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

A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

binwang.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 229 posts

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#31

Post by moondev »

utf_8x wrote: post #24

Disables Swap and Zram, gets OOM killed, surprised pikachu face Joking aside, is there an actual legitimate reason to do this on a workstation? I understand why you would want to disable swap on something like a kubernetes cluster node but in my head, heaving at-least zram enabled is a good thing on a workstation so you *don't* get OOM killed... I call on thee, Linux wizards of HN, to help me understand the reasoning…

Funny enough even Kubernetes supports running nodes with swap these days.

My laptop has 64GB RAM and 1TB NVME, I run with swap off because I want all storage usable should ideally not be pressed for memory.

I also have memory and storage allocation in my task bar to easily monitor the situation.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#32

Post by denysvitali »

1oooqooq wrote: post #13

Linux surface kernel is a meme. it's the same sort of hacks from teenage Android community to port binary blobs. if you're not familiar with that, just be glad. in summary, old unpatched kennels with weird binary code nobody cares to understand.

It's not, it follows the upstream releases and has a couple of patches for the Surface drivers (e.g: SAM) that will hopefully be upstreamed one day. They have something like ~50 commits on top of the release tag [1].

The main developer is doing an amazing job, and the fact that Linux runs on so many Surfaces devices, including the ARM ones (like my SPX) is just amazing.

Linaro (Bjorn Andersson) helped quite a lot in the Linux on ARM environment, and qzed (Maximilian Luz) is doing all of the Surface reverse engineering and kernel driver in their own free time.

Sorry, I had to downvote you because this is just disrespectful on the amount of work awesome people are doing on their free time, and you clearly have no clue on what the linux-surface project is about.

[1]: https://github.com/linux-surface/kernel/commits/v6.9-surface...

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#33

Post by mg »

One reason I don't use tablet is that they all have glossy screens.

And the new iPad with matte screen has a glossy frame around it. I tried it in a store and the glare around the otherwise nicely matte screen was uncomfortable.

Does anyone here have experience how well matte screen protectors for tablets work? I see them mostly discussed for they haptic feel when drawing on the tablet. I wonder how well they work to have a good experience when coding on the tablet.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#34

Post by denysvitali »

b3lvedere wrote: post #30

I never liked the Surface series that much. It looks very nice, until you actually start working with them. Then they feel like a weird tablet with slow Windows on it. You can optimize it a little, but not much. Quite expensive as well and sometimes support is horribly slow. I gave my wife an old Lenovo Yoga 2 in 1. That thing works nice using it as a flipped tablet to watch Netflix, but here also the performance isn…

The Surface Pro X (with Linux) runs pretty well. When I was running Windows on that, it worked nicely too

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#35

Post by shamefulkiwi »

mg wrote: post #33

One reason I don't use tablet is that they all have glossy screens. And the new iPad with matte screen has a glossy frame around it. I tried it in a store and the glare around the otherwise nicely matte screen was uncomfortable. Does anyone here have experience how well matte screen protectors for tablets work? I see them mostly discussed for they haptic feel when drawing on the tablet. I wonder how well they work to…

I’ve used one of the drawing/pencil screen protectors on my iPad for years for the same reason and it works great. It does make the screen feel a little less sharp/crisp but solves the glare problem for me. I’m sure they’ve gotten better over the years as well.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#36

Post by callalex »

utf_8x wrote: post #24

Disables Swap and Zram, gets OOM killed, surprised pikachu face Joking aside, is there an actual legitimate reason to do this on a workstation? I understand why you would want to disable swap on something like a kubernetes cluster node but in my head, heaving at-least zram enabled is a good thing on a workstation so you *don't* get OOM killed... I call on thee, Linux wizards of HN, to help me understand the reasoning…

Unfortunately, there is a huge amount of cargo-culted cruft lying around in various Linux-on-workstation-wiki guide sites that hasn’t been modernized since the 2000’s. I don’t normally like to rant without providing a solution, but this is a problem I see my friends bump up against all the time when I tell them it’s finally the year of the Linux desktop. When something goes wrong they land on the same search results that I did when I was a child and the advice just never got updated.

There used to be a time where swapping out meant moving cogs and wheels full of heavy rocks and RAM frequencies could be approximated by waving a stick until it made whistling noises. At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the system unusably unresponsive (I mean unusable, not just frustrating or irritating). Advice about disabling swap and zram came from that time for “resource constrained” systems. Unfortunately the meme will never die because the wikis and now regurgitated LLM drivel will just never let it go because nobody has gotten around to fixing it.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#37

Post by throw0982 »

mg wrote: post #33

One reason I don't use tablet is that they all have glossy screens. And the new iPad with matte screen has a glossy frame around it. I tried it in a store and the glare around the otherwise nicely matte screen was uncomfortable. Does anyone here have experience how well matte screen protectors for tablets work? I see them mostly discussed for they haptic feel when drawing on the tablet. I wonder how well they work to…

Minisforum has Ryzen based tablet, that has matte screen.

https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-v3

> The Minisforum V3 is a massive tablet PC with a 14-inch screen and a matte coating to reduce glare.

https://gettotext.com/minisforum-v3-test-our-full-opinion/

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#38

Post by makeitdouble »

b3lvedere wrote: post #30

I never liked the Surface series that much. It looks very nice, until you actually start working with them. Then they feel like a weird tablet with slow Windows on it. You can optimize it a little, but not much. Quite expensive as well and sometimes support is horribly slow. I gave my wife an old Lenovo Yoga 2 in 1. That thing works nice using it as a flipped tablet to watch Netflix, but here also the performance isn…

It depends on your reference point, but IMHO there's no device right now that hits all the right point, so yes, Surface Pro is one of these flawwd machines.

On the other side you'll have devices that feel really well built and graceful, but can actually do very little, or other ones fitting a very average vision of what a computer needs to do, and you'll be paying for additional devices to deal with the edge cases.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#39

Post by jillesvangurp »

tommodev wrote: post #21
vitorgrs wrote: post #18

About the Fedora Gnome vs EndeuvourOS KDE... the issue here isn't Gnome. It's actually Fedora. In my testing on a similar hardware (also Core M3 and 4gb RAM), Arch-based distros was the best with low RAM. And I tried like, probably 50 distros since last year... Gnome on my HW with Arch, is as fast as KDE, and use less memory than KDE (in theory, I know RAM is a complicated subject). Why fedora is problematic on low e…

yeah, I took the Ubuntu / Fedora perf for granted as well. Recently switched back to Arch on a whim across one low-end machine, one high-end machine, and both run like lightning compared to Ubuntu 24.04 / Fedora 40. Expected the difference with Ubuntu as it packs more out of the box for the enterprise behaviours, not so much with Fedora. I've had no freezes, faster startup and shutdown, generally more responsive desk…

I've been on Manjaro (arch based) for a few years now. I only ever installed it once and regularly update it. I've had some minor issues over the years but was able to resolve them. Mostly updates are without issues and when they aren't usually the fix is a google search away and pretty straightforward.

And of course just about everything has been updated many times at this point. Latest kernel, gnome, etc. Nice when a bunch of Intel driver performance improvements landed a few years ago. I got them right away after that kernel got released and noticed a slight difference. A few months ago, I noticed a few more improvements with performance when a bunch of btrfs fixes landed.

It's a good reason to stick with rolling releases. And since the Steam Deck uses Arch, getting Steam running on this was ridiculously easy. I'd use it professionally except I have a Mac Book Pro M1, which is really nice, and the Samsung laptop I run Manjaro on is not great, to put it mildly.

I check once in a while but there are a lot of compromises out there in terms of different laptops but none of them really come close to Apple. They all do some things well only to drop the ball on other things. You can have a fast laptop but not a quiet one. You can have a nice screen but then the keyboard or touchpad is meh. Or the thing just weighs a ton.

I think that was the point with the Surface Pro 4 in the article. It's a bit crap in terms of performance but the formfactor is nice-ish. Of course the touch support isn't great, which is no different with Manjaro. Except of course you do have access to all the latest attempts to address that.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#40

Post by ffsm8 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #38
b3lvedere wrote: post #30

I never liked the Surface series that much. It looks very nice, until you actually start working with them. Then they feel like a weird tablet with slow Windows on it. You can optimize it a little, but not much. Quite expensive as well and sometimes support is horribly slow. I gave my wife an old Lenovo Yoga 2 in 1. That thing works nice using it as a flipped tablet to watch Netflix, but here also the performance isn…

It depends on your reference point, but IMHO there's no device right now that hits all the right point, so yes, Surface Pro is one of these flawwd machines. On the other side you'll have devices that feel really well built and graceful, but can actually do very little, or other ones fitting a very average vision of what a computer needs to do, and you'll be paying for additional devices to deal with the edge cases.

Imagine an iPad that automatically switches to MacOSX if plugged into an external monitor, keyboard/mouse.

It'd be glorious, not that I'd ever happen - for multiple reasons. One of which being that ipadOS is essentially iOS, so no overlap with MacOS

Post reply on HN