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A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

204 points by chazeon 2y ago

badi95 2y ago
[dead]
treesknees 2y ago
I know this doesn't fit the author's goals but I still think the trick with the surface line is using WSL instead of trying to run native Linux. Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking. Maybe things will get better now that they're practically EOL with Win10 ending next year and no support for Win11. Unfortunately my SSD started to fail and battery life was poor enough that I ended up buying something else. The iFixit repair score reflects how much of a pain it would be to replace both of those. I do miss it sometimes, I really liked the 3:2 aspect ratio.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Does WSL handle multi-touch/gestures well?
  - treesknees 2y ago
    As far as I know it only supports basic tapping/clicking for GUI applications and not multi-touch or gestures. https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/737 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/737
  - goosedragons 2y ago
    No, it doesn't even handle Windows Snap.
- tstrimple 2y ago
  I guess that works because Linux power management is almost as bad as Windows so not a lot is lost. I'll never understand how people pick mobile devices with such short battery life. I further don't understand how literally no company other than Apple is able to deliver decent battery life. Even Microsoft's first party offerings which aren't infected by OEM bullshit are garbage in this regard.
  - divbzero 2y ago
    > how literally no company other than Apple is able to deliver decent battery life Apple’s full vertical integration from chip on up gives them an advantage here. For example, the doubling of video playback battery life from iPhone 12 Pro Max to iPhone 13 Pro Max [1] probably came from a new low-power display plus a new video decoder in the A15 Bionic chip. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ppevl6/streamed_video_playback_battery_life_improved/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ppevl6/streamed_vide...
  - commandersaki 2y ago
    These new Snapdragon Elite X laptops compete on battery life. But I need to build for Linux/amd64 and I don't want to emulate so it's either Intel laptop or Apple Silicon laptop with Rosetta 2 for Linux.
    - callalex 2y ago
      Do they still compete on battery life while running a corporate email client, corporate chat client (Slack/Teams) and an editor (text/code/spreadsheet) in the background while completely idle? You’d think such simple idle workloads wouldn’t matter and yet I only find macOS to be capable of reigning in even these “light” background tasks without manual process suspension and killing. I don’t understand how we got to this point but it seems to be how my “real” world works.
      - izacus 2y ago
        Yes. Even the Zen4 AMD Ryzen chips do.
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    > I'll never understand how people pick mobile devices with such short battery life. Some people don't need all that much battery life. For me trains and buses, meeting rooms and at home there are outlets. It's a convenience thing when I want to sit at home on the couch without a cable attacked to my laptop.
- vladvasiliu 2y ago
  I'm actually rather fine with what WSL can do. Hell, many of the tools I use run fine on Windows itself. But for me, the biggest shortcoming of this arrangement is having to put up with Windows' UX. I hate every single second I have to interact with this steaming pile of crap.
  - xtracto 2y ago
    This so much. I've run Linux in all my desktop machines for 10+ years. When I was younger it was mainly due to ideology, but now I really don't care. 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. Every new computer I buy I give the installed windows a try and oh my god, it becomes crappier with every version. For me Windows 2000 was the best... 20 years ago. It's been downhill from there.
    - vladvasiliu 2y ago
      > 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 until they start working. For some reason, whenever I reconnect them, Windows thinks it's a different "sound card". I sometimes can't control the volume in video calls, and they start at the max which is painful. Battery is much better on Linux (there not being anything doing god knows what with the cpu for no reason must help), and it actually stays asleep when I close it. Hibernation also worked well whenever I tried it, but I don't really have any use for it, so I can't tell for sure it's actually fully reliable. I didn't jump through any hoops for this other than an almost standard Arch install ("almost" because I use a fully encrypted drive with TPM+PIN unlock and secure boot with my own keys).
      - tracker1 2y ago
- memsom 2y ago
  You say no support for Win 11, but my Surface 2 Pro runs Windows 11 just fine. I don't think it even asked for the license key when I installed it. I probably used Rufus to make the image and turned off some of the more problematic aspects of Win 11, but it for sure installs with little or no problems. This is also a 4GiB model with 128GiB storage. It is very usable, despite having a processor equivalent to a pre-retina MacBook Air IIRC.
- trelane 2y ago
  The trick to running Linux on the Microsoft Surface line is to not. > Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking I don't know why you would be surprised that Microsoft hardware fails to run Linux well.
- rty32 2y ago
  WSL still has a ton of issues, slow IO and CPU usage, just to name two of them. Search "WSL vmmem" and you'll see what I mean. It is nowhere near ready for serious use if you are spending 90% of time doing development in a Linux environment.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
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/intel-core-m3-6y30-processor-4m-cache-up-to-2-20-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/88198/i... One interesting thing happening in Linux now is bpf control over hid devices. Perhaps it might be possible to filter palm reads out at the kernel level with this, or eliminate ghost inputs. Hypothetically it should allow filtering the data arbitrarily. Classically I've used interception-tools in userland to do some light remapping, reading a device filtering and emitting as a virtual uhid, but this should be faster & slicker. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.11-More-HID-BPF https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.11-More-HID-BPF I really need to switch from my Samsung Book 12 to another copy (which I already own); mine's OLED is pretty cracked: remarkably invisible when looking straight on at it, but the touch went from sometimes not working to never working. I also want to try a pen with it. The 4GB of ram can be obnoxious. I feel like with a better nvme not sata SSD it wouldn't be such an issue but paging stuff out or in really makes the whole system lag badly sometimes, which is terrible. I also hella recommend hibernate. I didn't trust it for years, but one day ran low on power while suspended & watched systemd wake my system up, then hibernate it, and was shocked shocked shocked that it resumed latter & worked. It takes ~10s to boot up but being able to put a project aside, and come back weeks later & pickup where I left off is amazing. Use hibernate! I think you can configure it to hibernate after X amount of time sleeping.
- beacon294 2y ago
  I use hibernate on the Acer Swift X 2022 edition and it's incredibly nice. Sleep crashes the wireless card though...
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    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.
KTibow 2y ago
I'm using a Surface Pro 7 to run Fedora, and my experience is mostly the same, although it runs a bit faster and without the ghost touches. The main annoyance I face is probably the fact that touch in Firefox occasionally breaks.
- alisonatwork 2y ago
  Can you share a bit more about your experience here, in particular setting the system up? I have a bashed up Surface Pro 7 I took traveling with me. I upgraded my main PC to a Surface Pro 9 when I housed up and have been wondering what to do with with the Pro 7 because it's so battered from being thrown around and used outdoors for a year that it's not really sellable. I was thinking of turning it into a dedicated outdoor/travel computer, installing Fedora and Steam for point and click adventures, and maybe some MIDI/DJ controller software to play tunes. But I no longer have a keyboard for it, so I would need to be able to do the full Linux install by touchscreen. My other Surface is 100% bluetooth input devices to avoid cables, docks and dongles, so I could potentially pair one of those if it would help during install phase, but I wouldn't want it permanently paired. It seems like the advice online is generally "if you don't have a USB keyboard, don't bother", though. Do you think it's worth a shot?
  - KTibow 2y ago
    I don't think anything could go wrong just booting into the live distro, but I did my setup with a keyboard and I don't know how it would work without.
  - gnarbarian 2y ago
    wouldn't you be able to plug in a USB keyboard?
    - tstrimple 2y ago
      I love that the Linux solution to a problem is just have this additional hardware to overcome it. I've run Linux as a desktop OS for years, so I'm not at all unfamiliar with all the hoops you have to jump through. Hoops that die-hard greybeards will deny exist because their personality is tied up in an operating system of all things. Surely 2024 is the year of the Linux desktop!
specproc 2y ago
It took a couple of attempts, but I'm really enjoying EndeavourOS and i3 on a Surface _Laptop_ 4. It's the lightest, most portable and comfortable laptop I've had.
1oooqooq 2y ago
Linux surface kernel is a meme. it's the same sort of hacks from teenage Android community to port binary blobs. if you're not familiar with that, just be glad. in summary, old unpatched kennels with weird binary code nobody cares to understand.
- solnyshok 2y ago
  old? 6.9.x as of today https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/releases https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/releases
- denysvitali 2y ago
  It's not, it follows the upstream releases and has a couple of patches for the Surface drivers (e.g: SAM) that will hopefully be upstreamed one day. They have something like ~50 commits on top of the release tag [1]. The main developer is doing an amazing job, and the fact that Linux runs on so many Surfaces devices, including the ARM ones (like my SPX) is just amazing. Linaro (Bjorn Andersson) helped quite a lot in the Linux on ARM environment, and qzed (Maximilian Luz) is doing all of the Surface reverse engineering and kernel driver in their own free time. Sorry, I had to downvote you because this is just disrespectful on the amount of work awesome people are doing on their free time, and you clearly have no clue on what the linux-surface project is about. [1]: https://github.com/linux-surface/kernel/commits/v6.9-surface-devel/ https://github.com/linux-surface/kernel/commits/v6.9-surface...
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    i stand corrected. that was a huge progress from a couple years I last checked.
vitorgrs 2y ago
About the Fedora Gnome vs EndeuvourOS KDE... the issue here isn't Gnome. It's actually Fedora. In my testing on a similar hardware (also Core M3 and 4gb RAM), Arch-based distros was the best with low RAM. And I tried like, probably 50 distros since last year... Gnome on my HW with Arch, is as fast as KDE, and use less memory than KDE (in theory, I know RAM is a complicated subject). Why fedora is problematic on low end hardware? Because well, Fedora uses packagekit, which is a ram hog, and this is pretty known. Is not the only reason though, I believe there's some other defaults that make it slower than arch on my HW, like zswap vs zram. In my experience with weak CPU and low ram, was that zswap was actually the best choice. On such low RAM like 4gb, you'll really need a swap, you can't run from this. And zram won't be enough, in my experience. Which I guess is one of the reasons why Arch go very well here, as is one of the few distros right now that does a nice default for zswap. With Fedora, and most other distros, I get constant freezes when the RAM is full (which is pretty easy to do with 4gb), and this never happen on arch based distros.
- tommodev 2y ago
  yeah, I took the Ubuntu / Fedora perf for granted as well. Recently switched back to Arch on a whim across one low-end machine, one high-end machine, and both run like lightning compared to Ubuntu 24.04 / Fedora 40. Expected the difference with Ubuntu as it packs more out of the box for the enterprise behaviours, not so much with Fedora. I've had no freezes, faster startup and shutdown, generally more responsive desktop etc. with Arch. Generally, though a rolling release it also has fewer moving parts as well - only having to deal with the main repo + flatpak (and a select few AUR pkgbuilds) is nice compared to Ubuntu where I had to layer deb repos + PPAs + flatpak + brew to get my tooling in place without having to script my own git-driven installers. One thing that tripped me up on any distro - the defaults for TLP (vs power profile daemon) seem hyper conservative wrt performance, probably by design. I never bothered digging in, just switched back to PPD, but it definitely prioritises power savings above all else.
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    I've been on Manjaro (arch based) for a few years now. I only ever installed it once and regularly update it. I've had some minor issues over the years but was able to resolve them. Mostly updates are without issues and when they aren't usually the fix is a google search away and pretty straightforward. And of course just about everything has been updated many times at this point. Latest kernel, gnome, etc. Nice when a bunch of Intel driver performance improvements landed a few years ago. I got them right away after that kernel got released and noticed a slight difference. A few months ago, I noticed a few more improvements with performance when a bunch of btrfs fixes landed. It's a good reason to stick with rolling releases. And since the Steam Deck uses Arch, getting Steam running on this was ridiculously easy. I'd use it professionally except I have a Mac Book Pro M1, which is really nice, and the Samsung laptop I run Manjaro on is not great, to put it mildly. I check once in a while but there are a lot of compromises out there in terms of different laptops but none of them really come close to Apple. They all do some things well only to drop the ball on other things. You can have a fast laptop but not a quiet one. You can have a nice screen but then the keyboard or touchpad is meh. Or the thing just weighs a ton. I think that was the point with the Surface Pro 4 in the article. It's a bit crap in terms of performance but the formfactor is nice-ish. Of course the touch support isn't great, which is no different with Manjaro. Except of course you do have access to all the latest attempts to address that.
langsoul-com 2y ago
Too bad that Linux support in laptops isn't the best. Especially for unique laptops like Asus zenbook 2024, the one with two screens. I want to get away from windows completely but their support for laptops is much better.
- crabmusket 2y ago
  Having been using a Framework 13 running Fedora for ~2 weeks now... it's going great! I've plugged in a variety of external devices (monitors, a webcam) and they've all just worked.
- vladvasiliu 2y ago
  > Especially for unique laptops But I'd say that's rather on the manufacturers, and not on Linux. They usually provide crappy drivers only for whatever version of windows they ship and call it a day. See all the junk that would stop working between major windows updates. Also, how does that laptop work? Don't the screens just show up as two displays, or do they do something special? > I want to get away from windows completely but their support for laptops is much better. YMMV as they say... Speaking of displays specifically, we just got some brand spanking new 5k screens at work. My full intel hp enterprise laptop can't use them at 5K under windows [0], but Linux supports them perfectly, even two at a time in addition to the integrated panel. Even 4k@60 had be borked on Windows on this PC for something like 2 years after I bought it. Worked OK since day one on Linux. --- [0] I actually did get it to work by installing the latest driver from the Intel website. But windows helpfully "updated" it back to the borked version after a reboot.
- trelane 2y ago
  Linux support for laptops is fine. Getting an OS to work well on hardware requires a whole team of people called system integrators. Just slapping Linux on a Windows laptop and expecting it to work is naive. If you want a better Linux experience, you have to buy a Linux laptop, i.e. one that was designed (especially in firmware and chip selection) to run Linux, with support. You know, like you do for Windows.
utf_8x 2y ago
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 behind this.
- speedgoose 2y ago
  I have swap, zram, and systemd-oomd enabled on my self managed kubernetes nodes. It helps dealing with JVM powered or memory leaking software at low cost. I am not sure why you would disable those in many scenarios.
- moondev 2y ago
  Funny enough even Kubernetes supports running nodes with swap these days. My laptop has 64GB RAM and 1TB NVME, I run with swap off because I want all storage usable should ideally not be pressed for memory. I also have memory and storage allocation in my task bar to easily monitor the situation.
- callalex 2y ago
  Unfortunately, there is a huge amount of cargo-culted cruft lying around in various Linux-on-workstation-wiki guide sites that hasn’t been modernized since the 2000’s. I don’t normally like to rant without providing a solution, but this is a problem I see my friends bump up against all the time when I tell them it’s finally the year of the Linux desktop. When something goes wrong they land on the same search results that I did when I was a child and the advice just never got updated. There used to be a time where swapping out meant moving cogs and wheels full of heavy rocks and RAM frequencies could be approximated by waving a stick until it made whistling noises. At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the system unusably unresponsive (I mean unusable, not just frustrating or irritating). Advice about disabling swap and zram came from that time for “resource constrained” systems. Unfortunately the meme will never die because the wikis and now regurgitated LLM drivel will just never let it go because nobody has gotten around to fixing it.
Havoc 2y ago
Had one issued for work. Absolutely hated working on it. Though that was probably more a mismatch with work requirement (heavy excel use + teams = deathly slow). A lighter OS plus lighter use could be fine.
- rtpg 2y ago
  It's unfortunate because I found that the Surface Pro "expensive" models are gerat, but the lower end really can't handle much of any workflow (dreaded latency spikes) and it leads to loads of people just having a middling impression of a product that theoretically could capture a lot of the high end Windows market IMO
  - Havoc 2y ago
    Yeah I liked the polish on them. I don’t recall which one it was. The mid range i5 I think. This was beginning of covid so IT just issued whatever they could get regardless of suitability. But yeah gigantic formula heavy excels kill even desktops let alone tablets. I had it swapped for a surface laptop. Forget what exactly but similar generation. That had active cooling which I suspect made the difference. Still slow but somewhat tolerable
1234554321a 2y ago
I’ve had had SP4 i5 8gb ram version since 2017. It’s unreliable when running Windows, let alone Linux. It had constant touch screen issues which never fully went away even after replacing the screen. When I tried installing Linux I decided to switch back to Windows after a couple of months as both wifi and bluetooth had constant issues. The battery life is 2 or 3 hours at best even if you replace the battery with a new one. I’ll be replacing it with an M2 Macbook as that’ll be way more productive than to keep using this Surface.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Wow, that's a 9 years old machine... I tried the SP7 refurbished 3 years ago, and it was already kinda slow and not great, though it gave a clear idea of what Microsoft did with the line. Switching to a 16G SP8 it's infinitely better. Still unreliable at times, but not that much if compared to an similar usage on an iPad pro. Battery life is workable (I get around 5~6 hours coding and compiling, usually have an external battery when out anyway). I assume if you're looking at an M2 giving up x86 compatibility isn't an issue. The most glaring issue on the Surface for me are too much reliance on Chrome/Edge for touch support, as Firefox is really not ready (mobile version is fine, don't know why desktop is so bad), and the port networking management in WSL2 where proxying VPNs can mess with wsl's port proxying. Otherwise I'mll be waiting for Apple to ever port macos to the iPad before reconsidering.
b3lvedere 2y ago
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't great. Maybe just don't expect that much from these weird computers pretending to be tablets.
- denysvitali 2y ago
  The Surface Pro X (with Linux) runs pretty well. When I was running Windows on that, it worked nicely too
  - maxboone 2y ago
    How's the peripherals support on Surface Linux? I've been wanting to switch to Linux on my Pro X SQ2 for a while due to the WSL2 support on it being terrible (might be fixed now [1]) but always thought that most stuff such as LTE, webcam and surface connector wouldn't work [2]. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274#issuecomment-2226962285 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274#issuecomment-2... [2] https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/1#issue-1263256974 https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/1#issu...
    - denysvitali 2y ago
      The peripheral support is slowing getting there. The major issues are the ones you've mentioned (including the inability to use external displays), but I'm seeing more and more upstream commits for the sc8180x by Maximilian - so I'm confident that these issues will be solved relatively soon. Wi-Fi and BT works btw, which IMHO makes it already usable as a daily driver. Audio works via BT
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  It depends on your reference point, but IMHO there's no device right now that hits all the right point, so yes, Surface Pro is one of these flawwd machines. On the other side you'll have devices that feel really well built and graceful, but can actually do very little, or other ones fitting a very average vision of what a computer needs to do, and you'll be paying for additional devices to deal with the edge cases.
mg 2y ago
One reason I don't use tablet is that they all have glossy screens. And the new iPad with matte screen has a glossy frame around it. I tried it in a store and the glare around the otherwise nicely matte screen was uncomfortable. Does anyone here have experience how well matte screen protectors for tablets work? I see them mostly discussed for they haptic feel when drawing on the tablet. I wonder how well they work to have a good experience when coding on the tablet.
- shamefulkiwi 2y ago
  I’ve used one of the drawing/pencil screen protectors on my iPad for years for the same reason and it works great. It does make the screen feel a little less sharp/crisp but solves the glare problem for me. I’m sure they’ve gotten better over the years as well.
  - mg 2y ago
    Yay, that sounds promising. Which protector do you use?
    - artisanspam 2y ago
      Not OP but I use this and like it. It gives a slight scratchy feel when I write on my iPad with the apple pencil and it removes all of the glare for when I'm reading. It's magnetic so you can remove it whenever you want to, but I never take it off. https://pen.tips/products/penmat https://pen.tips/products/penmat
- throw0982 2y ago
  Minisforum has Ryzen based tablet, that has matte screen. https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-v3 https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-v3 > The Minisforum V3 is a massive tablet PC with a 14-inch screen and a matte coating to reduce glare. https://gettotext.com/minisforum-v3-test-our-full-opinion/ https://gettotext.com/minisforum-v3-test-our-full-opinion/
pizza234 2y ago
I like the hybrids/detachable form factor, as a mean to merge tablets and laptops in a single device, but the whole software/hardware stack was not yet ready then, especially for those attempting to use Linux. List of problems: 1. x86(-64) power saving (sleep) capabilities are poor; tablets are expected to consume very little battery (ie. last weeks in standby mode), while x86 eats batteries for lunch (in S-whatever); this doesn't even take into account Windows arbitrarily deciding to wake up the machine while in a bag/backpack 2. Surface Pro's and Surface Book's (the latter was state of the art in terms of tablet hardware by the time of SB1 and SB2) had OK hardware support from Linux, but it took a long while, and it wasn't very stable (eg. wifi) 3. Hardware touch support itself is not enough; software needs to be good, and there was (likely, is) no document reader with good UX and annotation capabilities on Linux The solution for my use case was to dual boot, but points 1 and 2 were still a serious issue overall. Nowadays: 1. there are ARM tablets, with performant power saving (sleep) mode 2. WSL sidesteps Linux hardware compatibility issues (assuming one tolerates running Windows as underlying O/S), and avoids dual boot 3. WSL also allows using better document readers/annotators I fear WSL, but as a matter of fact, it's changing the landscape for Linux users. In theory, Ipad Pro's would be the best of both worlds, but they have a toy O/S by design. /shrug
codeulike 2y ago
Note this is the lowest spec Surface Pro 4, it had a low power Intel Core m3-6Y30 so that it could run without any active cooling, making it a 'true' tablet. Most of the 'proper' Surface Pro 4s had an i5 or i7 processor with active cooling (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_4 ) and were roughly comparable in performance to other PC ultrabooks at the time. I've been using the Surface Pro line for about 10 years to do everything I need to do, they are pretty solid.
- keepamovin 2y ago
  I also use the surface for everything I need: I like it a lot and I’ve never had a problem with it. I don’t get the hate, nor why the inaccurate idea that you cannot run things on it persists.
  - diffeomorphism 2y ago
    A surface pro 9 with average laptop specs (16GB of ram, 1TB of storage), keyboard and pen costs 2000 + 140 + 80 and that is for the "outdated" model. At that price it should be exceptional not just good. That is not "hate" but disapointment.
    - keepamovin 2y ago
      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 missing out on what could work for you. For me, I think the weight and mobility are important too. I love the stylus and OS. I like the look and there's a bit of a f-you status, not in terms of the money involved which is not that much (especially considering what people drop on gaming rigs, Mac stuff, etc), but because it is a bit different. I think you're wrong that there's no hate towards Surface: you may not be picking up on it, there definitely is. Maybe people dislike that it's flashy and costly when they expect it should be utilitarian, so it kind of clashes with their expectations in a way that upsets them, and they dislike seeing other people enjoy what displeases themselves. I find it humorous that the same people may see another item, a Mac or whatever, in a different light, despite obvious similarities, and enjoy its flashy costliness. Heh! :) I encourage you to consider how the people who like and enjoy it see it. These topics have a way of turning people a bit mad, or at least creating conflict. So please let me turn the heat down a little bit with this olive branch compliment: hey, cool username, are you a mathematician?? :)
deng 2y ago
Searching for a Linux tablet, I got a used Lenovo X1 Tablet Gen3. Linux works mostly fine, but as a tablet, it's mostly useless for reasons similar to the ones mentioned in TFA: * Battery life. 5-6 hours for moderate use simply does not cut it, especially since sleep drains battery like crazy because s0ix is not working properly, and debugging why is almost impossible. It's absolutely crazy how something that used to work just fine was deliberately botched because MS/Intel decided everything has to be a phone. * So because of this, you need to shut down the tablet if not used, which wouldn't be too bad, but as TFA says, you need a keyboard to enter the LUKS decryption password. * As a pure reading device, it's too heavy. Apart from that, Firefox is basically unusable because backspace does not work properly because of this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1832876 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1832876 So in the end, while it's working, there's still a lot of janky behavior, which makes the experience just frustrating.
slowhadoken 2y ago
I’ve seriously been considering moving all my development to Linux. Microsoft is giving me the creeps lately.
chrsw 2y ago
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 with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.
- Raydovsky 2y ago
  That's because the XPS were built to run ubuntu. You can even buy one with it pre-installed.
  - chrsw 2y ago
    Ubuntu 20.04 was preinstalled on my machine. But I reinstalled when I moved to a larger SDD. I think I still used the OEM install image too.
    - bdcravens 2y ago
      I can't help but wonder if Dell tweaked the firmware. I know that I, and everyone I've seen discuss it, haven't been able to get a vanilla XPS (non-Developer edition, sold with Windows) with a typical off-the-shelf distro, including Ubuntu, to work 100%.
      - chrsw 2y ago
        Sorry, I should have specified Developer Edition in my first post.
      - trelane 2y ago
        That seems likely. I know that firmware is one of the big differences between System76 laptops and the version that Clevo subsequently offers with Windows. I think the chips can vary sometimes too. Just from an ACPI perspective, I'd expect the Linux variant to (at a minimum) be built with the Intel compiler and the Windows one with Microsoft's. It is likely that there are far more differences, though.
trelane 2y ago
Interesting that slapping Linux on a Windows computer doesn't work well. I wonder how OSX would fare.
rowanG077 2y ago
I ran nixos on a surface pro 5 for 3 years without issues. Even the stylus worked. It was one of my favourite "laptops" I had. The superbad thermals forced me of surface pro line.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
QuadrupleA 2y ago
Sounds like every experience of mine with desktop Linux. Excitement, initial success installing, days of esoteric troubleshooting, then disillusion and abandonment.
- the__alchemist 2y ago
  This is an elegant, accurate description of my own experience. It's taken 20 years of regular attempts, but I've finally given up. ("This new release of Ubuntu / this new distro will be the one!") I use WSL if I want to compile a program for Linux users.
- tama_sala 2y ago
  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
surfingdino 2y ago
Why do we expect Microsoft to support Linux? They are selling a commercial operating system and are not interested in supporting a free one.
tallmed 2y ago
I've been exclusively using linux on my tablets since 2007 with the thinkpad x61t and i've never had any of these problems. Although i use a completely different setup compared to the dude in the article. I would even say that on tablets gnu/linux actually provides a better experience.
Valord 2y ago
F40 works fine enough on my SP2. Only complaint is no deep sleep. I just shut down instead. Same with my framework 16.
1oooqooq 2y ago
He went back to windows and didn't mention to worst part of old windows PCs (and a surface4 is extremely ancient!) The wifi stack is entirely handled by the shaddy driver, which is usually just the reference implementation from the chip manufacturer stuck in time. That means your wifi stack will only support WPA2, and ancient cyphers with outdated parameters. No matter how up to date is your OS.
csixty4 2y ago
I'm mostly impressed this person has an SP4 that still has a working battery and no screen issues.
dublin 2y ago
I'm very seriously thinking about one of these (or really, its successor) when I need to replace my computer again in the next year or two - it's already optimized for several Linux distros: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite# https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite# All I need now is a good replacement for OneNote that stores notes in an open format and supports pen input for sketching and handwritten note-taking...
lucisferre 2y ago
Is battery life decent on these new PCs? Does sleep work properly?

204 points by chazeon 2y ago

[dead]

I know this doesn't fit the author's goals but I still think the trick with the surface line is using WSL instead of trying to run native Linux. Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking. Maybe things will get better now that they're practically EOL with Win10 ending next year and no support for Win11. Unfortunately my SSD started to fail and battery life was poor enough that I ended up buying something else. The iFixit repair score reflects how much of a pain it would be to replace both of those. I do miss it sometimes, I really liked the 3:2 aspect ratio.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Does WSL handle multi-touch/gestures well?
- treesknees 2y ago
  As far as I know it only supports basic tapping/clicking for GUI applications and not multi-touch or gestures. https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/737 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/737
- goosedragons 2y ago
  No, it doesn't even handle Windows Snap.
tstrimple 2y ago
I guess that works because Linux power management is almost as bad as Windows so not a lot is lost. I'll never understand how people pick mobile devices with such short battery life. I further don't understand how literally no company other than Apple is able to deliver decent battery life. Even Microsoft's first party offerings which aren't infected by OEM bullshit are garbage in this regard.
- divbzero 2y ago
  > how literally no company other than Apple is able to deliver decent battery life Apple’s full vertical integration from chip on up gives them an advantage here. For example, the doubling of video playback battery life from iPhone 12 Pro Max to iPhone 13 Pro Max [1] probably came from a new low-power display plus a new video decoder in the A15 Bionic chip. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ppevl6/streamed_video_playback_battery_life_improved/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ppevl6/streamed_vide...
- commandersaki 2y ago
  These new Snapdragon Elite X laptops compete on battery life. But I need to build for Linux/amd64 and I don't want to emulate so it's either Intel laptop or Apple Silicon laptop with Rosetta 2 for Linux.
  - callalex 2y ago
    Do they still compete on battery life while running a corporate email client, corporate chat client (Slack/Teams) and an editor (text/code/spreadsheet) in the background while completely idle? You’d think such simple idle workloads wouldn’t matter and yet I only find macOS to be capable of reigning in even these “light” background tasks without manual process suspension and killing. I don’t understand how we got to this point but it seems to be how my “real” world works.
    - izacus 2y ago
      Yes. Even the Zen4 AMD Ryzen chips do.
- Mashimo 2y ago
  > I'll never understand how people pick mobile devices with such short battery life. Some people don't need all that much battery life. For me trains and buses, meeting rooms and at home there are outlets. It's a convenience thing when I want to sit at home on the couch without a cable attacked to my laptop.
vladvasiliu 2y ago
I'm actually rather fine with what WSL can do. Hell, many of the tools I use run fine on Windows itself. But for me, the biggest shortcoming of this arrangement is having to put up with Windows' UX. I hate every single second I have to interact with this steaming pile of crap.
- xtracto 2y ago
  This so much. I've run Linux in all my desktop machines for 10+ years. When I was younger it was mainly due to ideology, but now I really don't care. 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. Every new computer I buy I give the installed windows a try and oh my god, it becomes crappier with every version. For me Windows 2000 was the best... 20 years ago. It's been downhill from there.
  - vladvasiliu 2y ago
    > 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 until they start working. For some reason, whenever I reconnect them, Windows thinks it's a different "sound card". I sometimes can't control the volume in video calls, and they start at the max which is painful. Battery is much better on Linux (there not being anything doing god knows what with the cpu for no reason must help), and it actually stays asleep when I close it. Hibernation also worked well whenever I tried it, but I don't really have any use for it, so I can't tell for sure it's actually fully reliable. I didn't jump through any hoops for this other than an almost standard Arch install ("almost" because I use a fully encrypted drive with TPM+PIN unlock and secure boot with my own keys).
    - tracker1 2y ago
memsom 2y ago
You say no support for Win 11, but my Surface 2 Pro runs Windows 11 just fine. I don't think it even asked for the license key when I installed it. I probably used Rufus to make the image and turned off some of the more problematic aspects of Win 11, but it for sure installs with little or no problems. This is also a 4GiB model with 128GiB storage. It is very usable, despite having a processor equivalent to a pre-retina MacBook Air IIRC.
trelane 2y ago
The trick to running Linux on the Microsoft Surface line is to not. > Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking I don't know why you would be surprised that Microsoft hardware fails to run Linux well.
rty32 2y ago
WSL still has a ton of issues, slow IO and CPU usage, just to name two of them. Search "WSL vmmem" and you'll see what I mean. It is nowhere near ready for serious use if you are spending 90% of time doing development in a Linux environment.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

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/intel-core-m3-6y30-processor-4m-cache-up-to-2-20-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/88198/i... One interesting thing happening in Linux now is bpf control over hid devices. Perhaps it might be possible to filter palm reads out at the kernel level with this, or eliminate ghost inputs. Hypothetically it should allow filtering the data arbitrarily. Classically I've used interception-tools in userland to do some light remapping, reading a device filtering and emitting as a virtual uhid, but this should be faster & slicker. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.11-More-HID-BPF https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.11-More-HID-BPF I really need to switch from my Samsung Book 12 to another copy (which I already own); mine's OLED is pretty cracked: remarkably invisible when looking straight on at it, but the touch went from sometimes not working to never working. I also want to try a pen with it. The 4GB of ram can be obnoxious. I feel like with a better nvme not sata SSD it wouldn't be such an issue but paging stuff out or in really makes the whole system lag badly sometimes, which is terrible. I also hella recommend hibernate. I didn't trust it for years, but one day ran low on power while suspended & watched systemd wake my system up, then hibernate it, and was shocked shocked shocked that it resumed latter & worked. It takes ~10s to boot up but being able to put a project aside, and come back weeks later & pickup where I left off is amazing. Use hibernate! I think you can configure it to hibernate after X amount of time sleeping.

beacon294 2y ago
I use hibernate on the Acer Swift X 2022 edition and it's incredibly nice. Sleep crashes the wireless card though...
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  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.

KTibow 2y ago

I'm using a Surface Pro 7 to run Fedora, and my experience is mostly the same, although it runs a bit faster and without the ghost touches. The main annoyance I face is probably the fact that touch in Firefox occasionally breaks.

alisonatwork 2y ago
Can you share a bit more about your experience here, in particular setting the system up? I have a bashed up Surface Pro 7 I took traveling with me. I upgraded my main PC to a Surface Pro 9 when I housed up and have been wondering what to do with with the Pro 7 because it's so battered from being thrown around and used outdoors for a year that it's not really sellable. I was thinking of turning it into a dedicated outdoor/travel computer, installing Fedora and Steam for point and click adventures, and maybe some MIDI/DJ controller software to play tunes. But I no longer have a keyboard for it, so I would need to be able to do the full Linux install by touchscreen. My other Surface is 100% bluetooth input devices to avoid cables, docks and dongles, so I could potentially pair one of those if it would help during install phase, but I wouldn't want it permanently paired. It seems like the advice online is generally "if you don't have a USB keyboard, don't bother", though. Do you think it's worth a shot?
- KTibow 2y ago
  I don't think anything could go wrong just booting into the live distro, but I did my setup with a keyboard and I don't know how it would work without.
- gnarbarian 2y ago
  wouldn't you be able to plug in a USB keyboard?
  - tstrimple 2y ago
    I love that the Linux solution to a problem is just have this additional hardware to overcome it. I've run Linux as a desktop OS for years, so I'm not at all unfamiliar with all the hoops you have to jump through. Hoops that die-hard greybeards will deny exist because their personality is tied up in an operating system of all things. Surely 2024 is the year of the Linux desktop!

specproc 2y ago

It took a couple of attempts, but I'm really enjoying EndeavourOS and i3 on a Surface _Laptop_ 4. It's the lightest, most portable and comfortable laptop I've had.

1oooqooq 2y ago

Linux surface kernel is a meme. it's the same sort of hacks from teenage Android community to port binary blobs. if you're not familiar with that, just be glad. in summary, old unpatched kennels with weird binary code nobody cares to understand.

solnyshok 2y ago
old? 6.9.x as of today https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/releases https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/releases
denysvitali 2y ago
It's not, it follows the upstream releases and has a couple of patches for the Surface drivers (e.g: SAM) that will hopefully be upstreamed one day. They have something like ~50 commits on top of the release tag [1]. The main developer is doing an amazing job, and the fact that Linux runs on so many Surfaces devices, including the ARM ones (like my SPX) is just amazing. Linaro (Bjorn Andersson) helped quite a lot in the Linux on ARM environment, and qzed (Maximilian Luz) is doing all of the Surface reverse engineering and kernel driver in their own free time. Sorry, I had to downvote you because this is just disrespectful on the amount of work awesome people are doing on their free time, and you clearly have no clue on what the linux-surface project is about. [1]: https://github.com/linux-surface/kernel/commits/v6.9-surface-devel/ https://github.com/linux-surface/kernel/commits/v6.9-surface...
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  i stand corrected. that was a huge progress from a couple years I last checked.

vitorgrs 2y ago

About the Fedora Gnome vs EndeuvourOS KDE... the issue here isn't Gnome. It's actually Fedora. In my testing on a similar hardware (also Core M3 and 4gb RAM), Arch-based distros was the best with low RAM. And I tried like, probably 50 distros since last year... Gnome on my HW with Arch, is as fast as KDE, and use less memory than KDE (in theory, I know RAM is a complicated subject). Why fedora is problematic on low end hardware? Because well, Fedora uses packagekit, which is a ram hog, and this is pretty known. Is not the only reason though, I believe there's some other defaults that make it slower than arch on my HW, like zswap vs zram. In my experience with weak CPU and low ram, was that zswap was actually the best choice. On such low RAM like 4gb, you'll really need a swap, you can't run from this. And zram won't be enough, in my experience. Which I guess is one of the reasons why Arch go very well here, as is one of the few distros right now that does a nice default for zswap. With Fedora, and most other distros, I get constant freezes when the RAM is full (which is pretty easy to do with 4gb), and this never happen on arch based distros.

tommodev 2y ago
yeah, I took the Ubuntu / Fedora perf for granted as well. Recently switched back to Arch on a whim across one low-end machine, one high-end machine, and both run like lightning compared to Ubuntu 24.04 / Fedora 40. Expected the difference with Ubuntu as it packs more out of the box for the enterprise behaviours, not so much with Fedora. I've had no freezes, faster startup and shutdown, generally more responsive desktop etc. with Arch. Generally, though a rolling release it also has fewer moving parts as well - only having to deal with the main repo + flatpak (and a select few AUR pkgbuilds) is nice compared to Ubuntu where I had to layer deb repos + PPAs + flatpak + brew to get my tooling in place without having to script my own git-driven installers. One thing that tripped me up on any distro - the defaults for TLP (vs power profile daemon) seem hyper conservative wrt performance, probably by design. I never bothered digging in, just switched back to PPD, but it definitely prioritises power savings above all else.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  I've been on Manjaro (arch based) for a few years now. I only ever installed it once and regularly update it. I've had some minor issues over the years but was able to resolve them. Mostly updates are without issues and when they aren't usually the fix is a google search away and pretty straightforward. And of course just about everything has been updated many times at this point. Latest kernel, gnome, etc. Nice when a bunch of Intel driver performance improvements landed a few years ago. I got them right away after that kernel got released and noticed a slight difference. A few months ago, I noticed a few more improvements with performance when a bunch of btrfs fixes landed. It's a good reason to stick with rolling releases. And since the Steam Deck uses Arch, getting Steam running on this was ridiculously easy. I'd use it professionally except I have a Mac Book Pro M1, which is really nice, and the Samsung laptop I run Manjaro on is not great, to put it mildly. I check once in a while but there are a lot of compromises out there in terms of different laptops but none of them really come close to Apple. They all do some things well only to drop the ball on other things. You can have a fast laptop but not a quiet one. You can have a nice screen but then the keyboard or touchpad is meh. Or the thing just weighs a ton. I think that was the point with the Surface Pro 4 in the article. It's a bit crap in terms of performance but the formfactor is nice-ish. Of course the touch support isn't great, which is no different with Manjaro. Except of course you do have access to all the latest attempts to address that.

langsoul-com 2y ago

Too bad that Linux support in laptops isn't the best. Especially for unique laptops like Asus zenbook 2024, the one with two screens. I want to get away from windows completely but their support for laptops is much better.

crabmusket 2y ago
Having been using a Framework 13 running Fedora for ~2 weeks now... it's going great! I've plugged in a variety of external devices (monitors, a webcam) and they've all just worked.
vladvasiliu 2y ago
> Especially for unique laptops But I'd say that's rather on the manufacturers, and not on Linux. They usually provide crappy drivers only for whatever version of windows they ship and call it a day. See all the junk that would stop working between major windows updates. Also, how does that laptop work? Don't the screens just show up as two displays, or do they do something special? > I want to get away from windows completely but their support for laptops is much better. YMMV as they say... Speaking of displays specifically, we just got some brand spanking new 5k screens at work. My full intel hp enterprise laptop can't use them at 5K under windows [0], but Linux supports them perfectly, even two at a time in addition to the integrated panel. Even 4k@60 had be borked on Windows on this PC for something like 2 years after I bought it. Worked OK since day one on Linux. --- [0] I actually did get it to work by installing the latest driver from the Intel website. But windows helpfully "updated" it back to the borked version after a reboot.
trelane 2y ago
Linux support for laptops is fine. Getting an OS to work well on hardware requires a whole team of people called system integrators. Just slapping Linux on a Windows laptop and expecting it to work is naive. If you want a better Linux experience, you have to buy a Linux laptop, i.e. one that was designed (especially in firmware and chip selection) to run Linux, with support. You know, like you do for Windows.

utf_8x 2y ago

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 behind this.

speedgoose 2y ago
I have swap, zram, and systemd-oomd enabled on my self managed kubernetes nodes. It helps dealing with JVM powered or memory leaking software at low cost. I am not sure why you would disable those in many scenarios.
moondev 2y ago
Funny enough even Kubernetes supports running nodes with swap these days. My laptop has 64GB RAM and 1TB NVME, I run with swap off because I want all storage usable should ideally not be pressed for memory. I also have memory and storage allocation in my task bar to easily monitor the situation.
callalex 2y ago
Unfortunately, there is a huge amount of cargo-culted cruft lying around in various Linux-on-workstation-wiki guide sites that hasn’t been modernized since the 2000’s. I don’t normally like to rant without providing a solution, but this is a problem I see my friends bump up against all the time when I tell them it’s finally the year of the Linux desktop. When something goes wrong they land on the same search results that I did when I was a child and the advice just never got updated. There used to be a time where swapping out meant moving cogs and wheels full of heavy rocks and RAM frequencies could be approximated by waving a stick until it made whistling noises. At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the system unusably unresponsive (I mean unusable, not just frustrating or irritating). Advice about disabling swap and zram came from that time for “resource constrained” systems. Unfortunately the meme will never die because the wikis and now regurgitated LLM drivel will just never let it go because nobody has gotten around to fixing it.

Havoc 2y ago

Had one issued for work. Absolutely hated working on it. Though that was probably more a mismatch with work requirement (heavy excel use + teams = deathly slow). A lighter OS plus lighter use could be fine.

rtpg 2y ago
It's unfortunate because I found that the Surface Pro "expensive" models are gerat, but the lower end really can't handle much of any workflow (dreaded latency spikes) and it leads to loads of people just having a middling impression of a product that theoretically could capture a lot of the high end Windows market IMO
- Havoc 2y ago
  Yeah I liked the polish on them. I don’t recall which one it was. The mid range i5 I think. This was beginning of covid so IT just issued whatever they could get regardless of suitability. But yeah gigantic formula heavy excels kill even desktops let alone tablets. I had it swapped for a surface laptop. Forget what exactly but similar generation. That had active cooling which I suspect made the difference. Still slow but somewhat tolerable

1234554321a 2y ago

I’ve had had SP4 i5 8gb ram version since 2017. It’s unreliable when running Windows, let alone Linux. It had constant touch screen issues which never fully went away even after replacing the screen. When I tried installing Linux I decided to switch back to Windows after a couple of months as both wifi and bluetooth had constant issues. The battery life is 2 or 3 hours at best even if you replace the battery with a new one. I’ll be replacing it with an M2 Macbook as that’ll be way more productive than to keep using this Surface.

makeitdouble 2y ago
Wow, that's a 9 years old machine... I tried the SP7 refurbished 3 years ago, and it was already kinda slow and not great, though it gave a clear idea of what Microsoft did with the line. Switching to a 16G SP8 it's infinitely better. Still unreliable at times, but not that much if compared to an similar usage on an iPad pro. Battery life is workable (I get around 5~6 hours coding and compiling, usually have an external battery when out anyway). I assume if you're looking at an M2 giving up x86 compatibility isn't an issue. The most glaring issue on the Surface for me are too much reliance on Chrome/Edge for touch support, as Firefox is really not ready (mobile version is fine, don't know why desktop is so bad), and the port networking management in WSL2 where proxying VPNs can mess with wsl's port proxying. Otherwise I'mll be waiting for Apple to ever port macos to the iPad before reconsidering.

b3lvedere 2y ago

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't great. Maybe just don't expect that much from these weird computers pretending to be tablets.

denysvitali 2y ago
The Surface Pro X (with Linux) runs pretty well. When I was running Windows on that, it worked nicely too
- maxboone 2y ago
  How's the peripherals support on Surface Linux? I've been wanting to switch to Linux on my Pro X SQ2 for a while due to the WSL2 support on it being terrible (might be fixed now [1]) but always thought that most stuff such as LTE, webcam and surface connector wouldn't work [2]. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274#issuecomment-2226962285 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274#issuecomment-2... [2] https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/1#issue-1263256974 https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/1#issu...
  - denysvitali 2y ago
    The peripheral support is slowing getting there. The major issues are the ones you've mentioned (including the inability to use external displays), but I'm seeing more and more upstream commits for the sc8180x by Maximilian - so I'm confident that these issues will be solved relatively soon. Wi-Fi and BT works btw, which IMHO makes it already usable as a daily driver. Audio works via BT
makeitdouble 2y ago
It depends on your reference point, but IMHO there's no device right now that hits all the right point, so yes, Surface Pro is one of these flawwd machines. On the other side you'll have devices that feel really well built and graceful, but can actually do very little, or other ones fitting a very average vision of what a computer needs to do, and you'll be paying for additional devices to deal with the edge cases.

mg 2y ago

One reason I don't use tablet is that they all have glossy screens. And the new iPad with matte screen has a glossy frame around it. I tried it in a store and the glare around the otherwise nicely matte screen was uncomfortable. Does anyone here have experience how well matte screen protectors for tablets work? I see them mostly discussed for they haptic feel when drawing on the tablet. I wonder how well they work to have a good experience when coding on the tablet.

shamefulkiwi 2y ago
I’ve used one of the drawing/pencil screen protectors on my iPad for years for the same reason and it works great. It does make the screen feel a little less sharp/crisp but solves the glare problem for me. I’m sure they’ve gotten better over the years as well.
- mg 2y ago
  Yay, that sounds promising. Which protector do you use?
  - artisanspam 2y ago
    Not OP but I use this and like it. It gives a slight scratchy feel when I write on my iPad with the apple pencil and it removes all of the glare for when I'm reading. It's magnetic so you can remove it whenever you want to, but I never take it off. https://pen.tips/products/penmat https://pen.tips/products/penmat
throw0982 2y ago
Minisforum has Ryzen based tablet, that has matte screen. https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-v3 https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-v3 > The Minisforum V3 is a massive tablet PC with a 14-inch screen and a matte coating to reduce glare. https://gettotext.com/minisforum-v3-test-our-full-opinion/ https://gettotext.com/minisforum-v3-test-our-full-opinion/

pizza234 2y ago

I like the hybrids/detachable form factor, as a mean to merge tablets and laptops in a single device, but the whole software/hardware stack was not yet ready then, especially for those attempting to use Linux. List of problems: 1. x86(-64) power saving (sleep) capabilities are poor; tablets are expected to consume very little battery (ie. last weeks in standby mode), while x86 eats batteries for lunch (in S-whatever); this doesn't even take into account Windows arbitrarily deciding to wake up the machine while in a bag/backpack 2. Surface Pro's and Surface Book's (the latter was state of the art in terms of tablet hardware by the time of SB1 and SB2) had OK hardware support from Linux, but it took a long while, and it wasn't very stable (eg. wifi) 3. Hardware touch support itself is not enough; software needs to be good, and there was (likely, is) no document reader with good UX and annotation capabilities on Linux The solution for my use case was to dual boot, but points 1 and 2 were still a serious issue overall. Nowadays: 1. there are ARM tablets, with performant power saving (sleep) mode 2. WSL sidesteps Linux hardware compatibility issues (assuming one tolerates running Windows as underlying O/S), and avoids dual boot 3. WSL also allows using better document readers/annotators I fear WSL, but as a matter of fact, it's changing the landscape for Linux users. In theory, Ipad Pro's would be the best of both worlds, but they have a toy O/S by design. /shrug

codeulike 2y ago

Note this is the lowest spec Surface Pro 4, it had a low power Intel Core m3-6Y30 so that it could run without any active cooling, making it a 'true' tablet. Most of the 'proper' Surface Pro 4s had an i5 or i7 processor with active cooling (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_4 ) and were roughly comparable in performance to other PC ultrabooks at the time. I've been using the Surface Pro line for about 10 years to do everything I need to do, they are pretty solid.

keepamovin 2y ago
I also use the surface for everything I need: I like it a lot and I’ve never had a problem with it. I don’t get the hate, nor why the inaccurate idea that you cannot run things on it persists.
- diffeomorphism 2y ago
  A surface pro 9 with average laptop specs (16GB of ram, 1TB of storage), keyboard and pen costs 2000 + 140 + 80 and that is for the "outdated" model. At that price it should be exceptional not just good. That is not "hate" but disapointment.
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    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 missing out on what could work for you. For me, I think the weight and mobility are important too. I love the stylus and OS. I like the look and there's a bit of a f-you status, not in terms of the money involved which is not that much (especially considering what people drop on gaming rigs, Mac stuff, etc), but because it is a bit different. I think you're wrong that there's no hate towards Surface: you may not be picking up on it, there definitely is. Maybe people dislike that it's flashy and costly when they expect it should be utilitarian, so it kind of clashes with their expectations in a way that upsets them, and they dislike seeing other people enjoy what displeases themselves. I find it humorous that the same people may see another item, a Mac or whatever, in a different light, despite obvious similarities, and enjoy its flashy costliness. Heh! :) I encourage you to consider how the people who like and enjoy it see it. These topics have a way of turning people a bit mad, or at least creating conflict. So please let me turn the heat down a little bit with this olive branch compliment: hey, cool username, are you a mathematician?? :)

deng 2y ago

Searching for a Linux tablet, I got a used Lenovo X1 Tablet Gen3. Linux works mostly fine, but as a tablet, it's mostly useless for reasons similar to the ones mentioned in TFA: * Battery life. 5-6 hours for moderate use simply does not cut it, especially since sleep drains battery like crazy because s0ix is not working properly, and debugging why is almost impossible. It's absolutely crazy how something that used to work just fine was deliberately botched because MS/Intel decided everything has to be a phone. * So because of this, you need to shut down the tablet if not used, which wouldn't be too bad, but as TFA says, you need a keyboard to enter the LUKS decryption password. * As a pure reading device, it's too heavy. Apart from that, Firefox is basically unusable because backspace does not work properly because of this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1832876 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1832876 So in the end, while it's working, there's still a lot of janky behavior, which makes the experience just frustrating.

slowhadoken 2y ago

I’ve seriously been considering moving all my development to Linux. Microsoft is giving me the creeps lately.

chrsw 2y ago

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 with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.

Raydovsky 2y ago
That's because the XPS were built to run ubuntu. You can even buy one with it pre-installed.
- chrsw 2y ago
  Ubuntu 20.04 was preinstalled on my machine. But I reinstalled when I moved to a larger SDD. I think I still used the OEM install image too.
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    I can't help but wonder if Dell tweaked the firmware. I know that I, and everyone I've seen discuss it, haven't been able to get a vanilla XPS (non-Developer edition, sold with Windows) with a typical off-the-shelf distro, including Ubuntu, to work 100%.
    - chrsw 2y ago
      Sorry, I should have specified Developer Edition in my first post.
    - trelane 2y ago
      That seems likely. I know that firmware is one of the big differences between System76 laptops and the version that Clevo subsequently offers with Windows. I think the chips can vary sometimes too. Just from an ACPI perspective, I'd expect the Linux variant to (at a minimum) be built with the Intel compiler and the Windows one with Microsoft's. It is likely that there are far more differences, though.

trelane 2y ago

Interesting that slapping Linux on a Windows computer doesn't work well. I wonder how OSX would fare.

rowanG077 2y ago

I ran nixos on a surface pro 5 for 3 years without issues. Even the stylus worked. It was one of my favourite "laptops" I had. The superbad thermals forced me of surface pro line.

deleted 2y ago

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QuadrupleA 2y ago

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

the__alchemist 2y ago
This is an elegant, accurate description of my own experience. It's taken 20 years of regular attempts, but I've finally given up. ("This new release of Ubuntu / this new distro will be the one!") I use WSL if I want to compile a program for Linux users.
tama_sala 2y ago
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

surfingdino 2y ago

Why do we expect Microsoft to support Linux? They are selling a commercial operating system and are not interested in supporting a free one.

tallmed 2y ago

I've been exclusively using linux on my tablets since 2007 with the thinkpad x61t and i've never had any of these problems. Although i use a completely different setup compared to the dude in the article. I would even say that on tablets gnu/linux actually provides a better experience.

Valord 2y ago

F40 works fine enough on my SP2. Only complaint is no deep sleep. I just shut down instead. Same with my framework 16.

1oooqooq 2y ago

He went back to windows and didn't mention to worst part of old windows PCs (and a surface4 is extremely ancient!) The wifi stack is entirely handled by the shaddy driver, which is usually just the reference implementation from the chip manufacturer stuck in time. That means your wifi stack will only support WPA2, and ancient cyphers with outdated parameters. No matter how up to date is your OS.

csixty4 2y ago

I'm mostly impressed this person has an SP4 that still has a working battery and no screen issues.

dublin 2y ago

I'm very seriously thinking about one of these (or really, its successor) when I need to replace my computer again in the next year or two - it's already optimized for several Linux distros: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite# https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite# All I need now is a good replacement for OneNote that stores notes in an open format and supports pen input for sketching and handwritten note-taking...

lucisferre 2y ago

Is battery life decent on these new PCs? Does sleep work properly?