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

81–90 of 229 posts

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#81

Post by diffeomorphism »

keepamovin wrote: post #60
codeulike wrote: post #54

Note this is the lowest spec Surface Pro 4, it had a low power Intel Core m3-6Y30 so that it could run without any active cooling, making it a 'true' tablet. Most of the 'proper' Surface Pro 4s had an i5 or i7 processor with active cooling (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_4 ) and were roughly comparable in performance to other PC ultrabooks at the time. I've been using the Surface Pro line for about 10…

I also use the surface for everything I need: I like it a lot and I’ve never had a problem with it. I don’t get the hate, nor why the inaccurate idea that you cannot run things on it persists.

A surface pro 9 with average laptop specs (16GB of ram, 1TB of storage), keyboard and pen costs 2000 + 140 + 80 and that is for the "outdated" model.

At that price it should be exceptional not just good. That is not "hate" but disapointment.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#82

Post by gmokki »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #49
callalex wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was you kernel new enough to have MGLRU (kernel 6.1+).

After that improvement one can be swapping constantly and the machine is still responsive.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#83

Post by Raydovsky »

chrsw wrote: post #80

I run Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 without any issues as far as I can tell. I've done almost no tweaking. I just do periodic software and firmware updates. I close the lid, throw it my bag, open it hours later, or the next day and I'm right back to where I was. The experience as close to Mac-like as I've ever experienced outside of Apple. But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated w…

That's because the XPS were built to run ubuntu. You can even buy one with it pre-installed.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#84

Post by cameronh90 »

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…

That's because when it comes to memory management on a Linux workstation, it is an unsolved problem. I've tried every piece of advice, distro and tool, and spent hundreds of hours trying to tune it over the years, and haven't been able to find a configuration that works as reliably as Windows or MacOS do out of the box.

Linux memory management works well for servers where you can predict workloads, set resource limits, spec the right amount of memory, and, in most cases, don't care that much if an individual server crashes.

For workstations, it either kicks in too early (and kills your IDE to punish you for opening too many tabs in Chrome) or it doesn't kick in at all, even when the system has become entirely unresponsive and you have to either mash magic sysrq or reboot.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#85

Post by speed_spread »

andrewaylett wrote: post #72
speed_spread wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swapping in any form always sucks, period. The machine starts behaving strangely and does not tell you why because it's trying it's hardest to hide the fact that it ran out of resources. Experience has shown me over and over that you just want to feel the limits of the machine hard and fast so you can change what you're asking of it rather than thinking that there is some perf issue or weird bug. It's the idea that s…

But where else are you going to put your anonymous pages when you don't want them for a while? Lots of the stuff you're using is backed by disk anyway -- and will be removed from RAM when there's any memory pressure, whether or not you have any swap. If you've got swap then the system can put anonymous pages in it, otherwise it'll need to evict named files more frequently. Unless you have enough RAM that you're liter…

The whole concept of "virtual memory" has tainted systems design for decades. Treating RAM as a cache relies on the OS making guesses about what will be needed and what can be passivated without it actually knowing the application requirements. Except that compared to CPU level caching, the cost of page faults is big enough that performance degradation is not linear and breaks the user experience. The idea that a 4GB machine can do the same with as an 8GB one albeit slower is just not true. If you hit the swap, you feel it bad. I'll concede that Zram can work because the degradation is softer. But anything hitting the IO should be explicitly controlled by the app.

Other random semi-related thoughts:

- Rust having to define a new stdlib to be used in Linux kernel because of explicit allocation failure requirements. Why wasn't this possibility factored in from the beginning?

- Most software nowadays just abstracts memory costs, partly explaining why a word processor that used to work fine with 64mb of RAM now takes a gig to get anything done.

- Embedded development experience should be a requirement for any serious software engineer.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#86

Post by m_st »

chrsw wrote: post #80

I run Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 without any issues as far as I can tell. I've done almost no tweaking. I just do periodic software and firmware updates. I close the lid, throw it my bag, open it hours later, or the next day and I'm right back to where I was. The experience as close to Mac-like as I've ever experienced outside of Apple. But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated w…

Woah! Standby is working fine too?

I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell. This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense. I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down ever.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#87

Post by chrsw »

Raydovsky wrote: post #83
chrsw wrote: post #80

I run Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 without any issues as far as I can tell. I've done almost no tweaking. I just do periodic software and firmware updates. I close the lid, throw it my bag, open it hours later, or the next day and I'm right back to where I was. The experience as close to Mac-like as I've ever experienced outside of Apple. But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated w…

That's because the XPS were built to run ubuntu. You can even buy one with it pre-installed.

Ubuntu 20.04 was preinstalled on my machine. But I reinstalled when I moved to a larger SDD. I think I still used the OEM install image too.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#88

Post by jonathanlydall »

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…

My wife and I have been very happy with our Surface Pro 8 16Gb we bought last year running Windows 11 Pro. Mostly we use it with the keyboard attached.

My wife needed a personal device because her company issued laptop was so locked down that she couldn't do a lot of basic personal admin stuff on it (for example online ordering of groceries).

We considered an iPad, but in the end chose the Surface Pro because it allowed multiple user profiles. Windows Hello works super well that for either of us as we pick it up and look at it it's pretty much instantly on the correct profile and thanks to cloud sync with OneDrive and Microsoft Edge, I'm at home on either my own machine or the Surface.

Only thing to mention is that the out of the box experience wasn't as good as I would have liked, especially compared to my experience with iPhones (despite liking iOS over Android, I have no love for macOS).

Firstly, it wasn't running the latest feature update of Windows 11 and trying certain apps (like Instagram) off the Microsoft Store failed to install with a largely undescriptive error. Eventually I realized it wasn't running the very latest Windows 11 feature update which resolved the issue once installed.

The other problem was that my user profile was laggy, but not my wife's. For example the Start Menu was very slow to come up. After a few days of this and no luck Googling the issue, I just formatted and re-installed Windows using Microsoft's official ISO download image. I normally do this with any new Windows PC I get, but assumed it wouldn't be essential for full on Microsoft hardware, but even though there was no obviously extra bundled rubbish software, something was clearly not 100%.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#89

Post by chrsw »

m_st wrote: post #86
chrsw wrote: post #80

I run Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 without any issues as far as I can tell. I've done almost no tweaking. I just do periodic software and firmware updates. I close the lid, throw it my bag, open it hours later, or the next day and I'm right back to where I was. The experience as close to Mac-like as I've ever experienced outside of Apple. But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated w…

Woah! Standby is working fine too? I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell. This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense. I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down…

Yes, standby is working fine. I don't have the machine in front of me now but I don't remember fiddling with any of the power settings either. It was all working after the install. I definitely run software update so that might explain why it's working so smooth too.

Meanwhile, my other machine from work is a Precision workstation running Windows 10 and it gives me all kinds of power issues, more invasive updates, random restarts, random high fan RPMs, etc. Dell has already serviced the machine, twice. What a mess.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#90

Post by memsom »

treesknees wrote: post #2

I know this doesn't fit the author's goals but I still think the trick with the surface line is using WSL instead of trying to run native Linux. Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking. Maybe things will get better now that they're practically EOL with Win10 ending next year and no support for Win11. Unfortunately my SSD started to fail and battery…

You say no support for Win 11, but my Surface 2 Pro runs Windows 11 just fine. I don't think it even asked for the license key when I installed it. I probably used Rufus to make the image and turned off some of the more problematic aspects of Win 11, but it for sure installs with little or no problems. This is also a 4GiB model with 128GiB storage. It is very usable, despite having a processor equivalent to a pre-retina MacBook Air IIRC.
Post reply on HN