The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be

Post by hestefisk » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 8:10 PM UTC

dpedu wrote: post #138

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.

I've been using Linux on my Surfacebook 2 13" since about January. Most of the hardware features work decently (including touchscreen), but overall it's still not great despite the excellent work put into a modified kernel for it, here [1]. IMO, the most notable items missing full support are: - the battery[2][3], charge or capacity status - "performance base" dedicated GPUs 1: https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surfac…

Post by NicoJuicy » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 8:12 PM UTC

Post by partiallypro » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 8:14 PM UTC

cncrnd wrote: post #175

partiallypro wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had 5 Surface devices and have never had any major issues. The biggest issue I ever had with one was dropping it and shattering its screen. I didn't have coverage on it, but Microsoft replaced it all for about $300.

Good for you. However, consumer reports gave a two-year breakage rate of 25% for Surface products. Given a 75% everything-is-ok rate, that gives you around a reasonable 25% chance (.75^5) that everything is ok with 5 devices, illustrating why anecdotes are not helpful in decision making.

Post by ivan_gammel » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

hackujin wrote: post #164

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to work on files in my WSL home folder. Lots of language based package managers like npm and composer "live" inside a folder in your home directory. It's very important that VSCode running as a windows application be able to read/write to these files. No. You don't want this. Linux and Windows are different platforms; if your Windows application could use your packages installed through Linux (and vice versa…

Of course I want this! Globally installed npm and composer packages live in ~/.npm/ and ~/.composer/ and they both have a global packages.json esque file that I need to occasionally edit. The packages installed in those folders MUST be parsed by VSCode for intelesense to work properly. All I'm saying is I'm not gonna jump through all these hoops. I'd rather just keep working on my mac. Hell I'd rather hackintosh a su…

Post by gm-conspiracy » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 8:20 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #110

cornellwright wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are fair criticisms, but I don't think anybody has this nailed. I use a mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux, and have found myself walking around with the lid open in all three. Mac seems to handle what you describe better than everyone else, but it's far from perfect. I have one monitor that used to work fine on Windows and Mac. After a software update the Mac only recognizes it about 1 in 20 tries of plugging and…

Macs seem to be pretty good in my experience. It was something I really noticed about them when I first started using about 8 years ago. The only real monitor problem I've had was with an iMac that decided it didn't want to initialize the dual displays properly if the 2nd was plugged in when it was booted. Took me about a day to figure I needed to unplug the 2nd display. Eventually some OS update fixed it. Linux is a…