I keep checking youtube for reviews of people running linux on surface tablets. The surface-linux project looks like it's done some really great work and surface pro tablets do equally well. The one piece of hardware I wish there were more work on is the Surface X (especially after seeing how successful the Asahi project has been).
I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
31–40 of 240 posts
Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a tablet, you'd pick a mediocre tablet experience with a regular desktop experience over a good tablet experience? As a tablet?
This presumes there is a good tablet experience.
This requires some elaboration. I'd argue that iPadOS offers an excellent tablet experience because it was built with its unique set of properties in mind. It doesn't behave exactly like a phone and it doesn't behave exactly like a laptop, but you do see elements of both in it.
It offers a lot of applications that do all sorts of wonderful things. It's a great way to draw/paint, you can sculpt stuff in 3d, you can create full music tracks with professional quality. You can write books on it, you can watch your tv shows, read your comic books, and do a whole lot of stuff in a way that for me, is simply much more delightful than sitting at my computer.
There's plenty of uses that it doesn't serve very well, though. The coding experience is lackluster at best. The fact that there's only one web browser engine is a miss. The fact that the concept of extensibility is severely gimped or nonexistent in applications is a miss (though the addition of extensions to safari helps a bit). The fact that there's no reasonable way to side load officially supported by Apple is awful. A lot of these points are probably ones that are important to the hacker crowd on HN so to those people they probably find it hard to overlook those shortcomings.
I use my iPad every day and I love it for the things that it does do. To me that is enough to consider it a good tablet experience.
Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe because you need a mobile desktop, not a tablet?
This is better served by a laptop for the majority of people, though as someone that uses an unconventional keyboard anyway, a laptop is somewhat less compelling (since it occupies a lot of space with a keyboard that I actively avoid using), I can certainly see the appeal of a tablet for that purpose. I personally don't think Microsoft quite got it right with using Windows on a tablet, though it was certainly a lot b…
I bought a Surface 7+ a few months ago and really like it. I think of it as a “laptop replacement”. My serious work is done on a desktop with 3 large monitors at home, and a laptop with two large monitors at work. So I only needed a small-ish laptop to handle the in-between.
Plus I can read books or watch videos, take notes, etc, in tablet mode.
> building apps that fit the UX paradigms of Surface tablets
I kinda don’t want this. A major selling point was that I have a full OS with the same applications on my desktop and laptop (ie, PyCharm, other python-related stuff, Firefox, custom python, bash, powershell scripts). No need to have completely different apps because the tablet maker hobbles the OS, making using a tablet in laptop mode useless.
It can be awkward for sure in tablet mode, but it does kinda work.
Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#34I've been using Surface Book 2 as a work laptop and at this point I won't buy a single Microsoft's hardware beyond an Xbox. It was utterly bad. Lack of thunderbolt so USB-C docks won't fully work, lack of HDMI ports, insane thermal throttling, had issues handling 1000hz polling rate mouses(seriously), quite often laptop would just not turn on until specific reset combination of keys was pressed, general performance i…
Similar experience, with a Surface Pro 4 many years ago. After one year it bricked but thanks god I still had the warranty and they sent another one...
Am I asking too much? I want a tablet with high precision drawing and low-latency to take notes about everything. Add an ARM processor and I'd buy it today, damn it.
Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#35I've been using Surface Book 2 as a work laptop and at this point I won't buy a single Microsoft's hardware beyond an Xbox. It was utterly bad. Lack of thunderbolt so USB-C docks won't fully work, lack of HDMI ports, insane thermal throttling, had issues handling 1000hz polling rate mouses(seriously), quite often laptop would just not turn on until specific reset combination of keys was pressed, general performance i…
Similar experience, with a Surface Pro 4 many years ago. After one year it bricked but thanks god I still had the warranty and they sent another one... Am I asking too much? I want a tablet with high precision drawing and low-latency to take notes about everything. Add an ARM processor and I'd buy it today, damn it.
You want an ipad it seems like.
Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#36Or better, the Surface Pro X (when this is done):
https://github.com/Sonicadvance1/linux/issues/27
Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#37I have a surface go 1 running (currently) PopOS, but have been on Kubuntu also. It's a great travel computer, combined with a USB-C dock, mini keyboard, bluetooth headphones and a wireless trackball. I use it to run chrome, zoom, bitwig, and the terminal; I don't think I've ever attempted intellij on it, but it would probably be ok (that said the screen size is too small for me to really want to code on it).
Things have steadily gotten better in terms of support via linux-surface, but it's definitely on the wild-west edge of the linux universe; current issues:
1) The wifi driver isn't in the mainline kernel yet for whatever reason. After doing a dist upgrade you have to copy the driver into two locations. This is documented on linux-surface's site; I wrote a script to do it, and it's not that bad.
2) Camera doesn't work. Gives me a good excuse to do off-camera zooms while travelling. :)
3) PopOS specific issue: cannot run their system updater with the linux-surface PPA active. This is really annoying, and probably enough reason for me to just switch back to Kubuntu on it. (Also, I don't like Gnome's insistence on switching to lodpi mode, despite my having set up fractional scaling).
Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
This presumes there is a good tablet experience.
This requires some elaboration. I'd argue that iPadOS offers an excellent tablet experience because it was built with its unique set of properties in mind. It doesn't behave exactly like a phone and it doesn't behave exactly like a laptop, but you do see elements of both in it. It offers a lot of applications that do all sorts of wonderful things. It's a great way to draw/paint, you can sculpt stuff in 3d, you can cr…
Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#39Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2
#40I've been using Surface Book 2 as a work laptop and at this point I won't buy a single Microsoft's hardware beyond an Xbox. It was utterly bad. Lack of thunderbolt so USB-C docks won't fully work, lack of HDMI ports, insane thermal throttling, had issues handling 1000hz polling rate mouses(seriously), quite often laptop would just not turn on until specific reset combination of keys was pressed, general performance i…
Similar experience, with a Surface Pro 4 many years ago. After one year it bricked but thanks god I still had the warranty and they sent another one... Am I asking too much? I want a tablet with high precision drawing and low-latency to take notes about everything. Add an ARM processor and I'd buy it today, damn it.
I tried a Surface Go 2 then bought the latest iPad Mini. There's truly no equal for doing tablet stuff.