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A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

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Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#101

Post by WillAdams »

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…

I liked the first two iterations of the Surface Pro line, but it dropped off the radar for me when they went to NTrig digitizers.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was about the perfect computer for my needs:

- decent-size high-resolution screen

- small enough to fit in a bag for when traveling

- Wacom EMR stylus --- I find this essential for drawing, sketching, annotating, and when I'm not inclined to connect a keyboard, writing

Performance was quite good, but then Fall Creators Update crippled the stylus down to an 11th touch input which scrolled in web browsers and made selecting text quite awkward, as well as making using older applications quite difficult. I rolled back to 1703 twice and stayed there until circumstances forced a replacement --- the best option I could find was a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- I have to keep the Settings app open so I can toggle the stylus between acting/not acting like a mouse.

It kills me that we had such great innovation in the tablet space once-upon-a-time (the ThinkPad was so-named because it was originally planned as a stylus computer) and my NCR-3125 (since donated to the Smithsonian) running PenPoint was one of my most-favourite computers and things seemed so promising w/ Windows 8... at least it's easy to write into text fields again.

Hopefully the Lenovo Yogabook 9i will be popular enough that someone will make a dual-screen device using Wacom EMR.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#102

Post by black_puppydog »

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…

Personally, for a long time I disabled swap and made sure that I had an OOM killer running.

This was always in a setup where I'd have ample RAM for my everyday tasks, and was doing numerics. Running OOM would invariably mean two things:

1. I had a bug in my scripts, which typically meant I'd accidentally materialized a huge sparse matrix or some such, and thus

2. The system wouldn't go "just a little" OOM but rather consume memory an order of magnitude over the actual system's capacity. And it would not recover.

In that scenario, the system would typically start swath-thrashing so hard that I'd just cold reboot. An OOM daemon fixed that and let me iron out my bugs.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#103

Post by izacus »

speed_spread wrote: post #69
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…

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…

Swapping to zram is just fine and it will improve experience on many machines.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#104

Post by keepamovin »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #99
keepamovin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right? Exactly! It's a personal thing, I mean using it is not minor for me, it's super useful, but I don't see the point in challenging others about it. Just like different strokes for different folks, like diffeomorphisms haha :) Did that math joke work? I don't know as i'm not a mathematician. Lucky you haven't seen the hate, it's definitely out there. The refined world of academia must be too pleasant for it haha :)

I also really like how you can just plug whatever keyboard in to it and use a desktop OS on tablet form factor, and it just works.

You ever post your work on here?

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#105

Post by izacus »

callalex wrote: post #42
commandersaki wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Yes. Even the Zen4 AMD Ryzen chips do.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#106

Post by trelane »

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…

Standby doesn't work on Windows?

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#107

Post by trelane »

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…

The trick to running Linux on the Microsoft Surface line is to not.

> Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking

I don't know why you would be surprised that Microsoft hardware fails to run Linux well.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#108

Post by iamacyborg »

trelane wrote: post #106
m_st wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Standby doesn't work on Windows?

Certainly doesn’t appear to on my thinkpad

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#109

Post by tiahura »

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…

I’ve been all in on surface since the sp3. They had me at 3:2.
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