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

91–100 of 229 posts

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#91

Post by jcelerier »

webdevver wrote: post #61
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…

compiling clang on ubuntu 20.04, the link step used up all my ram and started swapping on the nvme. htop froze, so i hit ctrl-c, but nothing happened. no mouse movement, no ssh'ing in, just totally hard-locked. i ended up having to physically powercycle the machine. after that i turned off swap so that it killed the process rather than the machine (and remembered to pass -DLLVM_PARALLEL_LINK_JOBS=1)

Use easyoom or systemd-oomd

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#93

Post by bdcravens »

chrsw wrote: post #87
Raydovsky wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't help but wonder if Dell tweaked the firmware. I know that I, and everyone I've seen discuss it, haven't been able to get a vanilla XPS (non-Developer edition, sold with Windows) with a typical off-the-shelf distro, including Ubuntu, to work 100%.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#95

Post by keepamovin »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #81
keepamovin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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9 with average laptop specs (16GB of ram, 1TB of storage), keyboard and pen costs 2000 + 140 + 80 and that is for the "outdated" model.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

I get the perspective of comparing based on price per unit of specs, but you're not just paying for that. That consideration may not be the main consideration in purchase for everybody. People make subjective assessments that are hard to quantify and compare across individuals.

I guess if you find yourself being disappointed but you otherwise would have liked it, I suggest you may be looking at it the wrong way and missing out on what could work for you.

For me, I think the weight and mobility are important too. I love the stylus and OS. I like the look and there's a bit of a f-you status, not in terms of the money involved which is not that much (especially considering what people drop on gaming rigs, Mac stuff, etc), but because it is a bit different.

I think you're wrong that there's no hate towards Surface: you may not be picking up on it, there definitely is. Maybe people dislike that it's flashy and costly when they expect it should be utilitarian, so it kind of clashes with their expectations in a way that upsets them, and they dislike seeing other people enjoy what displeases themselves. I find it humorous that the same people may see another item, a Mac or whatever, in a different light, despite obvious similarities, and enjoy its flashy costliness. Heh! :)

I encourage you to consider how the people who like and enjoy it see it.

These topics have a way of turning people a bit mad, or at least creating conflict. So please let me turn the heat down a little bit with this olive branch compliment: hey, cool username, are you a mathematician?? :)

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#96

Post by steveklabnik »

speed_spread wrote: post #85
andrewaylett wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Rust having to define a new stdlib to be used in Linux kernel because of explicit allocation failure requirements.

This is phrased in a way that’s a bit more extreme than in reality. Some new features are in the process of being added.

> Why wasn't this possibility factored in from the beginning?

So, there’s a few ways to talk about this. The first is… it was! Rust has three major layers to its standard library: core, alloc, and std. core, the lowest level, is a freestanding library. Alloc introduces memory allocations, and std introduces stuff that builds on top of OS functionality, like filesystems. What’s going on here is the kernel wanting to use the alloc layer in the kernel itself. So it’s naturally a bit higher level, and so needs some more work to fit in. Just normal software development stuff.

Why didn’t alloc have fallible APIs? Because of Linux, ironically. The usual setup there means you won’t ever observe an allocation failure. So there hasn’t been a lot of pressure to add those APIs, as they’re less useful then you might imagine at first. And it also goes the other way; a lot of embedded systems do not allocate dynamically at all, so for stuff smaller or lower level than Linux, there hasn’t been any pressure there either.

Also, I use the word “pressure” on purpose: like any open source project, work gets done when someone that needs a feature drives that feature forward. These things have been considered, for essentially forever, it’s just that finishing the work was never prioritized by anyone, because there’s an infinite amount of work to do and a finite number of people doing it. The Rust for Linux folks are now those people coming along and driving that upstream work. Which benefits all who come later.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#97

Post by trelane »

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.

Linux support for laptops is fine. Getting an OS to work well on hardware requires a whole team of people called system integrators. Just slapping Linux on a Windows laptop and expecting it to work is naive.

If you want a better Linux experience, you have to buy a Linux laptop, i.e. one that was designed (especially in firmware and chip selection) to run Linux, with support. You know, like you do for Windows.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#98

Post by chrsw »

bdcravens wrote: post #93
chrsw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't help but wonder if Dell tweaked the firmware. I know that I, and everyone I've seen discuss it, haven't been able to get a vanilla XPS (non-Developer edition, sold with Windows) with a typical off-the-shelf distro, including Ubuntu, to work 100%.

Sorry, I should have specified Developer Edition in my first post.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#99

Post by diffeomorphism »

keepamovin wrote: post #95
diffeomorphism wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get the perspective of comparing based on price per unit of specs, but you're not just paying for that. That consideration may not be the main consideration in purchase for everybody. People make subjective assessments that are hard to quantify and compare across individuals. I guess if you find yourself being disappointed but you otherwise would have liked it, I suggest you may be looking at it the wrong way and m…

Agreed, people can sometimes get too much into minor things like laptop brands.

Yes, I am a mathematician and have a few colleagues who are happily using their surfaces for notes and online teaching. I have seen some "rivalry" with people using iPads instead, but luckily no hate thus far.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#100

Post by trelane »

bdcravens wrote: post #93
chrsw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't help but wonder if Dell tweaked the firmware. I know that I, and everyone I've seen discuss it, haven't been able to get a vanilla XPS (non-Developer edition, sold with Windows) with a typical off-the-shelf distro, including Ubuntu, to work 100%.

That seems likely. I know that firmware is one of the big differences between System76 laptops and the version that Clevo subsequently offers with Windows. I think the chips can vary sometimes too.

Just from an ACPI perspective, I'd expect the Linux variant to (at a minimum) be built with the Intel compiler and the Windows one with Microsoft's. It is likely that there are far more differences, though.

Post reply on HN