifications around updates and scheduled reboots. You can pause updates for 35 days after which a forced update occurs.
It is complicated if you want it to be but the default settings work well. The only setting I change is to tell it to update other software on my system in addition to Windows. I've never had a PC reboot on me unexpectedly or disruptively, I have a CAD/CAM box that I RDC into and it's evident that it has rebooted itself but it's not disruptive to my workflow.
My only real gripe is that my Laptop will become a lap warmer that sounds like a vacuum randomly when updates are installed.
>A reboot can be delayed for up to 5 days and you can actually schedule a specific day/time for the reboot to occur. There is a setting to enable enhanced notifications around updates and scheduled reboots. You can pause updates for 35 days after which a forced update occurs.
And that's why 9 out of 10 people turn them off for good.
And because of people not installing security updates because of that, Windows is such attractive target as a botnet breeding ground.
> And that's why 9 out of 10 people turn them off for good.
What are you even talking about?
This policy is new to Windows 10 and was introduced in response to the botnet problem.
The fact is that people disabled automatic updates in past versions of Windows which lead to the botnet problems because unpatched Windows machines were easy targets.
People also failed to reup their AV software so Microsoft introduced Windows Defender which is now free on Windows 10.
People also would install exes blindly so Microsoft introduced UAC.
About people seeing the nag popup and following whatever "howto" to disable it they find.
Not less important, people running warez Windows (which, as a simple fact, are a majority outside US and Western Europe) are afraid that the next update will can their hack.
To somebody not computer literate "an update" is just something that makes their computer slow, and reboots it for update just in time before somebody's project deadline :)
People got so conditioned over the years by that, that they download one of countless "update disablers" as a knee jerk reaction to anything resembling update popup now.
Microsoft started providing security updates regardless of activation status to all versions of Windows from XP forward because of the botnet problem years ago.
Can anyone who's recently transitioned to a Surface from a MacBook Pro / Air testify to the validity of this statement?
Yes, I made the jump a few months ago and am very happy. I would even say the whole Surface range is a glimpse of what Macs would be if Jobs was still alive. WSL is brilliant, totally replaced VMs in my use cases. 3:2 screen as well.
We have had a lot of quality problems with the SP3. The device is not bad but I think MS needs a few more years ironing out a lot of little details. When I look at my Macbook it still goes strong after 5 years and I think that's because Apple has been in the hardware business for long enough to have some serious experience.
I recently bought a Huawei (yeah, I know) MateBook X Pro, having used Mac laptops almost exclusively since the iBook G4. My only complaint with the hardware (drivers?) is that two-finger scrolling on the otherwise decent trackpad isn't nearly as smooth as on a MacBook.
My biggest problem is actually connecting mail, calendar, and contacts to Google. Whereas it works out of the box on my Macs, I have not been able to get them working in Windows 10. I've fiddled with 2-Step Verification and Allow less secure apps. I can get mail working over IMAP by enabling 2-Step Verification and using an application-specific password, but I've had no luck with calendar or contacts.
I presume I would have the same problem with Microsoft hardware.
I recently got a Huawei Matebook X Pro for work and I love the thing. The touch pad scrolling isn't smooth as the Apple one like you mentioned, but the tracking is great otherwise and gestures work well. Keyboard is nice, 3k screen is nice, usb-c + usb-a is nice, sd slot, etc...
It's stupid amounts of light and cheap for the amount of power and features. I think they'd be a lot more popular if they advertised better.
My only complaints are the camera placement and the the cooling. I like that the screen is so thin and has almost no bezel so I understand why they put the camera in the keyboard, it's just impractical for Skype which is at odds with the amazing call audio quality from the built in mics (yes, multiple, 4 of them). The cooling also leaves a bit to be desired, though http://bradshacks.com/matebook-x-pro-throttling/ has some good info on augmenting that if you feel like doing a little light hacking. I don't think it's any worse than the latest macbooks, I just think it could be better in both cases.
I've got 2fa on, mail and calendar on Windows 10 work flawlessly. It had me run through the standard Google OAuth process for both, didn't need an app specific password.
No experience with contacts however, I don't use it. Though, I just turned it on and it automatically offered to import from both my Google and MSFT account (which would seem that the logins are global instead of being app specific).
I was in your position, but I bought new MacBook Pro 13". After some resistance I actually love it. I have to go back to my old laptop because some old work infrastructure is there, I really don't like it anymore. I actually like & use touch bar. This is my personal experience, I didn't think I have it.
And in comparison, I have Windows installed on it too via bootcamp. I used it for 4-8 hours a day for last months for doing work. It's just awful. Working on macOS for many years really made me forget all the little things we're getting for granted.
- Windows frequently has bad touchscreen support. I've encountered many fullscreen games where a click can only be sent via a double-touch or double-pen-tap. It's phenomenally hard to click through text in story-driven games.
- The machine does not stay asleep at all (that or I've misunderstood what the lock button is intended for).
# Hardware problems:
- The machine electrocutes you whilst charging.
# Age / software / hardware problems:
- Recently (I think following Win10 April 2018 Creators Update), it has been BSoDing extremely frequently. i.e. within 5 minutes of startup, during basic usage.
I used a Surface Book 2 for about an year and my experience was not great. Three main issues ruined my experience of what seemed like pretty solid hardware:
- Almost every time my Surface failed to wake up from sleep and I had to force restart it.
- Erratic Wifi problems. Windows 10 would fail to connect to Wifi sometimes after a restart and I had to disable and re-enable adapter every time.
- External Display always seemed to hazy and had scaling issues. I have to admit I never tried hard enough to see if it needed a special display driver my external Samsung curved monitor.
Windows still has the following annoyances
1. Advertisements for One Drive storage in windows explorer.
2. Advertisements for Candy Crush and other games in start menu.
3. Advertisements and nag prompts to try Edge browser when you attempt to download chrome or switch your default browser.
4. Collects lots of telemetry.
Yes, most of the above issues can be solved by digging into the settings and turning them off but they shouldn't exist in the first place.
I'm on a 2014 MBP as well, and dreading the same transition. Until now I've been eyeing the Dell XP 13 as my next machine, but the Surface Laptop 2 also looks very compelling. Anyone know what the port story is? Looks to be USB-C-free, which I'm quite okay with, but I don't know if that's a MDP or Thunderbolt on there.
I have a Macbook Air and got the Surface Book 2 and it has been great. Amazing battery life. I can leave it sitting around, come back and pick up where I've left off at. I can also use it as a tablet, I use it the most to watch Netflix and Hulu. I can also download Nextflix shows and movies for offline consumption due to them being apps.
It's just not that way with the Surface lineup, unfortunately.
The trackpad is not quite good enough, the hardware glitches, the video card crashes, etc etc etc. All the little issues that you almost never see from Macs.
I tried to like my Surface Book, but I went back to Mac. I hate the touchbar, but otherwise it's what I need.
Just use the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). I was able to install Ubuntu 18.04, do "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade", install additional packages, all on Windows 10. I also managed to compile and run on Linux/Ubuntu/WSL the SageMath package (a complicated piece of Math software complete with Jupyter, Python 2.7, Python numpy, scipy, etc., packages, lots of C/C++/Fortran libraries, other math products/libraries, and an integrated web server (Django I believe)) ... and it ran just fine under Ubuntu-on-Windows just like native Ubuntu. It was as almost as easy as a macOS/Homebrew install.
What about the desktop environment? How does this work? I don't know anything about how WSL works, but what I know is that I don't want to use Ubuntu and apt, and I don't want to use Windows' window manager and desktop environment.
IMHO, "it just works" has never applied to Windows and probably never will. The arcane UX changes for the sake of change, arbitrary removal/renaming of features/actions/applications...
My favorite random "made it worse" change in Windows 10 is that with multiple monitors, your cursor gets stuck at the top/bottom corners between the two monitors, causing me to frequently click the Close "X" on the program/window I have open, because I was actually trying to click something on the monitor to the right. It doesn't matter if you were moving the mouse cursor very quickly. There's no registry flag for this, so the only known workaround is to run some 3rd-party application 24/7 which will take over the cursor position to nudge it over if you hit the edge.
>One final thought: the biggest point of discussion around these new devices is the lack of USB-C on modern devices. While I agree with this point, I suspect that the decision was made because consumers outside of our industry simply don't care, and the transition period sucks -- dongles galore and little to show for it.
Well it's not only that they don't care, they just don't know yet. But they will care and know after they get new gadgets then they'll start wondering why they need adaptors or different chargers for their computers.
That argument was fine with the previous models, but in 2018 all new gadgets use USB-C and that will be the norm from now on. I was thinking on getting one of their products, but this really is a turn off for me, since if I buy a computer today I expect to use it for at least 5 years (like my current 2013 MacBook Pro) and I don't see myself carrying around adapters in 2023.
USB-C ports are an active negative for me. I do not care to have them at all - I still don't own a single device that would use a USB-C port, while I have mountains of USB-A devices that will last for a length of time between 5 more years or until the earth is engulfed by the sun. I also like having dedicated power and display ports (HDMI-out is a requirement for the foreseeable future) as well, which are obvious and cannot have anything else stuffed into them.
>I also like having dedicated power and display ports (HDMI-out is a requirement for the foreseeable future) as well, which are obvious and cannot have anything else stuffed into them
I don't understand this argument when any of the ports would work. If USB C can handle power, data transfer, video, audio, etc. and you had multiple USB C ports on a device then any one of them would work for any use. That's such an easier system then having a bunch of different cords and ports.
Not all USB C ports are equal. Some have higher speed potential than others. Some have higher power providing/consumption potential than others. Some carry additional protocols (looking at you, Thunderbolt) that are only available on some ports.
Cables are in an even worse place - if your cable actually lives up to its stated capabilities (and the capabilities are as vastly different as the ports above), it's in the minority.
Not all USB C ports are equal. Some have higher speed potential than others. Some have higher power providing/consumption potential than others. Some carry additional protocols (looking at you, Thunderbolt) that are only available on some ports.
Any output that I'm going to hook up to is going to have an HDMI connection, and I would bet strongly that that is going to be the case for at least a decade. And I've got dozens of perfectly good HDMI cables kicking around.
As far as power, my understanding is that generally only a subset of the USB-C ports on a device will be rated for full voltage charging. If there's a power cord with it's own port, then you can't screw that up. You can also supply more power than the USB-C standard is rated for, which is nice if you have a real workstation rather than a lil 13" ultrabook.
The ideal would be that any old port can do anything, but I'm not holding my breath on that being a reality.
I have my workstation setup to plug in a single USB-C port that charges my laptop and drives my monitor, headphones, keyboard, mouse and a USB-A hub.
To me USB-C is a god send. I don't understand why people have such negative reactions to it.
Granted, I'm a Linux User so I stay away from both Mac and Windows boxes, and I wouldn't use either a Surface or an MBP due to a lack of Linux support. But I couldn't be more happy with the USB-C and the rest of the hardware of my Lenovo ThinkPad.
If you get a new laptop with USB-C, what are the chances of that setup working? How much time did you have to spend shopping to find a USB-C docking thingie that works with your laptop?
HDMI isn't perfect, but it works almost all the time, with any source connected to any display; especially if you limit to computers outputting to monitors, so you can ignore the DRM garbage. To my knowledge there's at least 3 ways to output video over USB-C (actually usb, alternative mode display port, alternate mode hdmi), and I wouldn't be surprised if there's more. If you pick the wrong modes, your docking station is going to be useless later -- just like a traditional docking station used to be.
Not to mention that a separate power port allows Microsoft to continue their magnetic power adapter, who's passing in Apple design is still oft maligned...
And the Surface Book 2 does have a USB-C connector and can even charge off of it.
Why is having a "dedicated" HDMI port a good thing?
Do you understand that USB-C is also an HDMI port and you just need a USB-C to HDMI cable if your monitor/tv doesn't have yet the USB-C port (which they are starting to come with)?
What's so good about having a port that can only serve one purpose and not be generic purpose?
What if you want to connect two monitors to a computer?
What if instead of a HDMI port you need to plug another Ethernet cable or another USB hard drive?
Are we going back to the times where we had a single serial port at the back and we used those switchers (mechanical ones, for those who remember the stuff)?
> Do you understand that USB-C is also an HDMI port and you just need a USB-C to HDMI cable if your monitor/tv doesn't have yet the USB-C port (which they are starting to come with)?
Yes. But I have tons of perfectly good legacy equipment, and no incentive to go buy a whole raft of new cable or dongles.
> What's so good about having a port that can only serve one purpose and not be generic purpose?
In an ideal world, sure. But in the real world, we've already got a clusterfuck of different cables and ports that all say that they are USB-C on the tin, but have wildly different capabilities in practice. If I've got ports that are special purpose, they might as well advertise the fact - Ethernet goes in the RJ45, display out goes in the HDMI, power goes into the power adapter.
Of course I also like having lots of ports, so in addition to power, HDMI, Ethernet, 3.5mm audio in and out, SD card reader, I look for 4-6 USB A ports. A 17" screen and a dedicated graphics card are nice. I'm not really a ultrabook person...
Adapters for what? It's not exactly difficult to find a USB-A to USB-C cables. Are there some modern devices that ONLY work with USB-C cables? Sure there are advantages (faster charging), but that's about it.
The key feature keeping me in Apple’s ecosystem is their unwavering embrace of privacy. I think this matters to more high-end consumers than many people realise. If Microsoft deployed features that made their devices (and culture) convincingly impenetrable, I’d switch.
The key feature keeping me in Apple’s ecosystem is their unwavering embrace of privacy.
But so do Linux and BSD. A stellar laptop with good Linux support may be enough for me to jump ship. I have been a Mac user since 2007, but it is clear that Apple does not really care about the Mac anymore. They will keep the Mac alive to continue to take the revenue and to have an iOS development machine. The Mac Mini has gone downhill since the 2012 model, the MacBook Pro has been quite bad since the 2016 (I have one and dislike it), the MacBook Air is great as it ever was, but is effectively early 2010s technology when it comes to the screen. On the software side, they are not really fostering the Mac ISV ecosystem anymore.
macOS is still great, because Apple was so far ahead when they stopped caring (2012 or so). But the great stagnation has already gone on for half a decade or so.
I am not a Windows user, but at least Microsoft cares about their Surface lineup.
I would really love a go to for this, but System76 are still bound by what Clevo makes. Lots of it just isn't that interesting. Clevo, from what I see, is a specs first company, but I think we're a bit beyond that now. I'm finding myself more and more interested in battery life, weight, and a good keyboard. This is already hard enough to find in laptops as is, let alone in Clevo's range
edit: I tried Dell's keyboard on the XPS and immediately disliked it. I don't think the developer ed would have different hardware in this respect.
I enjoy having windows as a machine for gaming and hacking, but WSL feels slow. Simple things like compiling and running watchers/servers for local changes.
What's the recommended approach for (non-visual-studio) coding larger projects? Install Linux on another partition? Use native binaries and forget about WSL?
Fwiw I like working in NeoVim and it's been great in WSL-terminal, overall I'm happy with that route - but the slowness is annoying...
For watchers and servers I use native nodejs/gulp/webpack (no WSL), apache and for code edition I'm more than happy with Sublime Text with a bunch of plugins.
Does Microsoft hardware have a decent trackpad, unlike all other PC laptops? My MacBook trackpad is great and I'm baffled as to why PCs can't replicate it.
Windows trackpads in mid-range or better laptops have been every bit as good as their Mac equivalent for several years now, in my opinion. Unless you think Force Touch is something desirable on a trackpad, in which case you'll be disappointed.
Surface is a weird hybrid of laptop and tablet, and I haven't been impressed by its floppy keyboard or tiny trackpad. A Lenovo X1 Carbon, on the other hand, is just incredible.
> Surface is a weird hybrid of laptop and tablet, and I haven't been impressed by its floppy keyboard
I agree, but only as far as the Surface Pro/Go are concerned. The Surface Book and Surface Laptop have no such issues, and have a very good keyboard feel.
I don't currently recommend a Surface Pro or Go for that reason. I will happily recommend the Book or Surface Laptop however.
I agree, I definitely meant to refer only to the Surface Pro.
I wish the Surface Laptop had USB-C, and I'm not a fan of how expensive the Surface Book is, but I recognize the Surface Book might be awesome for certain people.
Surfacebook. Absolutely. Its as good as my old MBP if not better. Laptop, not so much, but that's understandable since its not a real attached trackpad.
a. Fix IO overheads - things like cloning git repositories, copying directories with several thousands of small files, compilation are all much slower on Windows.
proper terminal APIs are coming in w10 october update, so then we will see how a real win10 terminal would work, and not just another cmd reskin as it has always been...
What about IO? I half suspect its the file notification apis that cause the slowness (since disabling antivirus seems to help a fair amount) but would love to hear more from people in the know. What are the things standing between how things are now and matching linux on the time it takes to git clone a large repo + compile it.
Hardware is the easy part. The software is where the "soul" lies. Microsoft for the most part, has always had descent hardware - its the software that causes them to be unpleasent and unreliable to use.
Glad Microsoft is catching up, competition is always good for us. But they are still severely lacking in the software department imo. It's just too complicated (see below) and on top of that the disregard for privacy and including ads in the OS is a no-go.
Small anecdote: Last time I had windows 10 installed on my MBP, the screen was funnily dark, although set to 100% brightness via the corresponding keys. Searching deep down in the system settings I found something like 2-3 different settings (power saving settings, profiles etc) which COULD have affected screen brightness, but weren't the culprit. Took me a good couple minutes to dig through the new metro settings app and then the older settings menus to find the right option.
Now, it might have been my Bootcamp installation which was configured incorrectly so it was more vetted towards saving power, still doesn't matter: the settings shouldn't be so complicated. It's not really close to "it just works". On mac, the user-facing system architecture is much more comprehensive and easy to figure out.
I thought it was a 0/10. The ones with the felt surface required tearing apart the entire unit in a totally non-repairable way.
The laptops have actual bodies and you should be able to take them apart. I'd wait until Dave2D does a review as he almost always includes opening the laptop.
Is someone honestly referring to a laptop that literally cannot be repaired as "the best hardware"?
It's not even possible to replace the battery in the Surface Laptop.
>According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.”
That is true. It should be noted, that there aren't many in the ultra-portable/ultrabook range which are repairable. Even looking at Thinkpads, the ultra-portable models aren't repairable, but the more traditional form factors (like the T, P, ranges) remain so.
At some point in the thinner/lighter push physics start to dictate what you have to give up to get it. In this case we're talking all soldered/glued parts made to order to fit into the space available.
To my knowledge, the Surface Laptop is the only laptop that iFixit has ever rated as impossible to repair.
It didn't receive that rating because it was thin and light. The issue was that it was not possible to open the device without destroying it.
>It’s clear that Microsoft never intended for the Surface Laptop to be repaired because it’s a completely sealed device. There aren’t even any screws to take out, so iFixit had to slice the fabric cover open to peel it away from the metal chassis. That’s never going back together. The inner metal shield is also devoid of screws, relying instead upon spot welds and glue. Again, this is probably not going to be reassembled.
>Replacing a defective or worn out battery is one of the most common repairs on laptops, but it’s really not feasible here.
I was running Ubuntu mate off of an SD card on my surface pro 3 for a couple months and it worked well until the card corrupted. There is a pretty active community at https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/
Why not? I use a Surface Pro 3 and I have installed Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch and they works well without any kernel fix. The drivers for the Surface hardware are getting mainline recently so you need to make sure you install latest Linux distributions. (for example, don’t install old Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.)
I still hated the device and eventually sold it, replacing it with an MSI. But in response to the questions, a Surface is just a standard PC with UEFI, so as long as all the hardware has kernel support, it should boot up fine.
The question really is about Linux proper, not about Linux subsystem or VMs. Can it run Linux on the hardware itself, without jumping through lock-in hoops and other hiccups?
People have and you can install Linux distros directly onto surface hardware, but personally I wouldn't recommend it.
If you want Linux hardware get something that's designed to be shipped with it , so in mainstream land a XPS13 Developer edition or if want something from a vendor focused on Linux System76 or Purism.
That said for many "linux" use cases, WSL works just fine. I use it a lot for developer/ssh use cases.
Also Windows 10 Hyper-V now has better support for Linux guests so things like clipboards and shared drives can work more smoothly.
Sure, I wouldn't recommend it either, just trying to understand the level of compatibility it has. I prefer to assemble my own desktop systems, so hardware selection is a different process in such case.
As for laptops, I'd go for something with Ryzen+Vega APU. Purism doesn't offer such options.
I daresay the Ubuntu userspace WSL ships with absolutely eclipses the kernel in terms of lines of code. For all intents and purposes it's another Linux distro, essentially with just one or two core packages swapped out.
Excluding drivers, documentation and non-x86 arch code, Linux is "only" 173mb of uncompressed source (39mb gzipped). The Debian source repository is 103GB compressed, or, put another way, the replaced code amounts to about 0.03% of what makes up Debian.
Turning that on its head, if you removed all of userspace and just left the kernel, would it be truthful to call what remains Linux? I'd say in common parlance that is what's called "the Linux kernel", and what people mean when they say Linux more thoroughly refers to the work of distributions than it has anything to do with the kernel
Linux of the early 00s was popularized on a platform of "Linux is about freedom, Linux is about choice". At least one half of that is entirely due to the distributions.
From a programmer's perspective, you are writing a program which interacts with the world by making system calls to the kernel. So the kernel is fundamentally more relevant than the fact that the system is running Wayland and comes with LibreOffice.
The Linux Subsystem for Windows is good enough for my software development needs - the Docker Engine does not run in WSL but you can tell the Linux docker client to use the Windows server by setting an environment variable:
The point is that unless you are fiddling with the kernel, a Windows laptop with WSL makes for a great workstation for software developers. Even if I only develop for Linux, for me it is either a Mac or Windows on the desktop (my pet peeve with Linux on the desktop is the several counterintuitive paste buffers).
As a reimplementation of the kernel APIs on top of the NT kernel, it's not the Linux kernel, but it is more than just some GNU tools. In theory, eventually nearly any Linux application should be able to run on WSL.
> The 'it just works' narrative applies to Microsoft better than any other company right now, and consumers are noticing.
'It just works' is best tested when you connect to a printer via wi-fi. We sent humans to the moon and car-sized rovers to Mars, but printing seems to be an unsolvable task for the humanity at the current technology level. At least in the Windows world.
Apple will now sell me a laptop with: 6 core i9, 32 gig of RAM and 1TB. As a bedroom producer this is truly incredible - and, yes, incredibly priced. The sheer capability of this machine is awe-inspiring, then you remember that it's super portable. 2018 is great.
The i9 initially had throttling issues, although some of those issues have been solved. A lot of recent reviews have shown that almost every PC/Mac i9, that isn't built with gaming laptop style heat pipes is going to have throttling issues. That processor is really not meant for a thin and light form factor.
There are plenty of PC laptops that can give you similar specs to the high end Apples though. Lenovo recently released another Carbon, and I see constant reviews for pretty high end gaming/workstation lappys.
They're not macbooks though. We bought a ROG Zepherus for someone doing 3d stuff at the place I work, it's fine, has a GTX 1080, but it's no mac book. And you can't run OSX. I'm a (relatively) happy member of the cult with the latest upgrades.
Really? I said it was expensive, and for equivalent it’s almost as expensive. It’s almost like they’re both premium machines with premium parts. £300 extra for a better OS is worth it.
This is so great. I am so glad someone finally did this. It took 15 years but the heat is on and Apple will have to deliver big or stop building personal computers. I hope it’s the former.
I hope this means I get to watch the same guys buy another bunch of surface hardware and then sell it a few months later and sheepishly return to their MacBooks.
I really like my windows 10 set up, it took me a few weeks to make it perfect by:
>Swapping my HDD with a SSD
>Fresh install of windows, removing the crapware that came with my laptop
And its incredible, I have about 7 chrome windows with 30 tabs open, sublime, Virtualbox, VS code, heidiSQL, excel, calculator, folders, paint, snipping tool, and often more open at the same time.
I can remote into my ubuntu server and get all of those benefits.
What is the competition? Apple who costs 3x more? Linux desktop which requires the extensive use of Terminal to function at Window's expectations?
I want to see someone knock M$ off their OS throne, but that is more of an unnecessary fantasy than a real pain.
Can anyone who's recently transitioned to a Surface from a MacBook Pro / Air testify to the validity of this statement? I am dreading the day I need to upgrade my 2014 MBP, I'm just not compelled by the Touch Bar Macs and the tax they add to the new lineup, but I still hear horror stories about BSOD, bloatware, and the surprise update you can't back out of that I'd want to return to far less.