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

41–50 of 229 posts

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#41

Post by mg »

shamefulkiwi wrote: post #35
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.

Yay, that sounds promising. Which protector do you use?

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#42

Post by callalex »

commandersaki wrote: post #15
tstrimple wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that works because Linux power management is almost as bad as Windows so not a lot is lost. I'll never understand how people pick mobile devices with such short battery life. I further don't understand how literally no company other than Apple is able to deliver decent battery life. Even Microsoft's first party offerings which aren't infected by OEM bullshit are garbage in this regard.

These new Snapdragon Elite X laptops compete on battery life. But I need to build for Linux/amd64 and I don't want to emulate so it's either Intel laptop or Apple Silicon laptop with Rosetta 2 for Linux.

Do they still compete on battery life while running a corporate email client, corporate chat client (Slack/Teams) and an editor (text/code/spreadsheet) in the background while completely idle? You’d think such simple idle workloads wouldn’t matter and yet I only find macOS to be capable of reigning in even these “light” background tasks without manual process suspension and killing. I don’t understand how we got to this point but it seems to be how my “real” world works.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#43

Post by makeitdouble »

1234554321a wrote: post #28

I’ve had had SP4 i5 8gb ram version since 2017. It’s unreliable when running Windows, let alone Linux. It had constant touch screen issues which never fully went away even after replacing the screen. When I tried installing Linux I decided to switch back to Windows after a couple of months as both wifi and bluetooth had constant issues. The battery life is 2 or 3 hours at best even if you replace the battery with a n…

Wow, that's a 9 years old machine...

I tried the SP7 refurbished 3 years ago, and it was already kinda slow and not great, though it gave a clear idea of what Microsoft did with the line.

Switching to a 16G SP8 it's infinitely better. Still unreliable at times, but not that much if compared to an similar usage on an iPad pro. Battery life is workable (I get around 5~6 hours coding and compiling, usually have an external battery when out anyway).

I assume if you're looking at an M2 giving up x86 compatibility isn't an issue.

The most glaring issue on the Surface for me are too much reliance on Chrome/Edge for touch support, as Firefox is really not ready (mobile version is fine, don't know why desktop is so bad), and the port networking management in WSL2 where proxying VPNs can mess with wsl's port proxying. Otherwise I'mll be waiting for Apple to ever port macos to the iPad before reconsidering.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#44

Post by vladvasiliu »

langsoul-com wrote: post #22

Too bad that Linux support in laptops isn't the best. Especially for unique laptops like Asus zenbook 2024, the one with two screens. I want to get away from windows completely but their support for laptops is much better.

> Especially for unique laptops

But I'd say that's rather on the manufacturers, and not on Linux. They usually provide crappy drivers only for whatever version of windows they ship and call it a day. See all the junk that would stop working between major windows updates.

Also, how does that laptop work? Don't the screens just show up as two displays, or do they do something special?

> I want to get away from windows completely but their support for laptops is much better.

YMMV as they say... Speaking of displays specifically, we just got some brand spanking new 5k screens at work. My full intel hp enterprise laptop can't use them at 5K under windows [0], but Linux supports them perfectly, even two at a time in addition to the integrated panel. Even 4k@60 had be borked on Windows on this PC for something like 2 years after I bought it. Worked OK since day one on Linux.

---

[0] I actually did get it to work by installing the latest driver from the Intel website. But windows helpfully "updated" it back to the borked version after a reboot.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#45

Post by tjoff »

callalex wrote: post #36
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…

This is OS-agnostic. I love the old fact that you should have twice the amount of swap as your RAM size. I could rant but, no. Just don't.

Today, don't buy a computer (regardless of size) with less than 32 GB of ram. Yes, this applies to fruity products as well. Part from making it a more enjoyable experience it will also extend the usable life of the computer immensely.

(The weird crap about apple computers not needing as much RAM comes from iOS vs. android and is for different reasons, does not apply to real computers)

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#46

Post by tetha »

callalex wrote: post #36
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…

I have similar experiences. I've been digging into this more over the years and my two conclusions are: (a) Linux memory management is overall rather complex and contains many rather subtle decisions that speed up systems. (b) Most recommendations you find about it are old, rubbish, or not nuanced enough.

Like one thing I learned some time ago: swap-out in itself is not a bad thing. swap-out on it's own means the kernel is pushing memory pages it currently doesn't need to disk. It does this to prepare for a low-memory situation so if push comes to shove and it has to move pages to disk, some pages are already written to disk. And if the page is dirtied later on before needing to swap it back in, alright, we wasted some iops. Oh no. This occurs quite a bit for example for long-running processes with rarely used code paths, or with processes that do something once a day or so.

swap-in on the other hand is nasty for the latency of processes. Which, again, may or may not be something to care about. If a once-a-day monitoring script starts a few milliseconds slower because data has to be swapped in... so what?

It just becomes an issue if the system starts trashing and rapidly cycling pages in and out of swap. But in such a situation, the system would start randomly killing services without swap, which is also not entirely conductive to a properly working system. Especially because it'll start killing stuff using a lot of memory... which, on a server, tends to be the thing you want running.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#47

Post by makeitdouble »

ffsm8 wrote: post #40
makeitdouble wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The real big roadblock is Apple, but if the DMA forces them to let third party software, we could get a fully exposed subsystem opening the door to what users really ask for.

Right now the joke is Windows XP emulation making it what it always needed to be, getting containerised/emulated Mac apps with decent Perfs from low level access would be a huge win. We could be close to your ideal, with the iPad still running, and a Mac instance pinned to the external screen.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#48

Post by pizza234 »

I like the hybrids/detachable form factor, as a mean to merge tablets and laptops in a single device, but the whole software/hardware stack was not yet ready then, especially for those attempting to use Linux.

List of problems:

1. x86(-64) power saving (sleep) capabilities are poor; tablets are expected to consume very little battery (ie. last weeks in standby mode), while x86 eats batteries for lunch (in S-whatever); this doesn't even take into account Windows arbitrarily deciding to wake up the machine while in a bag/backpack

2. Surface Pro's and Surface Book's (the latter was state of the art in terms of tablet hardware by the time of SB1 and SB2) had OK hardware support from Linux, but it took a long while, and it wasn't very stable (eg. wifi)

3. Hardware touch support itself is not enough; software needs to be good, and there was (likely, is) no document reader with good UX and annotation capabilities on Linux

The solution for my use case was to dual boot, but points 1 and 2 were still a serious issue overall.

Nowadays:

1. there are ARM tablets, with performant power saving (sleep) mode

2. WSL sidesteps Linux hardware compatibility issues (assuming one tolerates running Windows as underlying O/S), and avoids dual boot

3. WSL also allows using better document readers/annotators

I fear WSL, but as a matter of fact, it's changing the landscape for Linux users.

In theory, Ipad Pro's would be the best of both worlds, but they have a toy O/S by design. /shrug

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#49

Post by FeepingCreature »

callalex wrote: post #36
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…

I have had systems completely die from hitting swap a few years ago. This is not a 2000s problem.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#50

Post by TiredOfLife »

callalex wrote: post #36
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…

>At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the system unusably unresponsive

Interestingly that was my experience on steam deck with its default 1gb swap. But after enabling both zram and larger ordinary swap (now also default setting for upcoming release) it became much more stable and responsive.

Post reply on HN