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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

#161

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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 (I mean unusable, not just frustrating or irritating).

I had a machine freeze this month because it was trying to zram swap, and have hit shades of the problem over the last few years on multiple machines running multiple distros. Sometimes running earlyoom helps, but at that point what's the point of swap? So no, this isn't out of date.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#162

Post by 1oooqooq »

denysvitali wrote: post #32
1oooqooq wrote: post #13

Linux surface kernel is a meme. it's the same sort of hacks from teenage Android community to port binary blobs. if you're not familiar with that, just be glad. in summary, old unpatched kennels with weird binary code nobody cares to understand.

It's not, it follows the upstream releases and has a couple of patches for the Surface drivers (e.g: SAM) that will hopefully be upstreamed one day. They have something like ~50 commits on top of the release tag [1]. The main developer is doing an amazing job, and the fact that Linux runs on so many Surfaces devices, including the ARM ones (like my SPX) is just amazing. Linaro (Bjorn Andersson) helped quite a lot in…

i stand corrected. that was a huge progress from a couple years I last checked.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#163

Post by criddell »

haspok wrote: post #140
criddell wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You only want an option because Microsoft and their hardware partners did a poor job with this.

Pretty much nobody asks for the same feature to be configurable on their iPad because it works well.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#164

Post by laweijfmvo »

nucleardog wrote: post #155
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…

Don't know if it's "legitimate", but I've got 64GB of RAM. Allocating 16/32/64/128GB of NVME storage to swap is mostly just a waste of disk space for me. When I had swap enabled, it was constantly showing 0 used. (Not "pretty much none", literally "0.0".) Further, if I'm trying to use more than 64GB of RAM... I'm fine with things getting OOM killed. I don't know that I've ever had anything OOM-killed when something w…

I have access to a build machine with 256GB of RAM and it suffers from OOM killing during certain builds unless I allocate like 2GB of swap

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#165

Post by laweijfmvo »

chronogram wrote: post #71
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…

On my SBCs and VPSs I use a cache-heavy zram setup with LZ4 and `vm.page-cluster=0` being the most important changes to the default, and cache pressure and swappiness both to 200 off the top of my head, and things like only doing foreground IO when the background write buffer is full. This type of swapping is fast, and is easy on the CPU, and gives a lot of extra disk cache on this type of low performing storage. I d…

could you please write a ELI5 guide that I could follow on my tiny VPS? It's debian-based. Thanks!

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#166

Post by KennyBlanken »

trelane wrote: post #100
bdcravens wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The biggest problem with System76 laptops: their screens.

$1400 for a laptop with 1920x1080 at 60hz in 2024 is a joke. $200 more gets you a 3024x1964 @ 120hz, with an M3 processor and the ability to get warranty service walk-in anywhere around the world.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#167

Post by KennyBlanken »

martzy13 wrote: post #118
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…

https://system76.com/laptops

Don't waste your time. 1920x1080p @60hz in 2024...

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#168

Post by 1oooqooq »

He went back to windows and didn't mention to worst part of old windows PCs (and a surface4 is extremely ancient!)

The wifi stack is entirely handled by the shaddy driver, which is usually just the reference implementation from the chip manufacturer stuck in time.

That means your wifi stack will only support WPA2, and ancient cyphers with outdated parameters. No matter how up to date is your OS.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#169

Post by jasonjayr »

criddell wrote: post #163
haspok wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You only want an option because Microsoft and their hardware partners did a poor job with this. Pretty much nobody asks for the same feature to be configurable on their iPad because it works well.

It works well on mobile devices because from the get-go, it is established that the operating system can aggressively suspend or halt processes. Laptops + PC's, on the other hand, have 40+ years of legacy that assume that the OS won't kill a process unless the user insists, or a resource disaster is imminent. They can deal with a pause, provided the processes external view of the state of the CPU + memory are not drastically changed.

Windows finally had suspend working reliably, where memory was frozen, and nothing else on the PC could change the state of memory or the CPU. Modern standby is Intel/Microsoft's effort to hoist that mobile-style of operating system management onto PC's, in an environment that was not expecting it.

They should have slowly rolled it out, with thermal protections from the get go to prevent disaster, and after a generation or two when the hardware + software are working correctly, made it on by default. It seems like they rushed it for Win 10, and then made it the default on Win 11 before it was really stable.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#170

Post by artisanspam »

mg wrote: post #41
shamefulkiwi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not OP but I use this and like it. It gives a slight scratchy feel when I write on my iPad with the apple pencil and it removes all of the glare for when I'm reading. It's magnetic so you can remove it whenever you want to, but I never take it off.

https://pen.tips/products/penmat

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