Even less ports. Not upgradeable. Not serviceable. Author wants UNIX tools but Linux doesn't even work correctly with the device yet.
Plenty of Unix tools work in WSL (and plenty worked through Cygwin before that).
The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
131–140 of 467 posts
Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#132Such articles always give too much importance to the hardware (which is somewhat important, no doubt) and not enough importance to the software. Many people are looking for quality alternatives to Macbooks, Mac Mini, etc (myself included). Mac Mini hasn’t been updated for 4-5 years. So, I started setting up a Windows desktop as a Mac Mini replacement. But when it came to finding all the alternatives to the OS X softw…
Hey! Writer here. I discuss the software at length in here, but as I point out in the piece I've already covered why WSL and Bash work very well at length, so didn't want to muddy the water too much: 1. How to use Bash on Windows to retain your previous setup: https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-d... 2. Why WSL/Bash is good enough these days: https://medium.com/charged-tech/why-i-left-mac-for-w…
Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#133Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't open files in VSCode that live in the WSL virtual file system. Which is a huge problem for setting up the same exact dev environment I have on my Mac. It's honestly dumbfounding. VSCode works great on Mac with the existing terminal but the WSL team can't figure out a good way to allow you to edit WSL files from a normal Windows application.
The way you do this is to cd into your Windows system from within WSL. WSL can see files from the Win32 subsystem just fine.
As it is right now I can't even edit my ~/.ssh/config from VSCode without jumping through hoops.
Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows keeps breaking with every update. My touchpad randomly stops working. Startup is excruciatingly slow even on an i7 laptop with 16GB of RAM. Starting up from sleep takes nearly as long, and for some reason, it takes at least 5 minutes for the machine to work at normal processing power again. The search function is still as broken as ever. There is a useless "People" tab near the clock that hogs my memory. Then…
Yeah, you can turn off that "People" tab. Just right click.
Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first thing I always do on a new laptop (or install) is go into Power Settings and change the Closing Lid action from putting the computer to sleep to just turning off the screen. It's surprising how many people never change the settings on their computers. Whenever I saw someone with the taskbar icons combined, I always asked them if they liked it that way, and they would say "No." So I always offered and they a…
If you put it in your bag, you're more likely to fry something. Was extremely common with spinning rust media. Incidentally, the common cause was "close lid" action set to "sleep", but Windows being unable to actually put the computer to sleep for some reason.
Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#137It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid. Software matters, and how it integrates with hardware. And I keep waiting for them to fix just the basics in Windows 10. Not utterly losing both the sizes and positions of all windows just because the laptop was undocked. Not fai…
Interesting. I've never seen or even heard of this. Windows didn't do a great job at this in general like a decade ago and the Surface Pros had a bug that was eventually fixed relating to it but I've never heard or seen an issue beyond those. I have multiple Windows and Mac machines and they both do great at preserving state when closing the lid.
Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#138Has anyone managed to get Linux booted on this thing and working well? I've been debating purchasing one, but I am afraid that I'll be stuck with Windows, which, for what I work on, makes hacking pretty difficult. EDIT: Just as a note, I know about WSL (I use it at work), but I would greatly prefer to have Linux working on root. I have a lot of custom systemd setups, and I've become somewhat dependent on XMonad.
IMO, the most notable items missing full support are:
- the battery[2][3], charge or capacity status
- "performance base" dedicated GPUs
1: https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface
Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#139As I use the Surface Laptop, I wish Apple would steal the design and apply it to a new MacBook Air.
The screen is excellent, and coming from the Mac world it is surprisingly how good having a touch screen is.
Battery life is great and smashes my 15” 2016 MacBook Pro. It reminds me of the good old days of MacBook Air (all day) battery life.
The keyboard has travel, but I had to swap around the “Windows Key” and “Ctl key” to stop going mad (I have 19 years of macOS shortcut muscle memory).
Microsoft reminds us that you can still have a USB-A port and SD Card Slot in a nice form factor. It is possible to escape the #DongleLife .
My only gripes are 1) Windows still pales in comparison to OS X 2) the power supply is proprietary (I really like USB-C chargers).
Re: The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be
#140It’s 2018 and I still see people walking around with Windows laptop lids open because they presumably have no confidence in Windows’ ability to sensibly preserve state after closing the lid. Software matters, and how it integrates with hardware. And I keep waiting for them to fix just the basics in Windows 10. Not utterly losing both the sizes and positions of all windows just because the laptop was undocked. Not fai…
The first thing I always do on a new laptop (or install) is go into Power Settings and change the Closing Lid action from putting the computer to sleep to just turning off the screen. It's surprising how many people never change the settings on their computers. Whenever I saw someone with the taskbar icons combined, I always asked them if they liked it that way, and they would say "No." So I always offered and they a…
Yikes! Why? I haven't had an issue with a laptop properly going to sleep and coming back in many years. This was something I used to do back in 2008 but it's hard to imagine today.