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>> "...I just switched from a Surface Book to a Macbook Pro and the mac is a huge improvement, both from a hardware and OS perspective." Can the MS hardware ru
by avn2109 8y ago
>> "...I just switched from a Surface Book to a Macbook Pro and the mac is a huge improvement, both from a hardware and OS perspective."
Can the MS hardware run Linux without me doing a bunch of work with drivers etc?
- darzu 8y agoI don't have experience doing a native Linux install on the Surface Book, but I use(d) VirtualBox and use Linux every day for development (on Surface Book and Mac). With virtualization technology being as advanced as it is, I don't think there is any appreciable performance difference to a native install assuming you have enough RAM for the extra OS.
- throwaway2048 8y agoanything involving the GPU (including desktop environment compositing) is dreadfully slow in a VM.
- darzu 8y agoReally? Did you check the "Enable 3D acceleration" checkbox in Virtual Box?
- throwaway2048 8y agoIts buggy, extremely feature limited, and slow.
- nine_k 8y agoI did, and it helped the speed. But is was plenty buggy, so much that I had to switch it off.
- vetinari 8y agoTry running a live distribution on bare metal. The performance difference is night and day.
- EpicEng 8y agoGoing the other way (Win10 on osx via VMWare) was horrible. Completely unusable. Windows was so slow I just couldn't get anything done.
- lostapathy 8y agoUnless ... you want to share a filesystem between the windows host and the vbox guest. In which case performance is god awful.
- e12e 8y agoFrom host to guest network filesytems (cifs/samba) should be OK?
- lostapathy 8y agoDepends what you're doing, honestly. Some software won't tolerate running off a network mount at all for various reasons, if so you're sunk. Some is just slow because it's inefficient. It's been a while since I had to resort to this, but accessing a big svn checkout over cifs is so slow as to be useless.
- Shorel 8y agoVirtualization technology is advanced but not perfect. Some of my own programs are 2 or 3 times slower doing CPU stuff under virtualization than under the raw machine.
- Someone1234 8y agoIsn't it up to Linux Distro's and hardware OEMs (Intel, Nvidia, etc) to make sure you have a smooth experience? Microsoft doesn't block you from installing Linux on their hardware, just as Apple doesn't, but in both cases neither Microsoft nor Apple do much to support Linux.
- stephenr 8y agoI believe the point of the question was to ask if drivers are readily available for the specific combination of hardware Microsoft uses, not to imply that Microsoft should support it.
- Someone1234 8y agoSorry, I misunderstood. In answer to that question: I'd stay well away from the Surface Book if you want to run Linux, too many proprietary "magic" drivers for the screen disconnection functionality. The Surface Laptop uses fairly off-the-shelf hardware (shared by other ultra-portables) and you will *likely have a better overall experience.
- Bedon292 8y agoThere is Windows Subsystem for Linux, which actually works quite well.
- e12e 8y agoI've still not gotten Linux to work well on my surface pro 4. There are some out of tree patches - but there's no fixing the poor wireless hw (well, you could use an USB dongle). In fairness wireless is flaky in win10 too on these. But Linux does work - I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 with a custom kernel - display is pretty - pen is so-so under Linux. I was hoping to use it w dark table and a couple of drawing programs under Linux - but so far I've never gotten it to the quite "just works" point (compared to say, a refurbished ThinkPad).