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I had to replace my 2015 MBP last week, because the kb started failing (it wasn't one of the ones eligible for a free repair, sadly, and I can't live without a

I had to replace my 2015 MBP last week, because the kb started failing (it wasn't one of the ones eligible for a free repair, sadly, and I can't live without a machine for however long it takes them to fix it anyway). I was really torn, because although I could reluctantly live without the function keys, the escape key is a complete dealbreaker. After much debate I decided to take a chance on a surface book. I figured I'd try it, try and get my dev environment in a decent place, and see how I felt about windows after 30 days, with the idea that I might have to return it if things didn't work out. I'm 6 days in, and I can pretty safely say there's no way I'm going back to apple. Windows has managed not to suck at all, my dev environment is arguably better than what I had before, and I'm absolutely loving the machine itself. Most joyful new laptop experience in many years.

some_account 8y ago
Really? Window sucks for me even before I log in first time, with stuff like "wait while we are setting you up, just relax...". I switched to Linux and felt the same feeling you did though. Happiness to be back in a nice new system where I feel at home!
- DennisAleynikov 8y ago
  I was extremely unsatisfied with the promise and then the delivery of my surface pro, ended up selling it to a friend with lighter computing needs. The touch bar macbook seems pretty useful itself considering how insanely good its IO is (4 thunderbolt ports!!!). I haven't been able to use it as much and im waiting for better eGPU options to come out. in the mean time I'm stuck just like you in the world of linux. My primary desktop pc for the past 9 months was my galaxy note 8 with a usb c to hdmi adapter. it has an incredible chromebook like UI when docked and has all the linux tools i need! I've even been able to write an app and submit it to the app store all from there. You really cant go back after you've tried one device life and it makes filming and editing content for my youtube channel seamless since video never leaves the 256gb SD card inside my phone. Huawei has a similar mode and i cant wait for google to support it. they do natively support windowed mode and moving apps freely but i mean just add a chromebook ui to the screen when u dock a pixel 3 and you will be golden :)
  - fcbrooklyn 8y ago
    Yeah, I looked at the pros too. I don't think they were powerful enough for me, and I went with the SB2 instead.
  - busymichael 8y ago
    You wrote a native mobile app on a Galaxy Note 8 and submitted it to the App Store? Can you tell us what was your workflow and tool set?
    - gt2 8y ago
      Maybe React Native?
    - DennisAleynikov 8y ago
      Termux emulates Zsh for me and gives access to apt-get. so I installed nodejs through apt and made the project with react native and expo. compiling the binary for uploading to Google Play Store was a tricky step and I hope to improve the workflow in the future but for now had to cheat. Expo.io provides a build service for free where they will compile and sign your app for you. ideally i need to get a copy of OpenJDK installed and build with gradle but this was much easier. Expo also allows you to build an iOS blob from Android entirely assuming you have a way to get it onto an iphone through testflight.
      - mLuby 8y ago
        I'd be interested to read a write-up of this.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    > The touch bar macbook seems pretty useful itself considering how insanely good its IO is (4 thunderbolt ports!!!) Can a machine have "insanely good IO" if dongles are required for everything from iPhones to hard drives to memory cards? I could agree that a machine with 4 thunderbolt ports on top of the regular complement of power, USB-A, and SD slots would be insanely great. But I'm living the dongle life and not loving it.
- hmottestad 8y ago
  Not my experience. I have to use windows at work. Got ubuntu running in a vm. Buggy as shit. - sharing screen in hangouts puts chrome on every virtual desktop so now you can't click on chrome to navigate to that desktop - slack crashes silently every 24 hours - virtual desktops is a mess, if one window overflows into another desktop, then when you click on that app ubuntu will take you to the desktop where you see the least amount of your application, usually just a few pixels on the top of the screen - copy-paste sucks balls, in some applications it's ctrl-c in others its shift-ctrl-c and some applications will copy to clipboard if you select a string - keyboard support is terrible, in intellij i can't type `or ´ or ~ but I can type all those in gedit and then i have to copy paste them over - ctrl-a and ctrl-e don't work in most applications, even though these are old school shortcuts that work nearly everywhere on a mac - installing applications is always terrible on ubuntu. You can install from their app-store, if that works (50/50 odds) but you can't get intellij there, or sublime. To install sublime I had to find a blog post with 4-5 steps I needed to do. For intellij I also found a blogpost, but when I need to upgrade intellij I couldn't find it anymore and had to delete everything inside my intellij folder and copy a new intellij in.
  - DennisAleynikov 8y ago
    the only viable linux platform remaining is the one loosely organised and licensed around the world called "Android". with recent advances in ARM64 chips and extremely fast processors some OEM's are releasing desktop modes for android. Its truly the final frontier of linux, hopefully this idea can aleviate those issues you've had with linux. Applications work consistently on Android although there is still the app gap of stuff not yet ported onto google play store.
  - fcbrooklyn 8y ago
    I was a windows guy for many years before switching to OSX in 2006 (I actually worked for microsoft in the early 90's, but we all hated windows as much as the rest of the world, maybe moreso, because we had to develop on weekly builds). Therefore I have seen windows suck in a wide variety of ways, hence my desire to try it for 30 days and return it if needs be. In all my years in the windows world. I've never seen an app use anything other than ctrl-c/ctrl-v for copy paste (ok, I think you used to be able to do ctrl-ins, shift-ins, but that was optional), but the rest of your experiences sound quite plausible. I haven't run into any of them. Also, I don't have to restart my wifi 5 times a day anymore, which is kind of a nice win. EDIT: Oops, I thought these were complaints about windows (highly plausible!). actually it's unix under windows. Apologies.
- danudey 8y ago
  My Windows machine at home is awful. Every time I go to boot it up, I have to wait another 5 minutes for it to… whatever it does, finish windows updates I assume. I shut it down before a trip to Montreal; two weeks later I came back and it wouldn't boot. No idea why. Had to restore from a previous system snapshot and re-install a bunch of drivers and windows updates. It's a lot better than it was, but there's still strange, ridiculous stuff that crops up seemingly out of nowhere.
  - ryan-allen 8y ago
    My windows machine at home is always on, it's 6 years old and it's great. The only thing that has gone wrong is the motherboard failed, I replaced that and it's still chugging along quite nicely!
malnourish 8y ago
Surface Book is really great; I quite liked my SOs surface. I decided to go with an XPS 13 and have been incredibly happy.
- fcbrooklyn 8y ago
  I was considering the XPS series myself. Heard great things about it. Are you running windows or unix?
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    Check Costco. I bought an XPS 15 with 32gb ram for 1800 last winter.
  - kraftman 8y ago
    I just moved from an XPS to a surface book and I'd say if you can afford it go for the surface book, it's everything I liked about the XPS but with a detachable keyboard and a pen extra.
    - diffeomorphism 8y ago
      How does it compare to the XPS 2-in-1 models? The 3:2 aspect ratio seems tempting (even if slightly lower resolution) as does the battery life. Pen support should be quite comparable (wacom AES vs N-Trig), I guess? Reviews said batterylife with the screen detached is very short? The big drawback for me for the surface book would seem to be the subpar support for other OSs.
      - singingboyo 8y ago
        I can't compare to XPS myself, but: Pen support is better than the original surface pro's, which I believe were wacom. Hard to pin that on pen tech vs OS improvements, though. The pen needing a Quad-A battery is a bit annoying, but they're not too hard to find, and just one lasts a long time. Battery life with a detached screen is short, but you'll only really need it detached if you're walking around with it. If you're sitting or lying down, you can just attach it backwards and fold it back onto the keyboard. Heavier, but not to the point of annoyance, and it gives it a nice tilt for reading things if it's on a desk. Battery life with the keyboard attached is incredible, especially if you can dim the monitor a bit and run in battery saving mode. (The battery saver mode does have a pretty significant perf hit, though). Just don't try to use it at full speed, at least with an i7 and discrete GPU - I can kill my battery in under 2 hours if I try to run something like a graphics-intensive game. For dev stuff I've never had a problem. Multi-OS support is probably an issue, though WSL does seem to do a pretty good job of most things.
lutrinae666 8y ago
What’s your dev environment look like?
- fcbrooklyn 8y ago
  So my main concern was being able to easily run elixir/erlang, with some flavor of unix as a production target. Therefore running natively on windows was, at best, a nice to have. On OSX I could just work in the native environment, since it's unix, albeit a bit of a peculiar unix with the occasion random odd thing installed to trick me. On windows I've found two possible solutions so far. The first is Ubuntu installed under WSL. I've heard people complain that WSL doesn't always work, but so far I've had no issues. easily installed elixir, erlang, npm and vim. Phoenix works no problem. I installed elixir natively on windows as well, just to see if I could, and again, no problems at all, and it works fine. I'm using cmder, which gives you a much more unix-like command environment. Chocolatey is the equivalent of homebrew, and actually seems to be superior, or at least more complete. ("choco install chrome", "choco install spotify", kinda handy). I'm mostly a vim guy, but I'm not religious about that. Neovim worked fine in WSL, so that's all good for now. Might give vscode a shot, as it has some nice elixir plugins. Finally, I installed vagrant under windows, with virtualbox. I haven't used that before, but I think it could provide another alternative dev environment in case WSL turns out to be unreliable. My ultimate fallback plan was always to use vmware or similar and just run unix for dev, windows for things like excel, but my feeling is I'm not going to have to do that.
mygo 8y ago
Hey, what was wrong with your keyboard? Was the trackpad also not working when you had keyboard problems? You may have had a common issue with the 2015 Macbook Pros, literally tens of thousands of people have Googled that problem on Youtube. Apple won’t admit that it’s a problem with hose models but if you take it to an Apple Store they’ll conveniently take $500 to replace the keyboard. Anyways it’s an introduced bug due to a design flaw in the models released in 2015. They placed the ribbon cable flat on top of the battery on those models, and when the battery heats up and expands, as it does, it damages the ribbon cable. Prior models had the ribbon cable avoiding the battery by going around it. You can fix it yourself by replacing the ribbon cable. The ribbon cable costs $10 online and it’s the first thing you see when you open up the macbook, you don’t have to dig to get to it. No special equipment needed besides the screws to get the Macbook open.
- fcbrooklyn 8y ago
  For awhile the 'e' key was only working about 90% of the time. Then it began working about 120% of the time, so I had to remap it to nothing, move the 'e' to the backslash, and plug in an external keyboard. The trackpad and all the rest of the keys were working just fine. I usually replace machines every three years or so anyway, so the key issue was just the trigger. Thank you for your advice. Do you think that might be the issue, given that the trackpad worked fine?
  - mygo 8y ago
    Intermittent keyboard problems are the early signs. But I haven’t heard of it affecting just a single key. The trackpad and keyboard both use the ribbon cable, so when it fails completely, both the trackpad and keyboard will stop responding.. With the exception of the power button. It’s a toss-up if it’s the same issue with only one key being unresponsive. Could just be a bad key. But I’d give it a shot since it’s only a $10 fix with a t6 screwdriver. Or if you want, mail it to me and I’ll fix it and use the laptop as a secondary computer to run my data visualization computations =D
    - fcbrooklyn 8y ago
briandear 8y ago
Trading a touchbar escape key for Windows? As a Mac user that uses Vim, that touchbar escape seems easy to adapt to compared to adapting to an entirely different OS (and Windows at that!)
- wepple 8y ago
  I recall when touchbar first launched, someone on HN pointed out that Esc is a poor way to use Vim anyway and there are far better mappings. I swapped to Ctrl-[ before I even had a new MBP and much prefer it. The “Esc problem” is a drastic reason to throw your whole hardware/OS stack our the window IMO.
  - repsilat 8y ago
    Caps-lock could work too. As a weird ctrl+c vimmer I probably wouldn't notice. I think my uses of escape in the past year fall into two categories: - Ctrl-shift-esc (opens the task manager in Windows), and - Trying to close dialogs when I'm not sure which button is "go away".
    - aquamo 8y ago
      As a long time emacs user, I've always had cap-locks mapped as my control key (plus the emacs key-bindings work in html forms and in anything using gnu deadline) which is a bonus. So on my MBP with touch-bar, I have had this mapping so I can have a physical ESC key: CAPSLOCK -> CTRL LEFT CTRL -> ESC It's not great, but it works. The last time I had to deal with a company who put the ESC key in a weird place was back in college where we have several of these HP Apollo/720 keyboards: https://alum.wpi.edu/~tfraser/Machines/hpapollo720.jpg https://alum.wpi.edu/~tfraser/Machines/hpapollo720.jpg :-)
- fcbrooklyn 8y ago
  Escape key is non negotiable. Sorry, you won't change my mind on that point.
  - icedchai 8y ago
rcdmd 8y ago
I cut my teeth on Windows with Microsoft Visual Studio Basic in the 2000s, then Windows/Dev-Cpp because of poor MSVC++ support for some C++ features I thought I needed at the time, switched to Mac/Vim, then had a 6ish year stent with Ubuntu and Vim as an IDE. But then a botched upgrade from 14.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS lead to a few frustrating hours of my time to get X to even load. I'll never see that time again. Now I'm back on Windows, and somehow have drudged along without installing Cygwin yet, although that's coming. Developing Java has been a pleasant experience with IntelliJ IDEA. The GUI use is taking getting used too-- but configuring IDE things like language servers is mostly automagic and have very reasonable defaults. The biggest issue I've had is Windows upgrades requiring random restarts completely interrupting my workflow. But, overall, rediscovering Windows has been a pleasant experience for me too.
- nxc18 8y ago
  Check out Windows subsystem for Linux - you can almost certainly skip cygwin entirely and run the same binaries you like from Ubuntu.
  - nobleach 8y ago
    I hear I could even run i3.... I can't wait to give this a shot.
    - repsilat 8y ago
      Filesystem performance is a bit crap and you can't run Docker in Windows Home, but otherwise I found WSL pretty great. The Docker thing finally turned into a dealbreaker for me though, so after about two years of WSL I'm back to linux.
      - allannienhuis 8y ago
        The lack of Docker support with WSL stopped me in my tracks too, or I'd have probably moved back to windows as my daily driver. I don't enjoy dual-boot for gaming as I only game occasionally and have to deal with a backlog of windows updates when I do.
balls187 8y ago
I use Cloud9 for 100% of my dev needs. It made switching to a Surface Book pretty easy.
- ryeguy_24 8y ago
  Cloud9 is an amazing product that isn't very publicized. Makes developing right on AWS easy.
jaxn 8y ago
I left Mac for a Surface Book a couple of years ago. It was a challenge at first. Largely because of WSL speed, but that has been mostly fixed now (test suite may be a few seconds longer, but it isn't 10x longer) I am browsing the thread out of FOMO and don't feel any urge to switch back.
- fcbrooklyn 8y ago
  I hear you. The little annoyances are far outweighed by the positives. Even the display seems crisper which I didn't expect over a retina display. WSL is not amazing performance, but it's probably about the same (the machine itself is faster, phoenix under WSL is not. Perhaps that's the perf issue at play)
toephu2 8y ago
kb? Are people really abbreviating the word keyboard with "kb" now?
- fcbrooklyn 8y ago
  nope.
andrepd 8y ago
I opted for a Xiaomi laptop. Best purchase I ever made. Amazing build quality, out of the box compatibility with Linux, great hardware specs. I can't believe that near MBP clone only set me back 550€.
- navs 8y ago
  How does the trackpad on the Xiaomi compare with the MBP? I'm considering buying a cheaper MBP alternative and running Linux on it but I don't want to be carrying an external mouse around with me.
- javabean22 8y ago
  Wow, a near clone, huh? Did you compare display resolution, trackpad quality, SSD speed (hint: NVMe), etc, etc? Come on..
PascLeRasc 8y ago
What are you using for the terminal? I just started a new job with a Windows desktop provided and I can't get much done on it because every terminal emulator I can find sucks compared to iTerm 2 on my MBP, so much that I'm going in to IT to beg them to let me use it, or at least let me dual-boot Ubuntu. Bash on Windows has no way to add solarized light/dark or groovebox themes, much less switch between them daily like I like to do when I get stuck on something and need to see it differently. Also the Windows bash home is a no-mans-land once you want to open something up with Atom on Windows. Directories I make in Bash don't show up in File Explorer once I spend 5 minutes navigating to the right place. Font rasterizing and color-coding is awful too, on the native Bash, CMDR, and Hyper.JS. It's so frustrating.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  Cmder - http://cmder.net http://cmder.net Then get chocolatey
  - indemnity 8y ago
    I prefer this one. https://imgur.com/a/cFgvQaH https://imgur.com/a/cFgvQaH It runs on Windows too, but I prefer it on Mac, as I don't like the Windows font rendering on HiDPI displays. App is Hyper, https://hyper.is https://hyper.is You want the builds that use xterm.js from VS Code, their performance is much, much more like iTerm/Terminal.app. Color scheme is Ocean Dark, from the hyperterm-base16-ocean-dark plugin. Shell is ZSH, using prezto and a hacked up custom prompt. Font is a custom build of Iosevka Term, weight bold, 13px. Using Greyscale font rendering, not subpixel, on Mojave DP3. https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ Commands for custom build: make custom-config design='v-zero-dotted v-asterisk-low v-tilde-low v-underscore-low v-at-short v-brace-straight term' weights='book medium' make custom && make custom-web If you're not on Mojave, you can force the rendering to look like that for Hyper with this command: defaults write co.zeit.hyper.helper AppleFontSmoothing -int 0 Otherwise it will be a bit heavy.
    - cjlh 8y ago
      An Electron-based terminal emulator... I've seen it all!
cloudive 8y ago
not sure if shill !
- dang 8y ago
  We've banned this account for violating the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, please read them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and then email us at email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
zouhair 8y ago
Not yet hit by a friendly update reboot in the middle of an important compilation are we?

some_account 8y ago

Really? Window sucks for me even before I log in first time, with stuff like "wait while we are setting you up, just relax...". I switched to Linux and felt the same feeling you did though. Happiness to be back in a nice new system where I feel at home!

DennisAleynikov 8y ago
I was extremely unsatisfied with the promise and then the delivery of my surface pro, ended up selling it to a friend with lighter computing needs. The touch bar macbook seems pretty useful itself considering how insanely good its IO is (4 thunderbolt ports!!!). I haven't been able to use it as much and im waiting for better eGPU options to come out. in the mean time I'm stuck just like you in the world of linux. My primary desktop pc for the past 9 months was my galaxy note 8 with a usb c to hdmi adapter. it has an incredible chromebook like UI when docked and has all the linux tools i need! I've even been able to write an app and submit it to the app store all from there. You really cant go back after you've tried one device life and it makes filming and editing content for my youtube channel seamless since video never leaves the 256gb SD card inside my phone. Huawei has a similar mode and i cant wait for google to support it. they do natively support windowed mode and moving apps freely but i mean just add a chromebook ui to the screen when u dock a pixel 3 and you will be golden :)
- fcbrooklyn 8y ago
  Yeah, I looked at the pros too. I don't think they were powerful enough for me, and I went with the SB2 instead.
- busymichael 8y ago
  You wrote a native mobile app on a Galaxy Note 8 and submitted it to the App Store? Can you tell us what was your workflow and tool set?
  - gt2 8y ago
    Maybe React Native?
  - DennisAleynikov 8y ago
    Termux emulates Zsh for me and gives access to apt-get. so I installed nodejs through apt and made the project with react native and expo. compiling the binary for uploading to Google Play Store was a tricky step and I hope to improve the workflow in the future but for now had to cheat. Expo.io provides a build service for free where they will compile and sign your app for you. ideally i need to get a copy of OpenJDK installed and build with gradle but this was much easier. Expo also allows you to build an iOS blob from Android entirely assuming you have a way to get it onto an iphone through testflight.
    - mLuby 8y ago
      I'd be interested to read a write-up of this.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  > The touch bar macbook seems pretty useful itself considering how insanely good its IO is (4 thunderbolt ports!!!) Can a machine have "insanely good IO" if dongles are required for everything from iPhones to hard drives to memory cards? I could agree that a machine with 4 thunderbolt ports on top of the regular complement of power, USB-A, and SD slots would be insanely great. But I'm living the dongle life and not loving it.
hmottestad 8y ago
Not my experience. I have to use windows at work. Got ubuntu running in a vm. Buggy as shit. - sharing screen in hangouts puts chrome on every virtual desktop so now you can't click on chrome to navigate to that desktop - slack crashes silently every 24 hours - virtual desktops is a mess, if one window overflows into another desktop, then when you click on that app ubuntu will take you to the desktop where you see the least amount of your application, usually just a few pixels on the top of the screen - copy-paste sucks balls, in some applications it's ctrl-c in others its shift-ctrl-c and some applications will copy to clipboard if you select a string - keyboard support is terrible, in intellij i can't type `or ´ or ~ but I can type all those in gedit and then i have to copy paste them over - ctrl-a and ctrl-e don't work in most applications, even though these are old school shortcuts that work nearly everywhere on a mac - installing applications is always terrible on ubuntu. You can install from their app-store, if that works (50/50 odds) but you can't get intellij there, or sublime. To install sublime I had to find a blog post with 4-5 steps I needed to do. For intellij I also found a blogpost, but when I need to upgrade intellij I couldn't find it anymore and had to delete everything inside my intellij folder and copy a new intellij in.
- DennisAleynikov 8y ago
  the only viable linux platform remaining is the one loosely organised and licensed around the world called "Android". with recent advances in ARM64 chips and extremely fast processors some OEM's are releasing desktop modes for android. Its truly the final frontier of linux, hopefully this idea can aleviate those issues you've had with linux. Applications work consistently on Android although there is still the app gap of stuff not yet ported onto google play store.
- fcbrooklyn 8y ago
  I was a windows guy for many years before switching to OSX in 2006 (I actually worked for microsoft in the early 90's, but we all hated windows as much as the rest of the world, maybe moreso, because we had to develop on weekly builds). Therefore I have seen windows suck in a wide variety of ways, hence my desire to try it for 30 days and return it if needs be. In all my years in the windows world. I've never seen an app use anything other than ctrl-c/ctrl-v for copy paste (ok, I think you used to be able to do ctrl-ins, shift-ins, but that was optional), but the rest of your experiences sound quite plausible. I haven't run into any of them. Also, I don't have to restart my wifi 5 times a day anymore, which is kind of a nice win. EDIT: Oops, I thought these were complaints about windows (highly plausible!). actually it's unix under windows. Apologies.
danudey 8y ago
My Windows machine at home is awful. Every time I go to boot it up, I have to wait another 5 minutes for it to… whatever it does, finish windows updates I assume. I shut it down before a trip to Montreal; two weeks later I came back and it wouldn't boot. No idea why. Had to restore from a previous system snapshot and re-install a bunch of drivers and windows updates. It's a lot better than it was, but there's still strange, ridiculous stuff that crops up seemingly out of nowhere.
- ryan-allen 8y ago
  My windows machine at home is always on, it's 6 years old and it's great. The only thing that has gone wrong is the motherboard failed, I replaced that and it's still chugging along quite nicely!

malnourish 8y ago

Surface Book is really great; I quite liked my SOs surface. I decided to go with an XPS 13 and have been incredibly happy.

fcbrooklyn 8y ago
I was considering the XPS series myself. Heard great things about it. Are you running windows or unix?
- mikec3010 8y ago
  Check Costco. I bought an XPS 15 with 32gb ram for 1800 last winter.
- kraftman 8y ago
  I just moved from an XPS to a surface book and I'd say if you can afford it go for the surface book, it's everything I liked about the XPS but with a detachable keyboard and a pen extra.
  - diffeomorphism 8y ago
    How does it compare to the XPS 2-in-1 models? The 3:2 aspect ratio seems tempting (even if slightly lower resolution) as does the battery life. Pen support should be quite comparable (wacom AES vs N-Trig), I guess? Reviews said batterylife with the screen detached is very short? The big drawback for me for the surface book would seem to be the subpar support for other OSs.
    - singingboyo 8y ago
      I can't compare to XPS myself, but: Pen support is better than the original surface pro's, which I believe were wacom. Hard to pin that on pen tech vs OS improvements, though. The pen needing a Quad-A battery is a bit annoying, but they're not too hard to find, and just one lasts a long time. Battery life with a detached screen is short, but you'll only really need it detached if you're walking around with it. If you're sitting or lying down, you can just attach it backwards and fold it back onto the keyboard. Heavier, but not to the point of annoyance, and it gives it a nice tilt for reading things if it's on a desk. Battery life with the keyboard attached is incredible, especially if you can dim the monitor a bit and run in battery saving mode. (The battery saver mode does have a pretty significant perf hit, though). Just don't try to use it at full speed, at least with an i7 and discrete GPU - I can kill my battery in under 2 hours if I try to run something like a graphics-intensive game. For dev stuff I've never had a problem. Multi-OS support is probably an issue, though WSL does seem to do a pretty good job of most things.

lutrinae666 8y ago

What’s your dev environment look like?

fcbrooklyn 8y ago
So my main concern was being able to easily run elixir/erlang, with some flavor of unix as a production target. Therefore running natively on windows was, at best, a nice to have. On OSX I could just work in the native environment, since it's unix, albeit a bit of a peculiar unix with the occasion random odd thing installed to trick me. On windows I've found two possible solutions so far. The first is Ubuntu installed under WSL. I've heard people complain that WSL doesn't always work, but so far I've had no issues. easily installed elixir, erlang, npm and vim. Phoenix works no problem. I installed elixir natively on windows as well, just to see if I could, and again, no problems at all, and it works fine. I'm using cmder, which gives you a much more unix-like command environment. Chocolatey is the equivalent of homebrew, and actually seems to be superior, or at least more complete. ("choco install chrome", "choco install spotify", kinda handy). I'm mostly a vim guy, but I'm not religious about that. Neovim worked fine in WSL, so that's all good for now. Might give vscode a shot, as it has some nice elixir plugins. Finally, I installed vagrant under windows, with virtualbox. I haven't used that before, but I think it could provide another alternative dev environment in case WSL turns out to be unreliable. My ultimate fallback plan was always to use vmware or similar and just run unix for dev, windows for things like excel, but my feeling is I'm not going to have to do that.

mygo 8y ago

Hey, what was wrong with your keyboard? Was the trackpad also not working when you had keyboard problems? You may have had a common issue with the 2015 Macbook Pros, literally tens of thousands of people have Googled that problem on Youtube. Apple won’t admit that it’s a problem with hose models but if you take it to an Apple Store they’ll conveniently take $500 to replace the keyboard. Anyways it’s an introduced bug due to a design flaw in the models released in 2015. They placed the ribbon cable flat on top of the battery on those models, and when the battery heats up and expands, as it does, it damages the ribbon cable. Prior models had the ribbon cable avoiding the battery by going around it. You can fix it yourself by replacing the ribbon cable. The ribbon cable costs $10 online and it’s the first thing you see when you open up the macbook, you don’t have to dig to get to it. No special equipment needed besides the screws to get the Macbook open.

fcbrooklyn 8y ago
For awhile the 'e' key was only working about 90% of the time. Then it began working about 120% of the time, so I had to remap it to nothing, move the 'e' to the backslash, and plug in an external keyboard. The trackpad and all the rest of the keys were working just fine. I usually replace machines every three years or so anyway, so the key issue was just the trigger. Thank you for your advice. Do you think that might be the issue, given that the trackpad worked fine?
- mygo 8y ago
  Intermittent keyboard problems are the early signs. But I haven’t heard of it affecting just a single key. The trackpad and keyboard both use the ribbon cable, so when it fails completely, both the trackpad and keyboard will stop responding.. With the exception of the power button. It’s a toss-up if it’s the same issue with only one key being unresponsive. Could just be a bad key. But I’d give it a shot since it’s only a $10 fix with a t6 screwdriver. Or if you want, mail it to me and I’ll fix it and use the laptop as a secondary computer to run my data visualization computations =D
  - fcbrooklyn 8y ago

briandear 8y ago

Trading a touchbar escape key for Windows? As a Mac user that uses Vim, that touchbar escape seems easy to adapt to compared to adapting to an entirely different OS (and Windows at that!)

wepple 8y ago
I recall when touchbar first launched, someone on HN pointed out that Esc is a poor way to use Vim anyway and there are far better mappings. I swapped to Ctrl-[ before I even had a new MBP and much prefer it. The “Esc problem” is a drastic reason to throw your whole hardware/OS stack our the window IMO.
- repsilat 8y ago
  Caps-lock could work too. As a weird ctrl+c vimmer I probably wouldn't notice. I think my uses of escape in the past year fall into two categories: - Ctrl-shift-esc (opens the task manager in Windows), and - Trying to close dialogs when I'm not sure which button is "go away".
  - aquamo 8y ago
    As a long time emacs user, I've always had cap-locks mapped as my control key (plus the emacs key-bindings work in html forms and in anything using gnu deadline) which is a bonus. So on my MBP with touch-bar, I have had this mapping so I can have a physical ESC key: CAPSLOCK -> CTRL LEFT CTRL -> ESC It's not great, but it works. The last time I had to deal with a company who put the ESC key in a weird place was back in college where we have several of these HP Apollo/720 keyboards: https://alum.wpi.edu/~tfraser/Machines/hpapollo720.jpg https://alum.wpi.edu/~tfraser/Machines/hpapollo720.jpg :-)
fcbrooklyn 8y ago
Escape key is non negotiable. Sorry, you won't change my mind on that point.
- icedchai 8y ago

rcdmd 8y ago

I cut my teeth on Windows with Microsoft Visual Studio Basic in the 2000s, then Windows/Dev-Cpp because of poor MSVC++ support for some C++ features I thought I needed at the time, switched to Mac/Vim, then had a 6ish year stent with Ubuntu and Vim as an IDE. But then a botched upgrade from 14.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS lead to a few frustrating hours of my time to get X to even load. I'll never see that time again. Now I'm back on Windows, and somehow have drudged along without installing Cygwin yet, although that's coming. Developing Java has been a pleasant experience with IntelliJ IDEA. The GUI use is taking getting used too-- but configuring IDE things like language servers is mostly automagic and have very reasonable defaults. The biggest issue I've had is Windows upgrades requiring random restarts completely interrupting my workflow. But, overall, rediscovering Windows has been a pleasant experience for me too.

nxc18 8y ago
Check out Windows subsystem for Linux - you can almost certainly skip cygwin entirely and run the same binaries you like from Ubuntu.
- nobleach 8y ago
  I hear I could even run i3.... I can't wait to give this a shot.
  - repsilat 8y ago
    Filesystem performance is a bit crap and you can't run Docker in Windows Home, but otherwise I found WSL pretty great. The Docker thing finally turned into a dealbreaker for me though, so after about two years of WSL I'm back to linux.
    - allannienhuis 8y ago
      The lack of Docker support with WSL stopped me in my tracks too, or I'd have probably moved back to windows as my daily driver. I don't enjoy dual-boot for gaming as I only game occasionally and have to deal with a backlog of windows updates when I do.

balls187 8y ago

I use Cloud9 for 100% of my dev needs. It made switching to a Surface Book pretty easy.

ryeguy_24 8y ago
Cloud9 is an amazing product that isn't very publicized. Makes developing right on AWS easy.

jaxn 8y ago

I left Mac for a Surface Book a couple of years ago. It was a challenge at first. Largely because of WSL speed, but that has been mostly fixed now (test suite may be a few seconds longer, but it isn't 10x longer) I am browsing the thread out of FOMO and don't feel any urge to switch back.

fcbrooklyn 8y ago
I hear you. The little annoyances are far outweighed by the positives. Even the display seems crisper which I didn't expect over a retina display. WSL is not amazing performance, but it's probably about the same (the machine itself is faster, phoenix under WSL is not. Perhaps that's the perf issue at play)

toephu2 8y ago

kb? Are people really abbreviating the word keyboard with "kb" now?

fcbrooklyn 8y ago
nope.

andrepd 8y ago

I opted for a Xiaomi laptop. Best purchase I ever made. Amazing build quality, out of the box compatibility with Linux, great hardware specs. I can't believe that near MBP clone only set me back 550€.

navs 8y ago
How does the trackpad on the Xiaomi compare with the MBP? I'm considering buying a cheaper MBP alternative and running Linux on it but I don't want to be carrying an external mouse around with me.
javabean22 8y ago
Wow, a near clone, huh? Did you compare display resolution, trackpad quality, SSD speed (hint: NVMe), etc, etc? Come on..

PascLeRasc 8y ago

What are you using for the terminal? I just started a new job with a Windows desktop provided and I can't get much done on it because every terminal emulator I can find sucks compared to iTerm 2 on my MBP, so much that I'm going in to IT to beg them to let me use it, or at least let me dual-boot Ubuntu. Bash on Windows has no way to add solarized light/dark or groovebox themes, much less switch between them daily like I like to do when I get stuck on something and need to see it differently. Also the Windows bash home is a no-mans-land once you want to open something up with Atom on Windows. Directories I make in Bash don't show up in File Explorer once I spend 5 minutes navigating to the right place. Font rasterizing and color-coding is awful too, on the native Bash, CMDR, and Hyper.JS. It's so frustrating.

Jedi72 8y ago
Cmder - http://cmder.net http://cmder.net Then get chocolatey
- indemnity 8y ago
  I prefer this one. https://imgur.com/a/cFgvQaH https://imgur.com/a/cFgvQaH It runs on Windows too, but I prefer it on Mac, as I don't like the Windows font rendering on HiDPI displays. App is Hyper, https://hyper.is https://hyper.is You want the builds that use xterm.js from VS Code, their performance is much, much more like iTerm/Terminal.app. Color scheme is Ocean Dark, from the hyperterm-base16-ocean-dark plugin. Shell is ZSH, using prezto and a hacked up custom prompt. Font is a custom build of Iosevka Term, weight bold, 13px. Using Greyscale font rendering, not subpixel, on Mojave DP3. https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ Commands for custom build: make custom-config design='v-zero-dotted v-asterisk-low v-tilde-low v-underscore-low v-at-short v-brace-straight term' weights='book medium' make custom && make custom-web If you're not on Mojave, you can force the rendering to look like that for Hyper with this command: defaults write co.zeit.hyper.helper AppleFontSmoothing -int 0 Otherwise it will be a bit heavy.
  - cjlh 8y ago
    An Electron-based terminal emulator... I've seen it all!

cloudive 8y ago

not sure if shill !

dang 8y ago
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zouhair 8y ago

Not yet hit by a friendly update reboot in the middle of an important compilation are we?