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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

#121

Post by earenndil »

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 has some ms office compatability, and a surprising (and rapidly increasing) amount of stuff works fine in wine. I think an old but relatively recent photoshop version (cs6?) has an almost perfect rating.

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

#122

Post by Casseres »

dylrich wrote: post #25

I am also wondering how Linux runs on this. A Windows-only machine is out of the question for me, but the hardware looks pretty solid. I'll consider buying one if I can get Fedora to play well with it.

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...

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

#123

Post by beagle3 »

Casseres wrote: post #113
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 a…

If you put it in your bag, you're more likely to fry something. Was extremely common with spinning rust media. Incidentally, the common cause was "close lid" action set to "sleep", but Windows being unable to actually put the computer to sleep for some reason.

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

#124

Post by freeone3000 »

hackujin wrote: post #101
fgonzag wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can't open files in VSCode that live in the WSL virtual file system. Which is a huge problem for setting up the same exact dev environment I have on my Mac. It's honestly dumbfounding. VSCode works great on Mac with the existing terminal but the WSL team can't figure out a good way to allow you to edit WSL files from a normal Windows application.

The way you do this is to cd into your Windows system from within WSL. WSL can see files from the Win32 subsystem just fine.

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

#125

Post by dsego »

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.

Unless it crashes and loses your document like it happened to me a year ago. Auto-save apparently exists but is not turned on by default or something. Infuriating when it happens.

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

#127

Post by Casseres »

beagle3 wrote: post #123
Casseres wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

If you put it in your bag, you're more likely to fry something. Was extremely common with spinning rust media. Incidentally, the common cause was "close lid" action set to "sleep", but Windows being unable to actually put the computer to sleep for some reason.

True. In those instances, I would manually put it to sleep via the Start Menu button.

However, I've had my laptop wake up from Sleep while in a bag several times, causing it to overheat. That pissed me off. If I recall correctly, I think it was a Bluetooth event causing it to wake up.

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

#130

Post by gamblor956 »

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…

I use Windows 10 at work and at home, and in my experience it's been more stable than Windows 7, which I similarly used at home and at work for years. Annoying mandatory updates aside (and now less annoying since you can control when they happen), Windows 10 is pretty much the same Windows experience as before, in a slightly different skin.

One thing I noticed that was fixed with Windows 10 that was a problem in Windows 7: my laptops now handle state properly after the lid is closed (assuming you use hibernate or sleep rather than just screen-off).

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