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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

#111

Post by alexland »

collinf wrote: post #50

> I don't want a serious gaming monstrosity, I just desired something that can do the job well, had great build quality and could run the Unix-based tools I need to use to get through the day while offering reasonable battery life. It's a tall order, but should be feasible. Proceeds to not touch upon a single way the Surface 2 is UNIX-y in any sort of way? I know the WSL is there but the biggest stop for me using any…

He talks more about WSL near the end:

> The Bash on Windows environment is now so performant and well supported that you won’t even know the difference if you move from a MacBook, and Microsoft continues to improve it at an impressive clip.

> Unless you’re using Xcode, your workflow will almost certainly move from macOS to Windows as a non-event: it’s that good now, and I spend most of my time living in the Bash environment without any problems — even with complicated situations like Symlinks inside Bash now actually working fully.

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

#112

Post by stefan_ »

fgonzag wrote: post #96
singularity2001 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Bash on Windows and it was absolutely not good enough . Not yet.

What problems did you find it with it? I've been using it for the past 6 months after dual booting and running VMs for a long time and found I haven't found a reason to boot into my VM yet.

IO performance is atrocious. git status on a Linux tree takes a 10s of seconds.

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

#113

Post by Casseres »

makecheck wrote: post #103

It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid. Software matters, and how it integrates with hardware. And I keep waiting for them to fix just the basics in Windows 10. Not utterly losing both the sizes and positions of all windows just because the laptop was undocked. Not fai…

The first thing I always do on a new laptop (or install) is go into Power Settings and change the Closing Lid action from putting the computer to sleep to just turning off the screen.

It's surprising how many people never change the settings on their computers. Whenever I saw someone with the taskbar icons combined, I always asked them if they liked it that way, and they would say "No." So I always offered and they always accepted me going into the settings for them and changing it to 'never combine'.

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

#114

Post by PeCaN »

dizzystar wrote: post #69

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 goin…

>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.

I hadn't thought about it this way, but I feel like this too. It's weird. I don't know why. I think it's the presence of stuff I didn't add, the random updates, Microsoft Store ads, etc. I kind of want to go back to Windows 7 just so that I can feel like I really own my computer again.

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

#115

Post by oneplane »

fgonzag wrote: post #96
singularity2001 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Bash on Windows and it was absolutely not good enough . Not yet.

What problems did you find it with it? I've been using it for the past 6 months after dual booting and running VMs for a long time and found I haven't found a reason to boot into my VM yet.

I have the same problems as most people: it's a separate subsystem, which means you either need special integration or simply can't do what you want to do. The filesystems aren't the same, the devices aren't the same, the networking isn't the same, and all three are pretty much needed for daily work.

I suspect that most things that you can do in mingw64 will work the same in WSL, but things you need to do beyond that are basically broken in WSL and sub-optimal in mingw and almost always gets you to a point where you need a VM.

At the same time WSL has super limited benefit if you don't need any of the windows stuff, it basically means you are using linux inside windows but not using windows. When you use 'shell oriented workflows' on macOS, it just works, be it with BSD vs. GNU diffrences, which are easy to overcome by either learning or installing GNU versions of the tools you want (using a package manager like brew). In this setup, everything is the same system, what you do in the GUI also exists in the CLI, they interact directly with eachother, maintain state equally well, integrate directly with the rest of the OS, and basically has desktop functionality that isn't in the way of your development capabilities.

The only downside you can expect is if you need native windows development or windows-only tools, for everything else, windows doesn't really count anymore in almost all environments where I work (which is mostly retail, ecommerce, FOSS, infra). Only a small subset of things (large in quantity, small in configurations/versions/specific needs) that are managed by MSP's are still embedded windows or enterprise windows.

We do have a few people that actually like windows (be it the GUI, long time experience or simply brand affinity), but that's about it.

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

#116

Post by JohnSully »

makecheck wrote: post #103

It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid. Software matters, and how it integrates with hardware. And I keep waiting for them to fix just the basics in Windows 10. Not utterly losing both the sizes and positions of all windows just because the laptop was undocked. Not fai…

Sleep works great on my Lenovo P50. The only device that sometimes fails to come back up is the finger print reader.

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

#117

Post by Casseres »

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…

> If only Ubuntu could have native MS Office (needed for docs from lawyers)

Crossover by Codeweavers works very well with Office 2016 on Ubuntu.

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

#118

Post by vetinari »

makecheck wrote: post #103

It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid. Software matters, and how it integrates with hardware. And I keep waiting for them to fix just the basics in Windows 10. Not utterly losing both the sizes and positions of all windows just because the laptop was undocked. Not fai…

> Not failing to recognize the external display upon docking, despite the display working a few minutes earlier.

Now that you mention it... I have exactly the same problem with rMBP since upgrading to 10.13.5. Just this monday morning I've spent 20 minutes checking all the cables and why it doesn't work, until I rebooted the machine and then it suddenly worked.

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

#119

Post by mwachs »

throwawayqdhd wrote: post #31
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…

Yeah, you can turn off that "People" tab. Just right click.

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

#120

Post by Casseres »

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 in the same boat. It looks like it can run Linux pretty decently (I might be tempted to give it a try):

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Microsoft_Surface_Book_...

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

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