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I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

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Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#61

Post by sph »

highwaylights wrote: post #46

It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post. - EFI didn’t work. - The camera doesn’t work. - The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful). - Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover). - Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly). This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d…

It's not the first time I read a review from somebody, "it's great!", they say, and immediately after they start listing all the things that are not in fact great.

Reminds me of that meme that shows Brits using "it could be worse" to mean anything less than average, and "not too bad" for everything else, while Americans say "awesome!" for any kind of sentiment, good or bad.

I'm not saying OP is American, just that adjectives in reviews have lost most of their meaning.

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#62

Post by jlkuester7 »

highwaylights wrote: post #46

It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post. - EFI didn’t work. - The camera doesn’t work. - The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful). - Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover). - Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly). This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d…

Not disagreeing with you per we, but I will note that the author may be judging the tablet as compared to other mobile devices running Linux. With the exception of the PinePhone and a few other devices Linux on mobile devices is truly painful/broken in most cases (and in ways that make this tablet look almost fully featured...).

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#63

Post by rob_c »

highwaylights wrote: post #46

It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post. - EFI didn’t work. - The camera doesn’t work. - The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful). - Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover). - Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly). This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d…

Yeah, have to agree, wish they actually made half of that it work because it can, as they say it requires _effort_ to setup properly,...

Tbh the surface pro 3 and sp4 were about at the same level of fiddlyness, but the battery life was just up there with a normal laptop, definately not ipad territory.

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#64

Post by pxmpxm »

sph wrote: post #61
highwaylights wrote: post #46

It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post. - EFI didn’t work. - The camera doesn’t work. - The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful). - Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover). - Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly). This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d…

It's not the first time I read a review from somebody, "it's great!", they say, and immediately after they start listing all the things that are not in fact great. Reminds me of that meme that shows Brits using "it could be worse" to mean anything less than average, and "not too bad" for everything else, while Americans say "awesome!" for any kind of sentiment, good or bad. I'm not saying OP is American, just that ad…

I suspect it's a linux "enthusiast" thing, rather than an american thing.

Virtually every thread about linux on laptop starts out with someone claiming that it runs perfect on this or that hardware, then 20 other people chime in with all the things that actually don't work on the same same machine, and finally the original poster concedes with some weasel statement along the lines of "well it works for me". And the year-of-linux-on-x circle of life continues...

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#65

Post by zozbot234 »

jlkuester7 wrote: post #62
highwaylights wrote: post #46

It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post. - EFI didn’t work. - The camera doesn’t work. - The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful). - Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover). - Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly). This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d…

Not disagreeing with you per we, but I will note that the author may be judging the tablet as compared to other mobile devices running Linux. With the exception of the PinePhone and a few other devices Linux on mobile devices is truly painful/broken in most cases (and in ways that make this tablet look almost fully featured...).

Not true. Linux on BayTrail hardware is pretty much rock-solid by now (at least if you're running Fedora-derived distros). The thing is it can take many years to get to that level of support. It's absolutely normal for newly released hardware to be broken in many ways.

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#66

Post by seltzered_ »

I've been using an HP Elite X2 G4 tablet and it's been truly solid: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/s6k1qr...

Only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader.

There was a better writeup from someone using debian on a surface pro 6 to run their law firm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29199395

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#67

Post by dwighttk »

highwaylights wrote: post #46

It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post. - EFI didn’t work. - The camera doesn’t work. - The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful). - Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover). - Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly). This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d…

As a person who has tried setting up Linux like 5-10 times over the years this sounds exactly like my experience and basically what I assume Linux use is always like.

It’s just like cars, there are people who are super comfortable just tinkering around with cars and fixing crap and say “this car is great” and if I tried to drive it it’d break down 5 minutes in and I would consider it a total loss.

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#68

Post by makeitdouble »

highwaylights wrote: post #46

It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post. - EFI didn’t work. - The camera doesn’t work. - The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful). - Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover). - Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly). This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d…

I agree with you, but also think for a linux experience on a device that wasn’t meant for it, it’s par for the course. Of the above, the only critical flaw would be the camera not working, the rest is manageable.

It’s been a while, but updating a DELL laptop ended up with flacky sound that wouldn’t work for video calls, and the video card drivers sometimes crapping the bed and bringing the system down with it.

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#69

Post by LeSaucy »

least wrote: post #32
dredmorbius wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

I don’t think you can do much better than an iPad Pro in the tablet space, super refined tablet experience, combined with the Microsoft rdp app to a vm or other desktop for a full x86 windows env, apple rdp to macs/MacBooks, and blink mosh ssh to Linux systems. Yes running external systems is cheating but the actual end result is insanely functional. Say what you will about iPadOS but it still gets yearly major updates and new features for free.

Re: I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2

#70

Post by csdvrx »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #60
csdvrx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agree, honestly I don’t see the point of WSL, it is far less hassle to either Remote Desktop into a real Linux machine, or run a VM. Windows is way more configurable than Linux. To this day, there's nothing like AHK on Linux! Also, Windows offers the best terminal experience. I've tried foot on Wayland, it's ok, but I want better than ok. I've spend too much time trying to squeeze a good experience out of xterm ( h…

Surely you need AHK because Windows is less configurable? I want basic window management that's been in KDE for decades, but corporate IT won't let me have AutoHotKey. It's so frustrating having to move windows around all the time rather than them just going where they should. No focus options, no pin-on-top (except in OneNote) ... it's really a massive climb down from Kde/Plasma. How are you using terminals in Windo…

> Surely you need AHK because Windows is less configurable

No, but because it lets me do remaps, like having Caps be both Control and Esc - and I do the same with Enter being both Control when used with another key, and Enter alone. My Alt keys are Alt keys when used with another key, or Home/End when used alone.

My physical Esc key is a "jump to terminal" key that takes me from wherever to my fullscreen terminal, then back. For example, from the browser: one press of Esc gets me to the terminal, another press gets me back to the browser - and likewise for every app (not just the browser). That's even better than quake-mode!

I have other sequences to copy/paste images as base64enc and other crazy things that make my life easier: like changing the system and app theme to dark (or back to light), applying a color inversion +- red filter (late at night, no white: it's all just red), an OLED-black filter (to convert bad greys to pure black)

> How are you using terminals in Windows? Like you want to SSH from a fresh install, what do I do?

Install openssh from the windows settings: check https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...

I'd recommend the latest Windows terminal from the Microsoft store, or mintty from msys2, but that's just for comfort :)

> I find Linux superior here, but interested to learn why you're the opposite; maybe I'm doing it wrong

I like sixels, so I prefer mintty, but even without sixels, I find the Windows experience better. Yes, I want sixels and cute fonts with ligatures in my terminal. But I want proper support of bold, underline, italic. I want multiple tabs. I want to map key actions to everything - like, I want my terminal to change its color profile and font with just 1 key. I want keyboard shortcuts to different profiles with different shells or ssh hosts (with color or other titlebar/tab indicators to know at a glance which is which)

That's very hard on Linux, and sometimes just impossible. That's easy on Windows.

https://github.com/csdvrx/cuteXterm#why-did-you-make-cutexte...

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