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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

#61

Post by zdragnar »

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 have an original surface book, and linux works more or less flawlessly. Running arch right now, and the only thing that didn't work out of the box was the touch screen. Fortunately, I never use touch screens for anything anyway!

The only interesting thing was getting dual booting set up. I goofed. I didn't realize bitlocker was on, encrypting the hard drive, and apparently didn't have a recovery key, which you apparently need if any boot setting is touched at all. As a result, I had to wipe + re-install the whole system, but that was no great loss since everything I really needed was backed up anyway.

In fact, I've had fewer problems running arch on the surface book than with my work's dell xps 13, though I'll admit that most of those troubles are due to the dell's USB-C port and linux support in USB-C docks / hubs.

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

#62

Post by owenwil »

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…

All of those things were fine, as far as I can tell. What did you run into specifically? I could run npm stuff, compile with Gulp or webpack..

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

#63

Post by eatstoomuchjam »

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…

Install conemu. Problem (mostly) solved.

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

#64

Post by daxorid »

jdietrich wrote: post #11
rbanffy wrote: post #2

Unfortunately, it comes installed with Windows. edit: of course it runs Windows. It also comes pre-installed with it.

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…

The biggest problem with Windows is de-facto key escrow.

If you want to use BitLocker in W10, you have two options:

1. Escrow your FDE keys with Microsoft Live 2. Go through the hassle of setting up a PDC and escrowing them to your domain.

There is no option to NOT escrow your keys to a very LEO-cozy company with a local account. This is an immediate deal-killer, regardless of any other features or improvements.

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

#65

Post by Moto7451 »

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 had to work with, presumably, the same types of documents from layers as the GP. LibreOffice is fine if everyone is using it. It ends up being a bit of extra work to actually use in practice in a mixed environment. Some legal documents have a lot of formatting that imitates creating a layout with a typewriter and the structure is important. LibreOffice can be slightly off in meaningful ways from a WYSIWYG standpoint, but not necessarily a file format standpoint. So while you can open and edit, the output you will print may be off in subtle ways because you added some extra spacing, you have a different version of a font, etc.

While it’s possibly to make documents that work correctly in both editors with this formatting, you’re simply not going to get people out of their flow. It’s received as well as if the legal team started telling you what your Vim config should be ;).

It ends up being cheaper in terms of time saved for everyone to just buy office. I have a copy of Office just for Word based legal interactions and Excel and use LibreOffice for everything else out of preference for the “old school” UI.

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

#66

Post by eropple »

mattferderer wrote: post #57
eropple wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been using Cmder since shortly after its initial release.

It doesn't step to either Tilix or iTerm2, depending on platform.

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

#67

Post by admiralEyebrows »

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…

High Sierra has had some bad bugs, some that made my stomach churn even more than root access. One's that directly impacted my work flow make me the most angry: regular screen flickering, occasional computer falling asleep, and two times a complete logout. This is on the current model 13" Macbook Pro touchbar. I bought it in december to upgrade from my 2012 model.

I keep up to date on the software, but I sincerely hope after High Sierra Apple poured the necessary resources into making Mojave different. The thing about OS X is when it's working in my opinion it blows every other operating system out of the water. Clean. At least for my own workflow.

I don't buy a macbook for it's hardware. It could be two pounds heavier, have half the RAM for twice the price and look like a shoebox for all I care. OS X is what I'm paying thousands of dollars for.

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

#68

Post by eropple »

owenwil wrote: post #62
eropple wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of those things were fine, as far as I can tell. What did you run into specifically? I could run npm stuff, compile with Gulp or webpack..

It's been like six months since I tried, because Fedora does great for me now, but in Visual Studio Code Ruby/Rubocop threw a rod, using a Linux-based .NET Core confused it, and anything Java was a nonstarter. For JavaScript, I do usually run `yarn watch` (workspace-level through oao) in a terminal and that works fine, but stuff like eslint/tslint integrated into VSCode was regularly a real pain.

Worse: because VSCode--and if it wasn't a Microsoft product I would be less annoyed, but it's their editor and their OS so they can own it too--doesn't really support per-platform configurations, working around it by disabling stuff on VSCode causes my settings sync solution to break my other machines...

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

#69

Post by dizzystar »

I guess as someone looking for a MacBook alternative within a small limit, doing PHP and design, this sounds great.

I recently moved from Linux to MacBook after 7(?) years of Linux an exploratory foray into Windows 10. I simply don't trust the Windows to get out of my way.

A simple problem in older Windows was trying to profile for speed. After going through the very slow startup, you gotta keep an eye on what's going to randomly start running. It's a pain, and not having to deal with this is a huge win for Linux and MacOS. In Windows, I turn off an item in startup and what do you know, it's still starting up, not because the machine started, but because I opened up a separate program, because clearly, a program I never use is now convenient because Windows says so.

I got this feeling like I don't have any ownership of my computer and OS. Sure, Windows looks nice and is usable, but it feels like I'm renting my operating system, and honestly, MacOS sort of feels the same. It's an odd feeling.

Windows 10 seems "good enough" for most people's common use-cases. There really isn't a good reason to spend 2x the money on MacOS over a Windows computer for 95% of users, and even many developers are just fine using Windows.

It was an interesting read, and I'm glad the author is enjoying the new computer.

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

#70

Post by owenwil »

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…

Hey! Writer here. I discuss the software at length in here, but as I point out in the piece I've already covered why WSL and Bash work very well at length, so didn't want to muddy the water too much:

1. How to use Bash on Windows to retain your previous setup: https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-d...

2. Why WSL/Bash is good enough these days: https://medium.com/charged-tech/why-i-left-mac-for-windows-a...

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