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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

#51

Post by lstepnio »

daxorid wrote: post #34
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.

My experience differs drastically.

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

#52

Post by yesimahuman »

alexdeloy wrote: post #43
yesimahuman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can resize, copy/paste and change font/color/transparency settings on my cmd.exe without any problems. I get your point but they really improved it since Win7/8

I've used it regularly on Windows 10 and I still have to "mark" text to copy paste. Am I missing something?

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

#53

Post by whitepoplar »

WesleyLivesay wrote: post #6

I would love to see more laptop manufacturers use the 3:2 aspect ratio, especially on screens smaller than 15".

If Apple made a 12-13" laptop with a 3:2, non-glossy display, an all-day battery, and a non-broken keyboard, I'd probably pay double for it.

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

#54

Post by jeswin »

daxorid wrote: post #34
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.

I've been a Linux user for ages, and I disagree. Readable yes, but the formatting is almost always off (in Writer and Calc).

Basically unusable if the docs have to be shared back with MS Office users.

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

#55

Post by tombert »

sinatra wrote: post #30
tombert wrote: post #12

Has anyone managed to get Linux booted on this thing and working well? I've been debating purchasing one, but I am afraid that I'll be stuck with Windows, which, for what I work on, makes hacking pretty difficult. EDIT: Just as a note, I know about WSL (I use it at work), but I would greatly prefer to have Linux working on root. I have a lot of custom systemd setups, and I've become somewhat dependent on XMonad.

How is your experience with WSL? Do you get stuck in a lot of corner cases with it? Or does it work seamlessly most of the time? Guess not, considering you’d “greatly prefer Linux working on root.”

I don't have a big problem with it at work, but at home I tend to go kind of hardcore at home since it makes me feel validated as a geek.

I know you can install X on Windows, but I tend to prefer using XMonad with urxvt to navigate at home, so as to minimize my time using a mouse; AFAIK, you can't interop the Windows version of Firefox in my XMonad setup for WSL.

I'm not saying I couldn't make an equally productive setup in Windows, but I've come to prefer the setup I have on my personal laptop, which is sadly five years old and finally starting to show its age.

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

#56

Post by yesimahuman »

addicted wrote: post #36
yesimahuman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't powershell still have the same UI limitations of cmd.exe? I'm not talking about the actual shell itself, but the application the shell runs in.

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

#57

Post by mattferderer »

eropple wrote: post #24
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…

It's everything around baseline development that sucks when using WSL, not WSL itself. WSL itself is really cool. What's not cool is dealing with linters and compiling tools and all the other bric-a-brac that has to cross the Windows/WSL divide. Some of them have been fixed to support WSL, others haven't, knowing which have and which haven't is a crapshoot, and WSL is a third-class citizen at best so good luck waitin…

Try Cmder.

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

#58

Post by SXX »

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.

Under Linux you can run macOS in QEMU VM. Sometimes you'll need to wait for patches if you need most recent updates, but other than that it work flawlessly. Then if you need 3D you can buy compatible GPU as pass it into VM.

That way I could build and test C++ project across all OS under single Linux host. And it's nice to have all major browsers at hand too for web development.

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

#60

Post by oldcynic »

daxorid wrote: post #34
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.

More like it spoils the layout of 99% of documents. It works perfectly well for really simple stuff. Like letters and a little bit of what-if doodling in the spreadsheet.
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