I have a Surface Book and absolutely love it. The trackpad is something I've had problems with on my previous Windows laptops. The Surface book has a fantastic trackpad, on par with Macbooks.
Introducing Surface Book 2
491–500 of 520 posts
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which they run at 20W
Do they really? Wow...fuck Apple. I have been using Mac for years but I don't want to pay that much for severely handicapped hardware. Especially when it's just in pursuit of thinness and aesthetics.
I assume that MikusR was talking about the i7-8650U. Apple doesn't down-TDP the processors in the MBP. I don't know where this idea even came from and it's trivial to prove it false.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because Microsoft is trash. Typing this from an SP3, which I overall like very much. I was given this, so I have no misgivings. But the overall sloppiness of Windows and the years of varying quirky behavior I've had with this thing has been very annoying. Windows has an excuse when the hardware is arbitrary, but with the surface line there is no excuse. If I had paid more than a few hundred dollars for an SP3,…
You can expect negative comments for every OS in existence. You seem to dislike Windows quite a bit. To the point where it seems personal or you have a vendetta against it. Yes things like settings are silly in modern Windows. But they aren't make or break stuff. There's major positives to be seen from Windows too. They are the only major player trying to get touch working on desktop. That's not easy to do. You don't…
> You seem to dislike Windows quite a bit. To the point where it seems personal or you have a vendetta against it.
I have better things to do then have a "vendetta" against either a corporation or a piece of equipment (I don't know which you were insinuating).
At the same time I have no reason to defend commercial entities that should do better.
Like I said, I use the goddamn thing (SP3) as a daily driver for mobile use. It doesn't change the fact that numerous things have been appallingly broken for a stack completely controlled by Microsoft. I absolutely do not care to enumerate the "quirky behavior". For that you can go to answers.microsoft.com and also get a laugh observing that shitshow of unhelpfulness.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I got my Surface Pro way back when, I had some similar issues. I had to update the drivers for the screen and pen to the official Wacom release instead of the Microsoft release and afterwards it ran amazingly well. It was so nice that I've been eyeing one of those absurdly expensive drafting table style Wacom setups for my desktop ever since even thought I could never justify the price. I've considered upgrading…
>I've been eyeing one of those absurdly expensive drafting table style Wacom setups for my desktop ever since even thought I could never justify the price. Have you looked at the Surface Studio? I realize it's not super powerful for a desktop, but the price is simply too good compared to the Wacom tables.
But is the stylus digitiser better in the Surface Studio?
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried to switch to Windows for work (for gaming it's the obvious choice) but I just couldn't. Windows 10 is IMO the best Windows ever, but I was surprised that the ecosystem was really poor compared to macOS. Most of the software you find online are outdated win32 apps with scaling problems. Even modern software from major companies still has scaling problems such as Adobe CC or even the mighty Photoshop. I also di…
For me it feels like you want to tweak Windows to be a clone of your OSX setup. Hint: it will never happen, same way you cant ever make OSX really like Windows. For example I could never find a good replacement for Paint.NET on OSX. I dunno why people say that one or the other is superior for work (except if you work with some special software that exists only for one OS). Both of them are equally good, since everyth…
> For me it feels like you want to tweak Windows to be a clone of your OSX setup
Not really. The features I want could be easily developed in Windows, or Linux, but for some reason this isn't the case.
A good example of this are launchers. Once you start using a launcher you wonder how you could have lived without it.
MacOS offers Spotlight which is very limited but there are 3 very good third party options: Alfred, Launchbar, and Quicksilver. These offer a lot more than simply opening files and applications.
There are launchers for Windows too (launchy, Wox, etc) but the functionality is very limited compared to the macOS options. I suspect this may be cultural. Maybe there are no good commercial solutions like in macOS because there is no market.
Even Linux has better free launchers than Windows. For example: https://github.com/qdore/Mutate
I have found this same problem with other types of applications. For some reason the macOS options are simply better. And again, this is completely unrelated to the OS. It seems there is simply no interest in the Windows world for these types of things.
For example macOS has Karabiner which allows to configure you keyboard in a myriad of ways. Terminals like iTerm are also better in macOS, maybe because of the *Nix tradition. Monitors like iStatMenus which offer you one click access to deep information on hardware, network, etc, are non existent. BetterTouchTool which allows to deeply configure gestures on your trackpad, again, nothing on Windows like it. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are some limitations for software development with crouton though... basic scripting works fine, but quite a few things fail. The most recent one i stumbled on was kivy [1]. It couldn't start X-Sessions to open any windows. [1] https://kivy.org/#home
Could you elaborate a bit on that? I find that a tad surprising ... Just hazarding a guess, but are you using the xiwi X11 replacement? That's just a dummy x server, with everything forwarded to a chrome app. Its a hack to get around the chromeos switch from x to a custom wayland'ish display server. Pretty slow. But with crouton, you can also run a full xorg on vt-2. And I would be very surprised if anything failed t…
I started with xiwi, but as crouton environments are cheap, I also created a full xorg install. It's pretty easy to choose after all.
I've since installed galliumOs though, so I can't test anymore.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not exactly surprising, it's a successor to the SB1 and competitor with the rMBP.
So in terms of hardware competition, I've never had a problem going with Microsoft - Surface Pro can't be beat as a stylus-wielding note-taking beast. In classes, meetups, and hackathons as a whiteboarding tool, unbeatable. But when it comes to actually coding, it's much less "easy" than on a MBP. Some people swear by powershell but I just did not jive with having to do that when everyone else is using bash - so I'm…
But when it comes to actually coding, it's much less "easy" than on a MBP. Some people swear by powershell but I just did not jive with having to do that when everyone else is using bash - so I'm using WSL, which has... difficulties.
I tried that, then went back to using VirtualBox in seamless mode with Lubuntu. I was very disappointed. I'm still more productive on my 2012 Macbook Pro than I am on my 2017 Windows laptop.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, you can somewhat easily run Windows on Mac hardware. The opposite isn't true.
Microsoft does an excellent job making Windows run on just about any x86[_64] device (excluding ancient hardware). Windows runs perfectly on a Mac, whether in a VM or via dual boot.
Does the touchpad work properly now? Last time I checked was 2010 so obviously it might have improved.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#499This is a good example of how Microsoft often does marketing poorly. The text reads like a script for an in-person product launch. On the page it doesn't even make sense "When you think about Microsoft and you hear our mission – to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more – it’s powerful." What? And then after all of that, you click through to the store and there's no pricing informat…
As a former advertising executive, I can tell you what the problem is here. The writer and his boss who approved the copy aren't addressing the customer, they're addressing the boss's boss. In a dysfunctional organization like Microsoft, communicating up rather than out is how you get promoted. It's a rare Microsoft employee who moves up the ladder by thinking about the customer.
I really appreciated this analysis, thank you.
I just clicked the blgopost and was surprised by its quality even after having read these comments. I expect large companies to display good grammar.
Relatedly, it seems like Microsoft has a million blogs on different domains, it's hard to keep track of what's what.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
So in terms of hardware competition, I've never had a problem going with Microsoft - Surface Pro can't be beat as a stylus-wielding note-taking beast. In classes, meetups, and hackathons as a whiteboarding tool, unbeatable. But when it comes to actually coding, it's much less "easy" than on a MBP. Some people swear by powershell but I just did not jive with having to do that when everyone else is using bash - so I'm…
But when it comes to actually coding, it's much less "easy" than on a MBP. Some people swear by powershell but I just did not jive with having to do that when everyone else is using bash - so I'm using WSL, which has... difficulties. I tried that, then went back to using VirtualBox in seamless mode with Lubuntu. I was very disappointed. I'm still more productive on my 2012 Macbook Pro than I am on my 2017 Windows lap…
I've gone down that road as well, worked "ok" but as soon as the external monitor gets involved, forget about it.