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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

#131

Post by forgotacc240419 »

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'm a big fan of used Surface Go models. They tend to be for corporate use which seems to have a knock on effect of them being sold off very cheaply when people want rid and with seemingly minimal use. For use when traveling they're pretty exceptional, I even managed to get away doing a few days dev work on one while railing around Japan

Have gotten multiple people a Surface Go 1 with 8GB ram and the keyboard and have never paid more than £80. Bizarre that they even made a 4GB model, let alone that they kept it until the second most recent version

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#132

Post by mananaysiempre »

jasonjayr wrote: post #119
trelane wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standby doesn't work on Windows?

In the last few years; Microsoft started pushing this "Modern standby"[1] thing, which lets the CPU run while suspended or something. IIRC it is so a PC can run background services, wifi and what not, like tablets + cell phones. It is causing so many issues, because the common use case for a laptop is to close the lid, and then stuff it into a padded bag. If anything starts up the laptop for whatever reason, all that…

> Some system BIOS are removing the option to even disable modern standby mode

The CPU manufacturers have stopped providing support for developing firmware with an S3 (“traditional standby”) function for recent CPU generations, except for a couple of laptop manufacturers receiving special treatment.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#133

Post by criddell »

jasonjayr wrote: post #119
trelane wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standby doesn't work on Windows?

In the last few years; Microsoft started pushing this "Modern standby"[1] thing, which lets the CPU run while suspended or something. IIRC it is so a PC can run background services, wifi and what not, like tablets + cell phones. It is causing so many issues, because the common use case for a laptop is to close the lid, and then stuff it into a padded bag. If anything starts up the laptop for whatever reason, all that…

This should work much better than it does. Microsoft is right - Windows machines should be able to run background services as well as a tablet or phone.

Their Modern Standby requirements should have included a clause saying that the machines efficiency core (which I assume is what would be running in standby) should not be able to raise the temperature enough to require a fan.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#134

Post by criddell »

vel0city wrote: post #123
trelane wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standby doesn't work on Windows?

Standby works fine for me on Windows and has for a long time across dozens of different devices. Chances are if the system keeps waking from sleep, they have some third-party app that keeps waking the system.

The machine isn't waking from sleep, it's that the standby processing is intensive enough and the hardware is so poorly designed that the computer heats up which requires the fan to run.

> When Modern Standby-capable systems enter sleep, the system is still in S0 (a fully running state, ready and able to do work). Desktop apps are stopped by the Desktop Activity Moderator (DAM); however, background tasks from Microsoft Store apps are permitted to do work. In connected standby, the network is still active, and users can receive events such as VoIP calls in a Windows store app. While VoIP calls coming in over Wi-Fi wouldn’t be available in disconnected standby, real-time events such as reminders or a Bluetooth device syncing can still happen.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#135

Post by vel0city »

throwaway3306a wrote: post #126
vel0city wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standby works fine for me on Windows and has for a long time across dozens of different devices. Chances are if the system keeps waking from sleep, they have some third-party app that keeps waking the system.

Macbooks also wake from sleep while closed and yet it doesn't destroy the computer. How is the computer supposed to do background checks / send its location etc if it can't wake up for a short while?

Connected Standby has worked on my devices for a decade. When I plug in my laptop to my dock in the office and it wakes up, it comes on pretty much instantly. Its already on the WiFi, which it joined when I walked in the building. My email has already synced. My chat has already synced before I even log in.

It has been doing this just fine since Windows 8 came out across multiple Thinkpads, Surface tablets, and other devices.

Even pre-Windows 8, sleep has generally worked perfectly fine for me. I'd have my computer on sleep between classes, open it up and pretty much instantly be right back in OneNote ready to take notes. Cheap Compaq laptops, expensive HP laptops, IBM Thinkpads, Lenovo Thinkpads, Surface tablets, no-name cheap Walmart laptops, all kinds of devices. In the last almost 20 years I've had less than a dozen instances of a hot bag running XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, now 11.

I had issues with sleep on some desktops in the past, where it wouldn't want to stay in sleep. Every time it was some dumb app waking up the machine. Never due to some specific Windows issue, always something I installed.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#136

Post by haspok »

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…

FWIW I had similar problems with my X1, sleep on lid close was working about 50% of the time (which is probably worse than not working at all, because you genuinely don't know what is going to happen...).

As a quick fix I assigned Ctrl-Meta-L to Sleep (Meta-L is screen lock - I'm using KDE btw). It didn't take long for me to automatically press this combo before closing the lid - I got so much used to it that I had stop stop and think when I got a new laptop later and installed linux fresh on it. And of course I just set it up like before, even though this one works :)

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#137

Post by gosub100 »

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 ordered one with Ubuntu pre installed and it worked well, however there was an annoying issue where the mouse would freeze for a few seconds every couple minutes. I eventually swapped it with Garuda Linux and got a much faster UX, but suspend/sleep doesn't fully work. Doesn't bother me.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#138

Post by FeepingCreature »

a2tech wrote: post #62
FeepingCreature wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’ve learned to disable swap on my scientific computing machines where we’re working on giant datasets. It’s better for the machine to crash when it exhausts its RAM than go to swap. In my experience a machine is never going to recover when a workload pushes it into swapping because something has gone awry and that situation is not going to fix itself.

Yeah on my current nvme linux systems, swap is just "the phase where the ongoing leak makes the system kind of sluggish, shortly before the oom killer goes to work". On 32GB, I ~never hit swap "legitimately".

The most useful thing honestly has been a memory usage applet in the task bar. Memory leaks usually have a very clean and visible signature that provides a few seconds of warning to hit alt-tab-tab-ctrl-c.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#139

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

vbezhenar wrote: post #114
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.

I have Thinkpad which is supposedly built to run ubuntu as well and even certified for RHEL and Ubuntu. It doesn't work so good, though. It works, but there are rough edges around sleeping, external displays, power management. I feel that it has nothing to do with manufacturer, though, just not good enough Linux support for laptops.

> I feel that it has nothing to do with manufacturer, though, just not good enough Linux support for laptops.

On the contrary, it's down to the model. As I type this on a fully-functional Thinkpad, I can assure you Linux is fine on laptops.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#140

Post by haspok »

criddell wrote: post #133
jasonjayr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last few years; Microsoft started pushing this "Modern standby"[1] thing, which lets the CPU run while suspended or something. IIRC it is so a PC can run background services, wifi and what not, like tablets + cell phones. It is causing so many issues, because the common use case for a laptop is to close the lid, and then stuff it into a padded bag. If anything starts up the laptop for whatever reason, all that…

This should work much better than it does. Microsoft is right - Windows machines should be able to run background services as well as a tablet or phone. Their Modern Standby requirements should have included a clause saying that the machines efficiency core (which I assume is what would be running in standby) should not be able to raise the temperature enough to require a fan.

No, Microsoft did not ask the users if they wanted this or not (or made this behaviour configurable). Just as they did not ask users if they wanted to see ads in their Start menu...
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