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The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

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Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

#31

Post by throwawayqdhd »

sinatra wrote: post #10

Such articles always give too much importance to the hardware (which is somewhat important, no doubt) and not enough importance to the software. Many people are looking for quality alternatives to Macbooks, Mac Mini, etc (myself included). Mac Mini hasn’t been updated for 4-5 years. So, I started setting up a Windows desktop as a Mac Mini replacement. But when it came to finding all the alternatives to the OS X softw…

Windows keeps breaking with every update. My touchpad randomly stops working. Startup is excruciatingly slow even on an i7 laptop with 16GB of RAM. Starting up from sleep takes nearly as long, and for some reason, it takes at least 5 minutes for the machine to work at normal processing power again.

The search function is still as broken as ever. There is a useless "People" tab near the clock that hogs my memory. Then there is that other useless thing - Cortana. There are random noises for whatever error or notification that keeps playing in the background. Permission control is still completely broken. The Control Panel is a confused mess.

If I could go back to Windows 7, I might still be interested in keeping a Windows laptop. But 10 just keeps getting in my way. I just want to launch Chrome and use Google Docs, but Windows wants to distract me with a million little nuisances.

Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

#34

Post by daxorid »

sinatra wrote: post #10

Such articles always give too much importance to the hardware (which is somewhat important, no doubt) and not enough importance to the software. Many people are looking for quality alternatives to Macbooks, Mac Mini, etc (myself included). Mac Mini hasn’t been updated for 4-5 years. So, I started setting up a Windows desktop as a Mac Mini replacement. But when it came to finding all the alternatives to the OS X softw…

LibreOffice works perfectly well for 99.9% of MS Office documents.

Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

#36

Post by addicted »

yesimahuman wrote: post #23
jdietrich wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: Most people that I showed the Surface to were impressed by what they saw, but almost always came back to the same thing: it doesn’t run macOS. I’m increasingly frustrated by this because it’s almost always a misunderstanding of how far Windows 10 has come, and how compatible the workflow now is regardless of what you might do for a job. I suspect most people haven't touched Windows since years ago and it's time…

I've tried to adopt the alternative bash systems on Windows, and they are nowhere close to terminal options on OS X (or Linux!). It still boggles my mind why we have to stay within the limits of the cmd.exe UI, with the lack of window resizing, easy copy/paste, and proper font rendering. Then, on top of that, Windows will never have a proper unix-like filesystem. I just can't go back to that. The only thing windows h…

I don’t use cmd.exe for anything. It’s Powershell all the way.

Powershell, while different from the BASH way of doing things, is a really nice commandline tool.

Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

#37

Post by ChrisLTD »

sebringj wrote: post #32

What has stuck me to mac is ONLY this...I have to have XCode and Android Studio in one machine. That's it. How do I run XCode in windows or Linux even? I don't want to have to have a mac so I'm all ears.

You’re stuck forever, unless you want to try to run XCode in a virtual machine.

Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

#38

Post by rbanffy »

cwyers wrote: post #26
jdietrich wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: Most people that I showed the Surface to were impressed by what they saw, but almost always came back to the same thing: it doesn’t run macOS. I’m increasingly frustrated by this because it’s almost always a misunderstanding of how far Windows 10 has come, and how compatible the workflow now is regardless of what you might do for a job. I suspect most people haven't touched Windows since years ago and it's time…

> I suspect most people haven't touched Windows since years ago and it's time for a serious second look if so. I feel like this is evidence of living in a bubble. Windows is the dominant OS for anything in a PC form factor (even if you include the iPad Pro in the count).

I routinely test software and web applications (and a font) on Windows. It never ceases to amaze me how verbose PowerShell is, or how confusing and convoluted is everything around managing a Windows machine. You have vendor-provided settings panels and widgets for video, network, and wireless, you never quite know what went wrong where and which is the right place to fix it or where do you add a setting. I really don't want that.

For most people, the web is the dominant platform and Windows is just what draws Facebook on the monitor.

Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

#39

Post by ghaff »

throwawayqdhd wrote: post #14

The Surface Book also runs something I never want to deal with again: Windows 10. I can't deal with a software that constantly gets in the way of my work. I gave Windows a lot of tries, but the latest edition was the last straw for me. Never going back.

I'm inclined to agree and I have Windows, Linux, and MacOS laptops today (as well Chromebooks). The Windows one is actually the most powerful one from a hardware perspective; it's a 17" Alienware. But I mostly prefer to work on my 13" MacBook.

I probably could configure the Windows system to be less annoying but the trackpad doesn't really work for me and I still find Windows a bit clunky comparatively. Perhaps if I spent more time with it day to day but I don't have the same feeling with Fedora even though I use it about the same amount.

I'm also skeptical about laptop/tablet hybrids. And that's not a comment on Microsoft.I've tried to use my iPad Pro as a laptop replacement when traveling and it really doesn't work for me.

Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

#40

Post by tomxor »

I hate MS, but this looks like a genuinely nice piece of hardware... I wonder if it can run anything other than Windows without being half broken, then I might be interested.

[Edit]

Looks like everyone is thinking the same thing :P Now who can we pay to invest a month hacking away at figuring out how to get all the bits of hardware working in Linux?

Following the link various others have posted here [1], it looks like the surface book 2 support isn't completely terrible, much better than i expected, but not amazing either... Broken things and things that require more effort are:

    - Sleep S3 broken
    - Video is dual nVidia GPU, requires bumblebee
    - TouchPad and Pen broken, work with a custom Linux kernel
    - PCI camera(s) not working
The touchpad is probably gona be the most annoying one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/7kazwp/curren...

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