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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

#211

Post by beacon294 »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #193
beacon294 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh thanks, that is super helpful to keep my state if I accidentally hit fn-f1 which the manufacturer hardcoded to sleep. One likely blocker is that I think restart also crashes my wireless card. Maybe hibernate will work.

Going to test this tonight.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#212

Post by dublin »

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 disagree. I'm typing this on a nice Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1 and though it's quite nice and well-built, it's the worst computer I've bought in decades, because it's stupidly designed: It's got all the compromises of a tablet, but is too heavy and thick to really be used as one. The pen is marginal (and there's no way to carry it with the laptop except in a pocket!), and it gets way hotter than any of my Surfaces have.

It was clearly designed to be used as a laptop, and never really as a tablet. This shows in myriad ways, from being uncomfortable to hold as a tablet (though its rounded edges are infinitely better than the Surface Studio Laptop's razor-sharp edges (which really can cut you when holding it as a tablet!), to there being NO GOOD WAY to adjust volume without opening it back up to get to the keyboard!

To be fair, half of what I hate about the Yoga is Win11. I'm definitely moving to a Linux desktop next time, if that's viable. The Starlabs StarLite would be perfect if I could get it with 32-64 GB of RAM and a fast ARM processor like the one used in the new Surface Pro

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#213

Post by keepamovin »

tiahura wrote: post #109
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…

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

What makes 3:2 particularly good?

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#214

Post by dublin »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #78
ffsm8 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine an iPad that automatically switches to MacOSX if plugged into an external monitor, keyboard/mouse. It'd be glorious, not that I'd ever happen - for multiple reasons. One of which being that ipadOS is essentially iOS, so no overlap with MacOS

So iDEX? There have been multiple attempts at that from motorola, the nokia n900, sailfish, ubuntu touch, linux on DEX, DEX, maruOS, windows whatever, citrix,... Sounds nice in theory but people rarely actually use it.

It actually works very well. Phones/tablets are now more capable than many PCs/Macs. When you've literally got more compute power, RAM, storage, and network bandwidth than supercomputer centers had 15-20 years ago in a phone or tablet-sized package, all you really need is a nice dock to plug it into for display (I'll take a 42" multitouch/pen setup like the Surface Studio, please), keyboard, mouse, and network.

BTW, I've done exactly this daily with the only slightly larger Surface Pros and docks for over a decade, so the concept definitely works, and there are probably millions of people using it, contrary to your assertion.

It's a very small step from doing that with a PC or tablet to doing that with a folding phone design, and there are a few such solutions like that today. (Though they should run the same OS/interface, just morphed slightly for the hardware that's active.)

After having this setup, I will never, ever, go back to an old caveman laptop or desktop computer.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#215

Post by klooney »

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"…

This used to work, but Windows/Intel have this new thing called Modern Standby that just doesn't do what anyone wants. It's on purpose. It's very frustrating.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#216

Post by craftkiller »

philistine wrote: post #209
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…

Here's my massive pet peeve around PCs that I don't even believe that the Dell XPS 13 has resolved: All those computers charge over USB-C with the full force of the port. This is fine. But the second the battery is completely drained, the port cannot revive that computer. You must use the laptop's crappy barrel plug. Only Apple allows you to use only USB-C as a charger.

My framework laptop does not have a non-type-c way to charge. I've fully depleted the battery and charged it back up using the usb type-c port.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#217

Post by walteweiss »

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…

[dead]

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#218

Post by vladvasiliu »

tracker1 wrote: post #187
vladvasiliu wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although most linux distros still have quirks (bluetooth issues, sleep/resume issues, no hibernation out of the box, high battery consumption, among a plethora a of other papercuts) I am sticking with it mainly because windows ux just sux so much. Heh, as usual, YMMV. My bluetooth headphones actually work reliably on Linux (with LDAC support!), while on Windows I usually have to fiddle with them for a few minutes u…

On linux, I have to switch my headphone mode when going in/out of web calls. It doesn't auto-switch to mono-mode when the mic is in use by an application.

IME this isn't very reliable on Windows, either. It's likely to switch to conference mode when starting a call, but chances are it won't move out of it at the end. Linux tends to do the same. I chalk this up to crappy conferencing apps which don't seem to release the mic when the call is done. I've seen Teams show up multiple times in volume mixers and webex lose the mic in the middle of a call for no reason (also happens with a traditional wired headset) so I tend to not blame the OSs for this particular problem.

In my specific case this isn't much of an issue most of the time because I've chosen my headphones for their music playback quality and didn't care about mic performance, which, it turns out, is pretty crappy. So, I just put on my wired Jabra headset for calls, which doesn't lag and works mostly OK (until it doesn't: sometimes windows stops getting anything on the mic for some reason – never had the problem in Linux).

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#219

Post by throwaway3306a »

dragonwriter wrote: post #146
throwaway3306a wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

“How is the computer supposed to do background checks / send its location etc if it can't wake up for a short while?” Why would I want it to do that? OTOH, coming back from pay of on modern hardware is fast enough that I just reenable hibernation and use that instead of sleep, now that MS has made sleep less sleep-ish.

I want to find my device if it's lost. I also want it to react to being connected to my desktop docking station without having to open it.

Re: A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

#220

Post by saagarjha »

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?

Macs have a very limited list of things they are allowed to do when in standby–all code written by Apple.
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