Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe treat yourself to the Thinkpad X1 Yoga gen 2?
for some reaon Chinese spyware tastes appaling
how does NSA spyware taste?
Introducing Surface Book 2
311–320 of 520 posts
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, you can somewhat easily run Windows on Mac hardware. The opposite isn't true.
> The opposite isn't true. Sure you can. I've gotten macos installed in a vm and even ran a hackintosh for a while which was remarkably easy these days.
No it is not. It is not officially supported nor there is strong community support. When people like myself want for work, i want something 100% , I cannot explain it to my supervisor:”naaah, my hackintosh required a little bit of maintenance, so that’s why I submitted the paper late”.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now I wish I hadn't found the prices...
As compared to similar macbooks? I switched to a surface book about 4 months ago, and will probably be upgrading to this when the $ is in my budget.
Have you tried the surface pro line out?
Just speaking as someone that's tried both the book, pro, and laptop, I found the pro to be the most versatile of this weird "kind of tablet" line microsoft has going. You don't gotta push a button to take the screen off (that only works kinda sometimes and can lag), it's smaller/lighter, still just as powerful.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oddly enough I think mac and windows switched professional users somehow. I don't know a single developer on a windows machine, however most people I know working in 3d, digital illustration or video work all use windows machines now.
Windows Subsystem for Linux has been huge however. I used to have to run Vagrant or something on Windows to build stuff but WSL makes life super easy as a developer on Windows. I'm still one of the handful of people at a 600 person company though that runs Windows. :/
I'd like to second that. I've been using WSL + Docker on Windows for a long time now for web development (linux backend development) and it's been a breeze. Works flawlessly.
You can do fun things, like tail logs to a file using linux and simultaneously analyze the file using windows tools.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#315Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#316This is a good example of how Microsoft often does marketing poorly. The text reads like a script for an in-person product launch. On the page it doesn't even make sense "When you think about Microsoft and you hear our mission – to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more – it’s powerful." What? And then after all of that, you click through to the store and there's no pricing informat…
As a former advertising executive, I can tell you what the problem is here. The writer and his boss who approved the copy aren't addressing the customer, they're addressing the boss's boss. In a dysfunctional organization like Microsoft, communicating up rather than out is how you get promoted. It's a rare Microsoft employee who moves up the ladder by thinking about the customer.
"they're addressing the boss's boss"
I wonder about that with truck commercials.
I feel like every truck commercial is a sort of "See this is how we want our customers to act!"
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now I wish I hadn't found the prices...
They're not exactly surprising, it's a successor to the SB1 and competitor with the rMBP.
So in terms of hardware competition, I've never had a problem going with Microsoft - Surface Pro can't be beat as a stylus-wielding note-taking beast. In classes, meetups, and hackathons as a whiteboarding tool, unbeatable.
But when it comes to actually coding, it's much less "easy" than on a MBP. Some people swear by powershell but I just did not jive with having to do that when everyone else is using bash - so I'm using WSL, which has... difficulties. Random stuff doesn't work - SSHFS for example. Obviously anything than needs a GUI, though if you config just right you can get a display server ported through to windows through some sort of godless black magic.
I know they're still working on WSL, and if they can lock that down, I think Windows machines will be fantastic all-around dev tools, especially for a very visual developer like me (I just can't get over how great it is to whiteboard on the surface pro).
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't like the OS, can you not slap Linux on it? I found this thread on that subject [1] not sure how feasible it is. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/3qcqha/ubuntu...
Yep. I run latest Ubuntu on my Surface Pro 4 and it's great. The touchscreen doesn't work, although there are plenty of custom kernels out there that would fix that.
>The touchscreen doesn't work
Doesn't that eliminate one of the primary draws of the platform? I love taking notes and whiteboarding on my SP3.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this for software development (assuming yes since we're on HN)? I'm currently in the process of making this choice. Looking at Lenovo T470p/Dell XPS 13/15. If I'm doing linux development is it worth even thinking about the surface laptop?
I have a sp2017 i7 16GB and it's great as a developer machine. I'm mainly using languages that are cross-platform like Go and the JVM. But I often end up using Windows Subsystem for Linux which works amazing. I wouldn't buy any of the surface devices if you're planning to put linux on it (it's a little bit pointless), but maybe WSL + Docker on Windows are enough for you. (For me they are at least)
Got any WSL tips? I'm always trying to get that thing to be more functional.
Re: Introducing Surface Book 2
#320Having recently used a XPS 13, original Surface Book, Surface laptop, Surface Pro, and Lenovo T560, the Surface laptop is the clear winner for me. Definitely worth a look if you're looking for good Windows hardware, and don't need the discrete graphics capability of the Surface Book.
How do you feel about the textured cloth they put around the keyboard? I was really tempted to pull the trigger on one of these but my hands get really sweaty when I eat too much sugar (took me years to figure out what triggered it) and I'm guessing it'd become a mess really quickly.