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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

#191

Post by mrguyorama »

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…

The rumor is that this is a bug that happens when you close your laptop screen to put it to sleep BEFORE you pull out the power plug, so the laptop basically never realizes it stopped being plugged into the wall, and does work it shouldn't, like a windows update. I always remove the power before putting a laptop to sleep and do not have this problem anymore.

It happens on macbooks too weirdly.

A sleeping laptop, even "modern sleep" should not be doing enough work to create a meaningful amount of heat.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#192

Post by treyd »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #167
martzy13 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://system76.com/laptops

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

My first laptop in 7th grade was 1366x768(@60?) and it's what got me into the whole industry. I still use 1920x1080@60 as my daily driver work laptop and it's fine. If I need bigger screens / higher refresh rate I have my desktop.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#193

Post by jauntywundrkind »

beacon294 wrote: post #20
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #5

The Intel m3-6y30 used on this surface is just fantastically puny a core. 4.5W design spec, tdp down to 3.5 up to 7W. Tiny GPU. The 7200u on my Samsung Book 12 is a 15W configurable from 7-25W; so much more headroom. 0.8GHz vs 2.5GHz base clocks! Admittedly the 7200u is also a year newer but both are Sky Lake. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/88198/i... One interesting thing happening in Linux now…

I use hibernate on the Acer Swift X 2022 edition and it's incredibly nice. Sleep crashes the wireless card though...

On my last laptop, sleep also crashed the wireless card. But, if I restarted the system it would come back.

Guess what hibernate does? It restarts the system. After many years of carrying around a USB wifi card, when systemd hibernated my system on me, it also made the wireless card start working again! Hibernating fixed my broken wifi.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#194

Post by rad_gruchalski »

Willish42 wrote: post #190
ryandrake wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It works, but there are rough edges around sleeping, external displays, power management. Windows has these rough edges, too, though. It's actually pretty shocking that here in 2024, PC manufacturers and OS vendors are still struggling with basics like sleep/wakeup. Last job I had with Windows laptops, everyone would walk around the office from meeting to meeting with their laptops propped open because nobody could…

> Somehow, only Apple has seemed to be able to solve this Herculean problem. Bit of a stab in the dark here but I would assume ARM has at least something to do with this? Tablets, phones, etc. get standby a lot better than x86 systems seem to. My pre-M1 Macbook Pro does not handle standby well but my partner's M2 Macbook Air lasts for forever and handles sleep etc. well. The lower power consumption in "standby mode"…

> My pre-M1 Macbook Pro does not handle standby well but my partner's M2 Macbook Air lasts for forever and handles sleep etc. well.

Intel mac on sonoma?

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#195

Post by tama_sala »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #116

Sounds like every experience of mine with desktop Linux. Excitement, initial success installing, days of esoteric troubleshooting, then disillusion and abandonment.

This is the most relatable comment in this thread. I had the same experience when I was using ros.org and moved to a new distro

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#196

Post by nucleardog »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #164
nucleardog wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah I'm not trying to say "64GB is enough for anyone!" so much as "I have way more RAM than I realistically need for my workloads." I've got all the things I need open right now and `free` shows I've got 40GB of RAM available.

If your workloads involve using more RAM than you have you can... add more RAM, use swap/zram/etc, or just not do that thing.

Absolutely makes sense to me to throw some swap into the mix. I'd probably do the same if it were an infrequent use case (otherwise preferring to just add more RAM).

But also absolutely makes sense to me to not have any swap enabled on this machine right now.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#197

Post by gnarbarian »

alisonatwork wrote: post #73
gnarbarian wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well you may only need the keyboard to install it right? there are thousands of USB keyboards everywhere. in the poorest most remote villages in Africa they probably have so many USB keyboards they make sandals out of them.

Except now you have sandals and perhaps still can't install Linux on a Surface. Seriously, though, it's kind of ridiculous to make a case that just because there is so much electronic waste already in the world, might as well create some more of it. I don't own a USB keyboard and haven't owned one for a decade or more. Because I exclusively use Surface. Imo Windows tablets are the true cyberdeck of the 21st century.…

your expectations are unreasonable.

I think that if you are expecting Linux to work perfectly when there is no keyboard on a notoriously Linux hostile proprietary device maybe you should step up and write the driver for it yourself.

nobody is getting paid to specifically maintain the weird workarounds required to support the surface and your problem can be avoided by spending a nickel at the salvation army.

it might even work without one! I know the latest Ubuntu detects a touchscreen on my Thinkpad and provides an onscreen keyboard by default.

edit:

I sincerely believe that the best way forward is for people who use Linux to vote with their wallet and buy products from the companies who are not actively hostile to it.

I apply this logic to nearly ever device I buy and it results in less waste because I buy stuff I can actually fix! see this:

https://github.com/ubernaut/maintainable-device-scorecard

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#198

Post by chronogram »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #165
chronogram wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Of course! Just touching these files should be everything you need:

  /etc/sysctl.d/99-240716-vm.conf
  vm.dirty_background_ratio = 1
  vm.dirty_ratio = 100
  vm.page-cluster = 0
  vm.swappiness = 200
  vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 1
dirty_background_ratio = starts background writing when it's at least 1% of available mem; dirty_ratio = starts force writing when all avail (not total) ram is full; page-cluster = swap in only what's needed; swappiness = lower means swapping is expensive higher signals swapping is cheap; vfs_cache_pressure = lower keeps more dentries and inodes in memory.

  /etc/udev/rules.d/99-240716-ioschedulers.rules
  ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="mmcblk[0-9]*|nvme[0-9]*|sd[a-z]*", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="none"
Removes schedulers from typical local writeable storage.

  /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf
  [zram0]
  zram-size = ram
  compression-algorithm = lz4
Might have to install systemd-zram-generator if it doesn't already exist.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#199

Post by walteweiss »

Willish42 wrote: post #190
ryandrake wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It works, but there are rough edges around sleeping, external displays, power management. Windows has these rough edges, too, though. It's actually pretty shocking that here in 2024, PC manufacturers and OS vendors are still struggling with basics like sleep/wakeup. Last job I had with Windows laptops, everyone would walk around the office from meeting to meeting with their laptops propped open because nobody could…

> Somehow, only Apple has seemed to be able to solve this Herculean problem. Bit of a stab in the dark here but I would assume ARM has at least something to do with this? Tablets, phones, etc. get standby a lot better than x86 systems seem to. My pre-M1 Macbook Pro does not handle standby well but my partner's M2 Macbook Air lasts for forever and handles sleep etc. well. The lower power consumption in "standby mode"…

[dead]

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#200

Post by jclardy »

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 just bought a Surface Pro 11 and love it. I've jumped from mac into the surface line every few years and I totally agree with you - the fans on the old models were spinning just by having a few chrome tabs opened.

But...if you can live with Windows on Arm (Which has improved greatly in the past year) the SP11 has been great. Battery life is incredible.

For me I was never looking to fully replace my actual laptop, but more to replace my iPad with something that is actually capable of doing any sort of development work if needed. The iPad is a much better tablet, hands down, but even just updating a static website on an iPad is an absolute chore and requires multiple apps to function.

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