Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

changelog.complete.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 240 posts

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

#231

Post by hollandheese »

jansommer wrote: post #189

I recently got the same tablet in a cheap second-hand deal. Seller had never used it so battery is excellent. Bought it because I wanted to kill time by installing Linux, and it actually wasn't as bad as expected. Could have just disabled secure boot and be done with it, but that was probably where I spent most of my time. Waydroid is was easy to install so I can run both Android and Gnome, but x86-64 Android is so l…

> There's lots of annoying nuances, like the Gnome 42 icons in the activity list is really small, the on screen keyboard is small and almost unusable in landscape mode (but big in portrait mode)

I've switched to KDE (Arch) on mine. The on-screen keyboard is vastly better.

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

#232

Post by hollandheese »

akvadrako wrote: post #7

Does anyone have experience with Linux on the latest model, the Surface Go 3? I'm considering getting one of these as they seem like ideal travel devices, but uneasy about having to rely on a small community for basic driver support. Official Linux support would be much better.

Honestly from everything that I've heard is that the Go 2 is overall a better device especially under Linux. Plus it's cheaper.

Everything works except for the cameras. I mean the cameras can be made to kinda work, but in their current state don't produce a very good picture.

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

#234

Post by least »

hollandheese wrote: post #229
LeSaucy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 updat…

>Say what you will about iPadOS but it still gets yearly major updates and new features for free. I really wouldn't call iPadOS 16 a major update for anything but the M1 iPads. >Yes running external systems is cheating but the actual end result is insanely functional. Now go somewhere without great internet connectivity and attempt to do work.

> Now go somewhere without great internet connectivity and attempt to do work.

If you end up in a situation where you are suddenly without internet connectivity, the solution is simple: you stop working or you move somewhere that has internet connectivity. If you are knowingly going somewhere without internet and want to do work, you're obviously going to make arrangements to ensure that you can work. Maybe that means bringing a different device with you or maybe you find a workaround. For example, this youtuber/developer uses a raspberry pi connected directly to the iPad as a development server [1]. I think it's a tad silly, but it seems to work well for him to complete his work.

The whole "what if you don't have an internet connection?" argument just seems like needless FUD-spreading. I don't see it as a realistic problem for the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UPaI4Hp66Y

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

#235

Post by deepsun »

csdvrx wrote: post #227
deepsun wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, 30W is not enough, tried. In Europe, there is a company that does decent custom chargers, but it's nowhere on Amazon (wonder why): https://www.promate.net/collections/wall-chargers

They are all big and ugly, as if they had just glued the .uk plug. Don't you have some with retractable or switchable prongs? That's a very nice feature of some of our North American adapters!

> big and ugly

Wrong, they have the smallest chargers (for the same wattage). They seem to be bragging about some "new tech" that makes it possible to pack so tightly.

The UK plugs are ugly no matter what :) regardless of manufacturer. Fortunately I have Type C plug.

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

#236

Post by caycep »

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…

that's pretty good for Debian!

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

#237

Post by mmh0000 »

benlivengood wrote: post #163
linmob wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have a similarly bad experience with Linux on a laptop; all these issues (except for virtual keyboard related ones) also occur there: - EFI is a bit difficult with distributions when Secure Boot is enabled. Ubuntu and Fedora support it, if you choose a different distribution you may have to tinker, as evidenced in the post; - camera: Well, Microsoft was doing fancy stuff here; and most distributions just don'…

Have you noticed a big problem with ZFS on 8GB of RAM? I've successfully ran fairly large (2TB, thousands of snapshots) zpools out of 4GB of RAM, with dedup off of course.

Since ZFS is the greatest filesystem in the world, I use ZFS -everywhere-. Including, on my very old Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (2013) with a slow dual core, and only 8GB of ram. ZFS works great, on that device I need to manually limit the ARC size so that it doesn't eat all my ram:

  # cat /etc/modprobe.d/tiny-modprobe.d-zfs.conf
  options zfs zfs_arc_max=2147483648

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

#238

Post by kreetx »

cmatthias wrote: post #89
kreetx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Macbooks are slso mostly supported, albeit with a lag (e.g ATM graphics supporton M1's GPU is not ready yet). Also had to tweak kernel with a recent Ryzen GPU a few years ago on a desktop, but after that it worked. (Now the tweak isn't required anymore.)

I just went through trying to install Linux on my 2015 15” retina MacBook Pro (model 11,5 with Radeon dGPU) and it was not usable. Every distro I tried (Ubuntu, Pop OS, Fedora, and NixOS) had severe Bluetooth instability (most times the computer booted, Bluetooth worked for about 15 seconds after boot and then it would die completely until the next reboot). Graphics switching seems non functional on this model as wel…

I have a 13" Macbook from the same year and it pretty much just works with Nixos. There was a bit of trouble getting Bluetooth working, but as I'm not using it much can't say for it's instability.

What is graphics switching, there is one (integrated) GPU, no?

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

#240

Post by ttarr »

dboreham wrote: post #71
ttarr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think WSL is overrated. I haven't used Windows for years but it was forced upon me by my new employer. Overall I'm not impressed, at least when compared to a full native Gnome experience. Not sure how people are managing, any filesystem operation (on C: for e.g.) takes forever, also GUI apps feel sluggish and heat the laptop.

Don't use the host FS for your work files. Use the Linux FS.

I won't bore you with the details, but things are locked down and a dev folder structure is assumed and baked into the build system, both for sources and dependencies.
Post reply on HN