- The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful).
- Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover).
- Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly).
This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d want this, and it sounds like the author might be trying to force a tablet to be a laptop when they’d have just been better of with a laptop to begin with.
You can have a similarly bad experience with Linux on a laptop; all these issues (except for virtual keyboard related ones) also occur there:
- EFI is a bit difficult with distributions when Secure Boot is enabled. Ubuntu and Fedora support it, if you choose a different distribution you may have to tinker, as evidenced in the post;
- camera: Well, Microsoft was doing fancy stuff here; and most distributions just don't support anything but UVC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class) style webcams. It's a pain point now, but may not be in a year or two. Also, depending on the lifestyle and the devices one uses, a non working camera may not be an issue at all;
- SSD: Yes, this may be painful, but... for me personal it works well enough. Networking does wonders ;-)
- Lap friendliness... I have had a Surface Pro 3 years ago, and with that device I would agree. With the Surface Go 2 it's way less of an issue. The device is just so much lighter. Works on the subway for me without fear or trouble so far.
Now on the "Why would anyone want this experience" point: I just love desktop Linux, and it's nice to have some full desktop Firefox or apps like rNote [1] on a small, portable device. It's nice to run the OS you know, be able to replicate the same experience on a small form factor device so that you can have it, when you need it, while also being able to use it as tablet - more and more touch friendly apps are available.[2] With GNOME Shell adapting to mobile [3], this experience is only going to get better.
> You can have a similarly bad experience with Linux on a laptop
Yes, but not with a laptop mentioned in an article called "I Finally Found a Solid Debian Laptop".
This is not a solid debian tablet, it's a shitty unsupported tablet. Thinkpads (t series) are solid linux laptops, with occasional mini quirks, this tablet is far from anything "solid".
Honestly, I have one. I put KDE Neon User Edition (based on 20.04) on it (a somewhat bad choice, as it does not ship a virtual keyboard by default yet, GNOME is generally better there), and it installed just fine.
Touch works, the Pen works (with pressure sensitivity) rotation works, WiFi and Bluetooth work, Standby (deep sleep, I put to sleep for 8 hours and it only lost 5%) works (including wake-up).
Non working: Webcams.
All that OOTB, without switching to a special kernel or similar. If that’s "shitty unsupported tablet" in your book that's ok, but in my book it's pretty cool and way better than what I've seen on my last ThinkPad (L380 Yoga) when I got it, where standby wouldn’t just work.
Have you noticed a big problem with ZFS on 8GB of RAM? I've successfully ran fairly large (2TB, thousands of snapshots) zpools out of 4GB of RAM, with dedup off of course.
Since ZFS is the greatest filesystem in the world, I use ZFS -everywhere-. Including, on my very old Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (2013) with a slow dual core, and only 8GB of ram. ZFS works great, on that device I need to manually limit the ARC size so that it doesn't eat all my ram:
Not disagreeing with you per we, but I will note that the author may be judging the tablet as compared to other mobile devices running Linux. With the exception of the PinePhone and a few other devices Linux on mobile devices is truly painful/broken in most cases (and in ways that make this tablet look almost fully featured...).
Not true. Linux on BayTrail hardware is pretty much rock-solid by now (at least if you're running Fedora-derived distros). The thing is it can take many years to get to that level of support. It's absolutely normal for newly released hardware to be broken in many ways.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but isn't Android already Linux? What's the advantage of installing another distro?
I thought the whole point of Android is to make a curated touch friendly Linux experience. If you want a more traditional distro, wouldn't a touchscreen laptop (yoga etc.) be a better choice, if only for x86 support?
Android is running a Linux kernel, yes. But, as an enthusiast GNU+Linux desktop user you'll find that you can't do your linuxy stuff on Android - sure, termux does a lot, but it's just not the same.
The Surface Go 2 that the article is about, is an x86_64 device - I recently aquired one and it's really quite nice with Linux in my limited testing. The biggest difficulty with a standard desktop GNU+Linux on a tablet is that most distributions are not optimized for easy tablet use - KDE Neon User Edition e.g. does not come with a virtual keyboard preinstalled.
On Yoga style laptops: Well, they are easier to get started with, but they often are quite a big bigger and having those keys on the back all the time... It's doable, but if you want a "nice 10" tablet" experience these devices are just not what you will want: Too large, too thick, too heavy.
> The biggest difficulty with a standard desktop GNU+Linux on a tablet is that most distributions are not optimized for easy tablet use - KDE Neon User Edition e.g. does not come with a virtual keyboard preinstalled.
Ubuntu 22 on a Lenovo X1 Fold gave me the OSK without installing anything - though the touchscreen was not supported by default, the driver is under work cf https://github.com/quo/ithc-linux
Some distros do, and GNOME has been good to me too on many distributions with delivering a working virtual keyboard OOTB. KDE Neon, however, which I wanted to try after reading that KDE Plasma 5.25 has better tablet support, comes without a virtual keyboard (and AFAIK does not come with an easy option to install one, you need to know that it you have to install maliit-keyboard).
You lose the spyware if you use AOSP (except any that’s baked into your OEM’s kernel blobs), but you also lose a lot of functionality. You can regain some by using a community-maintained AOSP-based OS like Lineage, but chances are that a bunch of device-specific hardware/software features will still be missing.
Yes, Android is Linux. That means that you can just install the GNU OS with the kernel that comes with the device, and get a GNU/Linux installation running on top of it.
But by doing that you get to maintain all the malware that comes builtin on the mobile OSes.
The OP wants to replace the kernel. But most mobile devices use very specific hardware that do not have drivers compatible with the standard kernel you get from your distro. Technically, the manufacturer should have to supply you the source of the drivers they use (so you could port them), but good luck enforcing any right of yours against a large company on the legal system (any country's one actually).
As a person who has tried setting up Linux like 5-10 times over the years this sounds exactly like my experience and basically what I assume Linux use is always like.
It’s just like cars, there are people who are super comfortable just tinkering around with cars and fixing crap and say “this car is great” and if I tried to drive it it’d break down 5 minutes in and I would consider it a total loss.
I've been using Linux professionally for a decade, on many machines (desktop/laptop), and the compatibility is really hardware-dependent. It's "for tinkerers" on some hardware, and "fully mainstream" on other.
Choosing a Microsoft laptop to use Linux is asking for trouble :) I had two of them, and Microsoft had this awful idea of the connected standby, which caused standby/suspend problems (power-hungry standby, which is a very serious problem on a laptop). At least the older machines should now have a good upstream support, in other words, everything working out of the box, with the exception of touch (Linux is just not there).
Regarding other brands, it depends. I remember IBM/Lenovo (Thinkpads) as always just working out of the box. Dell used to be also very compatible, but paradoxically, the Dell XPS developer edition is marketing garbage (it's not very compatible as they claim).
I've installed Linux on a couple of budget computers and they worked fine. I suspect that low-end laptops tend to be much more compatible, since they use more common/cheap components.
Bluetooth has started to be compatible just in the last couple of years - bluez is poor software (and Ubuntu has been sloppy in handling it), but it finally reached a usable level.
I don't remember having to do any tweak on desktop machine, except the time where I had a very modern Ryzen that was supported by very recent kernels only.
Which makes sense. If manufacturers designed laptops exclusively for Linux—only writing Linux drivers and rarely even testing Windows during product development—how well do we think Windows would run?
Hardware designed to run one operating system isn't necessarily going to perform well with a different operating system, and expecting otherwise of every arbitrary machine on store shelves is unrealistic. Prospective buyers need to do research beforehand.
You can see with the Steam Deck. Valve is slowly releasing drivers over time but in early stages Windows was inefficient, sound didn't work or didn't work well, sleep wasn't snappy, the list goes on.
It had all the problems your average Linux install will encounter without the enthusiast-written drivers to work around manufacturers' lack of support.
That said, the Steam Deck seems to be the first non-enthusiast device where the manufacturer actually cares. Even laptops that get sold with Ubuntu preinstalled from the factory don't seem to receive that much support over the years.
I'd say pretty confidently that Lenovo has done quite a bit of caring over the years. I've had a bunch of T-series ThinkPads that have been super good under Linux.
This might have more to do with the glut of off-lease corporate ThinkPads being available at very competitive pricing for FOSS developers to pick up rather than any indication of Lenovo's commitment to FOSS.
> Choosing a Microsoft laptop to use Linux is asking for trouble :)
Not true anymore.
> I had two of them, and Microsoft had this awful idea of the connected standby, which caused standby/suspend problems (power-hungry standby, which is a very serious problem on a laptop).
When? Which models?
ACPI S01x when well done works better than ACPI S3, and Linux support for S01x is now getting quite good.
On a X1 nano, I've got less than 0.2%/h of power draw: so 10h of sleep consumes about 2% battery
It's still a work in progress, but I can't remember ACPI S3 consuming less that 5% overnight and resuming instantly.
> I don't remember having to do any tweak on desktop machine, except the time where I had a very modern Ryzen that was supported by very recent kernels only.
Have you ever had anything that resembled the experience or a MacBook Air with a M1?
I have a windows running Lenovo t14 for work, and it’s a decent enough laptop but it’s sort of like the stone ages compared to my personal MacBook. It has a terrible mousepad, it’s bulky, it runs out of battery after a two hours even though its factory new (developer specs in non-tech enterprise), the screen isn’t very nice and it’s actually more expensive.
I ask because I kind of want to get out of the closed ecosystem. Not so much because I dislike Apple but because I figure that with the way things are going for big American tech companies I’ll likely dislike them sooner or later. But I’ve never found a Linux (or windows) laptop that came close to the daily usage of a MacBook Air. Obviously I’m not in need of a powerhouse or a computer, weight, battery life and a good mousepad is my primary requirements, but yeah.
Have you tried an LG Gram?
I got myself one, it is one of the closest laptops to a macbook air M1:
- extremely light (my 14 inch is a little under 1kg), you'll absolutely feel the difference when holding it vs holding a macbook air M1, and it is very significant.
- great screen
- amazing keyboard
- the fan is very quiet, but the laptop can get a bit warm under load
- the touchpad is lacking on windows but is amazing on linux (I mainly use ubuntu / pop os)
- expect 9-10 hours battery life in most use cases, it sometimes goes as high as 14h+ if you're simply surfing the web/reading or as low as 6 hours on heavy use
When installing a linux distro, in some rare cases you might need to tweak a few bios option just to start the installation, but everything after that works out of the box.
That battery life is impressive! Thunderbolt 4 and a better selection of ports than the MacBook Air M1, also.
But, as great as the screen is, looks like it falls short of the 12" MacBook screen. Same 8GB of RAM in the base model as the M1, but memory bandwidth not the same. And the processor isn't going to keep up.
I mean, it's nice, but I picked the base model M1 Air about a year ago for $750 - still seems like the laptop to beat, if you can live with MacOS.
I quite like my work M1 Pro, but (to help coworkers with Mac problems while I was using a ThinkPad) I had an M1 Air 8GB from work for a while and I honestly found it really pretty bad because of the RAM limits. It seems like there's a floor against which MacOS bumps pretty hard if you want to use the machine for development-ish stuff and it reacts really poorly to memory starvation if you get ahead of yourself.
Having 16GB and up, though, an M1's fantastic. If I had to be resource constrained, though, I think I'd prefer something that handled Linux well.
Agreed, 8 GB is just not enough even for basic needs in the era of remote work and electron apps. I don’t know why they are continuing that as the base in this year’s MacBook Air M2, because it is just a worse user experience. These are already premium computers, even at the base models. I wish Apple would be a little bit more forward thinking about keeping users happy rather than saving a few pennies in the short term.
I have had excellent experiences with System76. They fully support Linux, and work hard to make sure the hardware works with Linux. Also, their support is very responsive, though limited to business hours.
Putting Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game.
I'm personally expecting Apple Silicon machines to become really good Linux devices within the next year. A killer team is working on it, and they can benefit from the game console effect—ie, Apple sells a limited number of models in large quantities.
Apple has no incentive to pick e.g. wifi chips with reasonably open specs. And history has pretty much proven that no amount of volunteer effort without specs will make Broadcom chips behave well.
Future Apple hardware being usable with Linux is not a bet I would make. I used to run Linux on a PowerPC iBook, and it's been downhill from there.
If you have an old MacBook lying unused, then Ubuntu tends to run out of the box on them. It is a lot lighter, so even though my 2014 MacBook Air is unusably sluggish with macOS, it runs Ubuntu 22.04 great.
This does not exist. System76 and some others do a good job at trying, but despite many efforts over the last 20 years, this just isn’t possible.
Consider that even the best Windows laptops are worse than MacBooks (and I would say this was true before the M1 but is inarguable now), despite the billions of dollars of investment from Intel, AMD, Dell, Microsoft, etc. I think the Surface line has historically had the closest experience for Windows, thanks to Microsoft's investments, but battery life and heat have been an issue on all x86 laptops for at least 5-7 years, with very recent improvements only coming from AMD and now on the 12th-Gen Intel processors. But nothing exists that matches the battery life and power/performance of the M-series. You can get a more powerful machine, but not one that will have battery life worth a damn.
And even as trackpads have improved with the Precision Touchpad drivers, Macs are just better here. Period.
If you don’t count Chromebooks (and I really don’t), there is no one investing anything close to what Microsoft and OEMs are in Linux, not just in software, but hardware, so even the best scenarios are going to fall short. It doesn’t help that the latest and greatest hardware takes to hit the kernel (understandable, of course), meaning you’ve got a lagging timeline from when the stuff is new/hot and when it works.
My Framework is quite good and with Linux, but it took a few months for drivers to be included in most distros (Fedora being so bleeding edge made it a real hero), and now 12th-gens are coming out and I don’t know the status of those chipsets (though WiFi 6E and the like are supported), and Framework cares about Linux and that community.
System 76 and Tuxedo basically just buy Chinese or Taiwanese laptops from Clevo or Tongfang and can make some adjustments to the firmware and hardware config, but they don’t control the whole stack. And even Purism, who sells itself as offering an Apple-like experience, falls embarrassingly short (like, their own firmware updates are bricking $2000 laptops running 2019/2020 specs. And the keyboards are terrible and their own Debian spin distro is not great).
So it’s amazing we have what we have. That we can buy pre-configured Linux laptops. But unless you want to do a Chromebook and tweak into run Linux apps, nothing has the experience you have on Windows, let alone Mac.
Someone will try to refute what I’ve said, but unless the hardware is very specific and the distro is very specific, you don’t get anything close. And it absolutely won’t have the power or niceties of a Mac. It just won’t.
Make sure you don't forget display nits. So many laptops not made by Apple are so dim that you don't want to use them. Apple is at 500 nits with the newest Air with an M2 chip. That's positively bright!
I've run debian on a non-dev xps 13 for years trouble-free.
My biggest gripe is docking station compatibility with the Dell TB16 which, to be fair, is largely own fault. Suspending the laptop while connected to three ext displays and input devices, then spinning it back up before re-connection produces some gnarly results.
Arch linux on non-dev xps 13 here. Install went smoothly and it's been working very well for the past few years. Admittedly, the trackpad is not as awesome as Apple's, but it's adequate by my standards.
I just went through trying to install Linux on my 2015 15” retina MacBook Pro (model 11,5 with Radeon dGPU) and it was not usable. Every distro I tried (Ubuntu, Pop OS, Fedora, and NixOS) had severe Bluetooth instability (most times the computer booted, Bluetooth worked for about 15 seconds after boot and then it would die completely until the next reboot). Graphics switching seems non functional on this model as well.
I’m looking for an alternative when Apple stops supporting Mac OS on this machine, and I was surprised at how flakey the hardware was in Linux on a 7 year old machine.
I have a 13" Macbook from the same year and it pretty much just works with Nixos. There was a bit of trouble getting Bluetooth working, but as I'm not using it much can't say for it's instability.
What is graphics switching, there is one (integrated) GPU, no?
I teach a university course for which we require students to install Linux on their Windows laptops, all of them different. These are overwhemingly inexperienced students that we give a short manual, mostly about tweaking a few bios settings before you insert the installation medium.
Of the 35 students in my class, 25 completed the installation without issue, with all hardware (never asked about fingerprint scanners) running fine. The rest required some help from expert googlers like me and some patience, in most cases related to Nvidia drivers. We got all but two to work fine or well enough in the end.
Having 5 to 10 consecutive bad experiences sounds like a fluke to me, given the 70% instant success rate I've seen.
It's not just about getting it to run. The devil is in the details: sleep mode, bluetooth, power usage, etc etc. Usually, the first 90% went great, and the last 10% took whole weekends to fix.
I included that in 'running fine', though admittedly some of these laptops may not be showing great battery life and may experience the occasional issue waking up from sleep mode. These students have been using their Linux installations for almost a year now; enough time for any subtle problems to emerge.
Our first year consists of a pretty intense dive into programming, with many assignments for which we provide starter material. And for that we want all students to run a predictable environment. Also, dual booting helps some students to cleanly separate course work from gaming. :-)
A few students (those whose laptops we could not convince to run Linux) work within a VM, but that experience is comparatively miserable.
To be fair every time I’ve tried it has been on a cheap or free computer and I haven’t needed to get it running… I’d probably have gotten better results of it was my only option or if I went out and tried to plan my computer purchase to make Linux work. And this is extending back like 20 years, so it has, I’m sure, gotten better somewhat.
I don’t think it’s a Linux problem. It’s a trying to run Linux on arbitrary hardware problem.
On one hand that’s kind of the whole point of open-source. Because it can be extended to support almost anything it usually is extended over time by someone else that has already had the same problems you do getting a thing to work. That’s not the same as just assuming everything already works without checking though.
There are some very suitable laptops that would have had support out of the box.
Oh yeah definitely. I bet the experience would be at least a little better if I had ever wanted to switch to Linux and spent money on the effort.
But I bought the (perhaps unspoken?) promise that it would be an easy test drive to find a crappy old laptop and throw Ubuntu on it… and those test drives ended up with me not wanting to switch to Linux.
> As a person who has tried setting up Linux like 5-10 times over the years this sounds exactly like my experience and basically what I assume Linux use is always like.
It's not my experience at all. When I buy a computer to run Linux I normally get one with Linux preinstalled (normally the latest LTS Ubuntu). Then if I ever need to upgrade to a more recent version of Ubuntu it generally goes smoothly.
Pop!_OS is a piece of cake to install and has been my daily driver on a Lenovo CX1 for the past 3-4 years. (I’m assuming your comment is referring to Linux in general, not on a tablet). And I’m not a former CS major or anything. I’m on the verge of recommending it to my dad who only has experience with windows machines.
Lenovo hardware is known for being Linux compatible. Microsoft hardware is not. Let us know how it went when you try to install popos on a Microsoft Surface 2.
The Intel monoculture in laptops has been a boon for linux compatibility. A random mid-range laptop with the an Intel CPU, Intel WiFi chipset, and integrated graphics will usually run linux straight out of the box. Most webcams in laptops are UVC devices so also work.
Desktops are somewhat more hit-and-miss, as are discrete GPUs (I hear the newer AMD GPU drivers are much improved, but have no personal experience with them).
> Well actually I guess there’s PineTab[0] but something with better specs is bound to come around
I monitor their news section almost daily to follow the development of their devices, especially the PineNote and PineTab. I've almost given up about the
PinePhone however because of my reading difficulties with smallish screens; Having no needs for a smartphone, I've found that a 4G capable dumbphone working as hotspot plus this Thinkpad are the perfect pair.
It's not the first time I read a review from somebody, "it's great!", they say, and immediately after they start listing all the things that are not in fact great.
Reminds me of that meme that shows Brits using "it could be worse" to mean anything less than average, and "not too bad" for everything else, while Americans say "awesome!" for any kind of sentiment, good or bad.
I'm not saying OP is American, just that adjectives in reviews have lost most of their meaning.
I suspect it's a linux "enthusiast" thing, rather than an american thing.
Virtually every thread about linux on laptop starts out with someone claiming that it runs perfect on this or that hardware, then 20 other people chime in with all the things that actually don't work on the same same machine, and finally the original poster concedes with some weasel statement along the lines of "well it works for me". And the year-of-linux-on-x circle of life continues...
OEMs sometimes will do things like use different Wifi modules (among other things) on the same exact model and it can be somewhat luck of the draw as to what works well with Linux.
Distro choice also has a big impact. Like I tried Guix on my P14s and haven't been able to get Wifi working even with the latest non-libre kernel among other issues. Literally EVERYTHING works perfectly on Ubuntu 22.04 despite in theory non-libre Guix having a newer kernel so something must be going on there.
Agreed, this is why I find Chromebook, with its great Linux container support, so nice. I know the author mentioned he tried this on a Lenovo Chromebook and said it was dog slow. I have it running on my Pixelbook and with maxed out RAM it worked well.
Soooooo sad there hasn't been much news on a new Pixelbook, was such a great device.
you can install firefox on linux and run it as an app in chromeos but the performance isn't great on pixelbook i7. I ran into a lot of issues with regard to networking between the chromeos layer and the linux layer, its like they're nat'd or something rather than bridged, so good luck running a test environment for some things without extra steps.
I agree with you, but also think for a linux experience on a device that wasn’t meant for it, it’s par for the course. Of the above, the only critical flaw would be the camera not working, the rest is manageable.
It’s been a while, but updating a DELL laptop ended up with flacky sound that wouldn’t work for video calls, and the video card drivers sometimes crapping the bed and bringing the system down with it.
No... if videoconferencing software runs slow, with choppy audio and low framerates, try prioritizing the sound daemon and whatever videoconferencing software you use so that the scheduler makes sure those processes run in a timely manner.
Yeah, have to agree, wish they actually made half of that it work because it can, as they say it requires _effort_ to setup properly,...
Tbh the surface pro 3 and sp4 were about at the same level of fiddlyness, but the battery life was just up there with a normal laptop, definately not ipad territory.
I've been using Surface Book 2 as a work laptop and at this point I won't buy a single Microsoft's hardware beyond an Xbox. It was utterly bad. Lack of thunderbolt so USB-C docks won't fully work, lack of HDMI ports, insane thermal throttling, had issues handling 1000hz polling rate mouses(seriously), quite often laptop would just not turn on until specific reset combination of keys was pressed, general performance issues with time. Whole thing was also very fragile and scratched very easily. And the worst part - power button sticks out so much it was randomly turning on in my laptop bag or backpack, quite often heating really badly and discharging to death. I would come to work almost every day without power. Never again.
Similar experience, with a Surface Pro 4 many years ago. After one year it bricked but thanks god I still had the warranty and they sent another one...
Am I asking too much? I want a tablet with high precision drawing and low-latency to take notes about everything. Add an ARM processor and I'd buy it today, damn it.
"Am I asking too much? I want a tablet with high precision drawing and low-latency to take notes about everything"
This is actually quite much.
Low latency means high powered hardware and all of that in a slim, passive cooled fanless design, bundled with the best possible display avaiable. I don't see how one can ask for more ...
I have a Surface Pro 7, honestly it's pretty good; I didn't buy it though.
When I first had it the responsiveness and accuracy for drawing were great, but the lines all wiggle now -- there's a simple calibration that I think will fix it, but that's locked down by our IT department for reasons. If the wiggle were fixed I'd have almost no complaints (except the prices to me are eye-watering, I have the oem dock and keyboard cover too; also Windows is so awful as a window manager).
Is that really that high of a bar? A bunch of Apple tablets and Samsung phones offer those features, as did Wacom tablets a decade ago. There are even (relatively) low latency inkable e-ink devices.
By tablet stuff, I mean reading, taking notes and sketching. No app ecosystem does it like iPad OS'.
The problem with the Surface Go isn't the hardware, but the fact that it runs Windows, a system that just isn't made for these things.
The most ridiculous part was being forced to "save or discard" drawings before I could close an app. I had to painstakingly pick a location and name for each file. It felt like using Photoshop, not a notebook. Every app sucked in a different way. In contrast, most iOS ones are decent to great, and there are far more options for readers.
That's on top of the regular Windows problems. I spent the first day just doing updates and disabling bloat. As a tablet OS, it's incredibly clunky. I didn't get to the part where it wakes itself up and fries itself to death in my laptop bag, but I heard that it's still an issue.
The iPad was so much better at its task that it's not even funny.
Now I take my iPad everywhere, and if I intend to do more work, I pack my Macbook. It's not heavy enough to make me consider Windows ever again. However, I'd consider an old 12" Macbook to shave a kilo off when I travel.
I've got an ipad in a drawer somewhere. Also work has been trying to push a macbook on me. After trying it I said no: I stick to my Fold, because I like it better, both for the hardware and the software.
It's smaller and does everything multiple separate device would be needed for.
> I had to painstakingly pick a location and name for each file.
First world problem lol!!
For old apps, I have an AHK shortcut to save files by ISO date. However, it's rarely a problem with modern apps. And if you close them without saving, most of them will bring back your unsaved work. Even Word does that!
> By tablet stuff, I mean reading, taking notes and sketching. No app ecosystem does it like iPad OS'.
For comics and mangas, I use Takiyomi (technically, it's an android app, but WSA makes it seamless)
For taking notes, I use ZimWiki and Windows stickies
For sketching, I use OneNote.
> The iPad was so much better at its task that it's not even funny.
We must have very different uses, because between even just Takiyomi+OneNote vs an ipad, indeed it's not funny for the ipad.
> That's on top of the regular Windows problems. I spent the first day just doing updates and disabling bloat
Well, don't look further for the root cause: "disabling bloat" often causes more problems. I only remove very specific things. For updates, I use Windows Pro and usually defer them until I want to reboot. When I read the problem people report with windows, it's like they live in a different world.
> Now I take my iPad everywhere, and if I intend to do more work, I pack my Macbook
I just take my Fold everywhere - nothing else is needed, but I've got a bluetooth keyboard for comfort if I want to type a lot.
On the Fold, I can draw with a Wacom pen - no need for a separate device like the ipad, because most windows tablet and convertibles also have a touchscreen.
If I need to work, I have Windows Terminal and everything I need to code. ZimWiki means my notes can be converted to HTML and published.
Oh that’s exciting to hear; I’ve always been a fan of some of their products but sometimes the hardware support under Linux is lacking for their more modern devices. Cool to see someone tackling it!
For me the iPad feels too constricting when you want to do anything other than consume content.
But I think that's just because I'm accustomed to having direct access to files and filesystems, and the extra later of abstraction (already necessary to visually translate a filesystem) just becomes bothersome.
E.g. I still need to cd and ls in a very primitive and visceral way, feel my way around the warren like a mole so to speak, even if I can just click/tap on a screen or C-x C-f.
Probably how the mind gets wired with basic text UIs like the DOS and Unix command lines, before you get to stuff like Midnight Commander.
Pretty weird, if you ask me, as that's more of a verbal and less than a visual way of interacting with the system, while I'm an otherwise visual person.
I have 2 iPad Pros, both sizes, two Linux laptops, and a Lenovo Duet Chromebook with Linux containers. Lots of experimenting with hardware choices.
When traveling with an iPad (sometimes I take the Chromebook) I find using a SSH or Mosh client app with a remote server works very well. Your mileage may vary.
Similar experience. And MS accusing me I dropped it and refusing warranty. I did not drop it; it was broken out of the shop. It never worked well even after I paid for fixing (they just sent a new one). Would be nice if it worked but maybe they should learn something about customer experience and hardware quality from other vendors.
I agree, generally terrible performance all around and poor build quality for the price (almost £3,500 fully specced out).
I installed Linux on it recently thanks to the linux-surface project which improved the experience quite a bit as I don’t have to deal with Windows 11 shit anymore, but the performance is still dreadful. You know it’s bad when after 30 mins of it being on it’s slower and laggier than a £500 laptop.
Will never by a Surface product again, easily one of the worst purchasing decisions I have made.
Similar experience here. Just shipped 20 off to a recycler. They didn’t even get to a year old. Replaced with thinkpad L series which suck but at least they actually work.
For what it's worth, I can recommend the Surface Go (2 and 3) as a tablet, even if you do not intend to run Linux. Simply because it's x86 and your not running Android or iOS.
While the actual tablet experience in Windows 11 is mediocre, the fact that I run plain, regular desktop apps makes the device so much more enjoyable to use. It's not a replacement for a decent laptop, but as a tablet, I'd pick this one over crappy Android or locked-down iOS any time of the day.
Android is out, they've basically thrown in the towel in this space. Their newest release claims "We're back for real this time", but they already dumped it once.
I'd take a desktop with touch experience over a "phone app on big screen" experience 100%.
So I've ended up with a Surface Go as my tablet when I replaced my nvidia shield k1 also. The UI can be janky, but having stuff like proper multitasking, being able to use apps like VS Code or my preferred PDF reader, and actual desktop Firefox with all the extensions does outweigh that jankiness for me.
I don't understand the purpose of the "big phone" tablets when phones themselves have now gotten as big as my first tablet.
iPadOS 16 beta with StageManager helps a bit, especially with the cover case/keyboard and a $10 Bluetooth mouse and a USB-C external monitor.
I think future iPhones may provide similar docking and software, so, who knows, maybe in five years a phone will be good for everything as long as docking setups are available.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, to use iOS or iPadOS for general use, I need a SSH/Mosh client app and a remote server. This may seem like a huge constraint but I often use SSH/Mosh on my laptops and work on remote servers. This is likely an age thing: I am 71 years old and it seems natural for me to work with remote Emacs, etc. setups.
It comes down to what you want to do with your tablet.
I want to replace paper books and notebooks. The iPad is unrivalled for that. If I need a machine to type on, I need a full OS on a full laptop. I just pack both.
I've never used the Kindle app, so I don't know what that user experience is like, but I've been pretty happy with Sumatra PDF for reading EPUBs. Inside the advanced settings you can adjust color, font, and font size. For me, that's all I need from an ebook reader.
Does Sumatra support reading Amazon's books direct, or do you need to pass them through DeDRM first? Or is there some other store selling DRM-free epubs I'm not aware of?
I end up stripping DRM off mine with Calibre's tools, then reading them on calibre-web.
This requires some elaboration. I'd argue that iPadOS offers an excellent tablet experience because it was built with its unique set of properties in mind. It doesn't behave exactly like a phone and it doesn't behave exactly like a laptop, but you do see elements of both in it.
It offers a lot of applications that do all sorts of wonderful things. It's a great way to draw/paint, you can sculpt stuff in 3d, you can create full music tracks with professional quality. You can write books on it, you can watch your tv shows, read your comic books, and do a whole lot of stuff in a way that for me, is simply much more delightful than sitting at my computer.
There's plenty of uses that it doesn't serve very well, though. The coding experience is lackluster at best. The fact that there's only one web browser engine is a miss. The fact that the concept of extensibility is severely gimped or nonexistent in applications is a miss (though the addition of extensions to safari helps a bit). The fact that there's no reasonable way to side load officially supported by Apple is awful. A lot of these points are probably ones that are important to the hacker crowd on HN so to those people they probably find it hard to overlook those shortcomings.
I use my iPad every day and I love it for the things that it does do. To me that is enough to consider it a good tablet experience.
While I love my iPad, I love my Boox Note 2 even more. Fantastic device for what it does: reading and note taking with crazy long battery life. I charge it once every few weeks, to a month and a half with my usage patterns. Great weird expensive but fantastic device!
I don’t think you can do much better than an iPad Pro in the tablet space, super refined tablet experience, combined with the Microsoft rdp app to a vm or other desktop for a full x86 windows env, apple rdp to macs/MacBooks, and blink mosh ssh to Linux systems. Yes running external systems is cheating but the actual end result is insanely functional. Say what you will about iPadOS but it still gets yearly major updates and new features for free.
I want to run the full browser I want, if needed, I want to be able to load up some code and review/run tests and maybe start coding something simple and keep going.
There are apps that kind of help, but they're not the same. I also can't say I'm always online.
I went with a Surface Pro. I'm running windows which I don't particularly like, but it'll have to do for now. I would have preferred something that runs Linux over Windows, but I didn't see things with great support and I'm also not here to fight the hardware to make it work.
I've tried both. Both are a pain IMO (but Mac doesn't really improve this). With WSL2 you end up with another abstraction layer that you have to figure how to get your programs to work nice with.
With Docker Desktop, there's been some performance issues lately. Doesn't turn into a hoverboard like my mac, but the performance still lags.
I mainly use it to script small things on python and that's worked out fine. Haven't had issues with paths which was the most annoying things last time I tried it on Windows.
Serious question: why not simply an ultra-light laptop?
I've taken a hard look at what the strengths/weaknesses of tablets are (see my link-drop elsewhere in this subthread), and the one thing they're really good at seems to be reading ebooks. For which a dedicated e-ink ebook reader is far superior.
Almost any productivity task is better done with a keyboard, ergo, laptop.
Video and audio capture are more flexibly and usefully achieved with a dedicated camera or recorder, and both can be extremely inexpensive.
(I've also reasons for wanting my audio/video capture tools to have minimal connectivity and not be part of a surveillance-capitalism platform.)
Handwritten notetaking is another possible application, though having a keyboard available makes typed notes and note-management systems viable. Then there's drawing / sketching. Again, e-ink kworks well for B&W there.
Video can be watched on a laptop. Audiobooks are pretty well suited to an e-ink tablet again.
Sometimes I just want to just browse and consume content and don't need a keyboard. Sometimes I want to annotate and handwrite on something and the ones with keyboards that fold back, become too thick.
The iPad has a great size and depth for this. When I use my wife's the thickness is not bad. If I want to annotate a PDF, I can sit on the couch and it's super easy and not heavy or too thick.
Videos, I can easily remove the keyboard, prop it against something and it doesn't take more space. However, I rarely do this for long periods. My main use to watch videos is to figure something out and take notes.
I want to be able to take handwritten notes, highlight and annotate PDF's, and research using a full featured browser. So it's an in-between. I think the iPad is close. Hardware is there (same CPU/architecture). Just needs software support.
We also have leaned towards mac's just for the UNIX tools but also it has a ton of nice things so that's why I think that the OS would be great. Copy from your computer, paste it on your ipad, keep going or open it through Files.
> Handwritten notetaking is another possible application, though having a keyboard available makes typed notes and note-management systems viable. Then there's drawing / sketching. Again, e-ink kworks well for B&W there.
Have you actually tried using an e-ink device for taking notes? Sluggish and not nearly good enough compared to Goodnotes (iPad), OneNote (Windows), Xournalpp (Linux).
>Video and audio capture are more flexibly and usefully achieved with a dedicated camera or recorder, and both can be extremely inexpensive.
Can not work as well for making instructional videos as a tablet with screen recording.
>Audiobooks are pretty well suited to an e-ink tablet again.
> Now go somewhere without great internet connectivity and attempt to do work.
If you end up in a situation where you are suddenly without internet connectivity, the solution is simple: you stop working or you move somewhere that has internet connectivity. If you are knowingly going somewhere without internet and want to do work, you're obviously going to make arrangements to ensure that you can work. Maybe that means bringing a different device with you or maybe you find a workaround. For example, this youtuber/developer uses a raspberry pi connected directly to the iPad as a development server [1]. I think it's a tad silly, but it seems to work well for him to complete his work.
The whole "what if you don't have an internet connection?" argument just seems like needless FUD-spreading. I don't see it as a realistic problem for the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time.
This is better served by a laptop for the majority of people, though as someone that uses an unconventional keyboard anyway, a laptop is somewhat less compelling (since it occupies a lot of space with a keyboard that I actively avoid using), I can certainly see the appeal of a tablet for that purpose.
I personally don't think Microsoft quite got it right with using Windows on a tablet, though it was certainly a lot better with Windows 8, which is what the surface pro 2 (I think the first one as well?) shipped with. There's way too many compromises on usability because it's running Windows, and there's no meaningful impetus for developers to create their applications specifically with touch in mind.
Apple's been much more antagonistic to developers yet they still get people making apps specifically for iPadOS in a way that neither Google nor Microsoft have managed. I think this is the advantage to their totalitarian strategy; they get less applications built for iOS/iPadOS overall and their restrictions make it significantly harder or impossible to create some things you can find easily on Windows, Android, or even MacOS, but because they control the platform they can impose minimum requirements for applications on the platform and as a result you actually get programs that run with that device's UX paradigms in mind. It probably also helps that their platform makes more money and that the iPad is already in a position of dominance in this market, but I digress.
If Microsoft wants to fully realize their Surface tablet vision, they need to pump a ton of money into getting developers on board and building apps that fit the UX paradigms of Surface tablets.
I bought a Surface 7+ a few months ago and really like it. I think of it as a “laptop replacement”. My serious work is done on a desktop with 3 large monitors at home, and a laptop with two large monitors at work. So I only needed a small-ish laptop to handle the in-between.
Plus I can read books or watch videos, take notes, etc, in tablet mode.
> building apps that fit the UX paradigms of Surface tablets
I kinda don’t want this. A major selling point was that I have a full OS with the same applications on my desktop and laptop (ie, PyCharm, other python-related stuff, Firefox, custom python, bash, powershell scripts). No need to have completely different apps because the tablet maker hobbles the OS, making using a tablet in laptop mode useless.
It can be awkward for sure in tablet mode, but it does kinda work.
This is also my finding - I need regular apps even while reading books or watch videos. Windows 10 in non tablet mode is totally great for that. I use winget/chocolatey to install stuff I use on work and home and no need for different OS/apps. I can run anything work related on Surface - I have docker installed, Visual Studio, Sql Server, PostgreSql, nodejs, dotnet etc - I rarely use them but its good to know everything just works if I needed it. Most of the time I use it for reading HN and friends, watch some videos/podcasts, read ebooks. Besides that, I have it with me on each meeting. I save any work in git repository so having all that working the same as on my Desktop computer is a big win.
Regarding that use case, the only thing I don't like about Surface 7 Pro is its screen which is very much reflective. Other then that, its totally awesome.
I think the Surface line serves the "I only want one portable device" crowd well enough, even though I think it could be better. Applications being able to adapt based on the way you're interfacing with them would be the most work required from developers but also probably the best of both worlds... just that'd require Microsoft investing in 3rd party developer support in a way they haven't before.
I personally use both a laptop and an iPad regularly enough in their own contexts that I find it worthwhile to have both.
> This is better served by a laptop for the majority of people, though as someone that uses an unconventional keyboard anyway, a laptop is somewhat less compelling (since it occupies a lot of space with a keyboard that I actively avoid using), I can certainly see the appeal of a tablet for that purpose.
I've switched to an Ergodox in early 2019 and I couldn't use a laptop since. MNT[1] is the only laptop manufacturer I know of, that is even trying to do anything about the absurdity of emulating 19th century typewriters; although the Planck-style ortholinear layout is not my type.
At one point I've been considering a tablet + a small foldable camera tripod + Corne-ish Zen[2] or similar; and a custom carrying case to fit all of these neatly. The tripod could also be useful for actual photography, and would put the screen at a reasonable height for actual work.
I'm having a difficult time finding decent tablet hardware though. I would ideally like to run OpenBSD on it!
I don't have trouble typing but I do have trouble trying to type for a long period of time on a standard laptop keyboard because it tends to cause flare ups in my hands, the whole reason I switched to an ergonomic keyboard (in my case a Kinesis Advantage 2).
I do wish there was a better option available on keyboards but alas the market is quite niche. Separating the keyboard from the laptop seems to be the only realistic option for people with those needs.
Related to the Surface Pro 2, I have Ubuntu 22.04 LTS running on an 8 GiB version (i5-4300 CPU), 256 GB SSD.
It's been reasonable for what I use it for, mainly SDR applications, such as CubicSDR and GNU Radio X11 apps, and multiple CLI apps like rtl_433. Audio is good, screen is fine, and WiFi works. It's nice to have a laptop if I want to use an antenna outside.
Don't even bother using the tiny trackpad on that model's type cover. Bluetooth works so I use that for an external mouse.
Bonus: I never even thought to try the built-in video cam, and after reading the article, I installed VLC and to my surprise the camera worked!
I still use a 8" Windows tablet from 2015 every day, for the same reasons.
I wish I could upgrade from the mediocre specs, but newer, better x86 tablets in this form factor simply don't exist.
Made possible by the Linux Surface project, have been using this on Surface laptop 3s for a few years its pretty great and an active project. https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
Random comment about the device: I have the weak version and I'm amazed at its sleep battery preserve capability. Put it in airplane mode, hit the power button to turn off screen, then leave it on my desk for weeks, still has battery later on/wakes up.
> Random comment about the device: I have the weak version and I'm amazed at its sleep battery preserve capability. Put it in airplane mode, hit the power button to turn off screen, then leave it on my desk for weeks, still has battery later on/wakes up.
ACPI S01x done right is great: it can consume less power than S3 suspend and resume faster! (though after a few weeks, I think your surface may have gone into S4 hibernate)
Will note: I would not recommend the weak SG2 (Pentium Gold Y) as far as usability. It's one of those where you open up a couple of browser tabs and it starts to really perform badly. It gets better if you plug it in, particularly for the updates, they run faster while plugged in.
I really just got it to have a Windows tablet that was not too expensive, I had an SB2 before but I ended up selling it. The SB2 was a cool device though. Also I wanted drawing but I ended up using an e-ink tablet for that (also concern with battery) my stuff is just doodles/note taking, so no color is fine and e-ink means long battery life.
I bought a Lenovo Thinkbook 14s Yoga about 1 month ago. Great FHD 360 degree touch screen with a neat docked stylus. Comes with 8GB soldered RAM + 8GB SODIMM that can be swapped for up to 32GB. The 500GB Nvme drive comes with Win10 but having a 2nd empty M.2 slot meant it was easy to put in another drive that now has Ubuntu, Fedora and a sweet ChromeOS installation. Only problem I'm having is getting the built-in mic to work on ChromeOS.
I have a surface go 1 running (currently) PopOS, but have been on Kubuntu also. It's a great travel computer, combined with a USB-C dock, mini keyboard, bluetooth headphones and a wireless trackball. I use it to run chrome, zoom, bitwig, and the terminal; I don't think I've ever attempted intellij on it, but it would probably be ok (that said the screen size is too small for me to really want to code on it).
Things have steadily gotten better in terms of support via linux-surface, but it's definitely on the wild-west edge of the linux universe; current issues:
1) The wifi driver isn't in the mainline kernel yet for whatever reason. After doing a dist upgrade you have to copy the driver into two locations. This is documented on linux-surface's site; I wrote a script to do it, and it's not that bad.
2) Camera doesn't work. Gives me a good excuse to do off-camera zooms while travelling. :)
3) PopOS specific issue: cannot run their system updater with the linux-surface PPA active. This is really annoying, and probably enough reason for me to just switch back to Kubuntu on it. (Also, I don't like Gnome's insistence on switching to lodpi mode, despite my having set up fractional scaling).
1) The wifi driver isn't in the mainline kernel yet for whatever reason. After doing a dist upgrade you have to copy the driver into two locations. This is documented on linux-surface's site; I wrote a script to do it, and it's not that bad.
That's a very Debian issue. It's the only distro where I've ever had to do silly things like that.
I've got a vintage Surface One. 32-bit, WinRT. I'd love to just even run a cross compiled golang binary on it. If I recall correctly, even Dropbox wouldn't install. But I've never been tempted to boot linux into it, just because its such an esoteric device, even though the nvidia popos image works. The Adobe paint program is rather elegant. And perhaps the device can run MAME ;)
As for decent powered charger try one from https://frame.work -- it also has both power and USB-C cords detachable, so you can use any other USB-C you like, as well as custom length (or plug) power cords.
> As for decent powered charger try one from https://frame.work -- it also has both power and USB-C cords detachable, so you can use any other USB-C you like, as well as custom length (or plug) power cords.
Uh? That's HUGE!
I recommend instead a AOHI GaN USB-C PD charger: the 30W is much smaller and sufficient to charge most laptops https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097BWY4WG
The chubbier AOHI 65W I got when I thought I may need it now sits at home. I also got a USB-C cable with an integrated display to monitor how much the devices are drawing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MS545VF
> the 30W is much smaller and sufficient to charge most laptops
Even the M1, which is praised for it's power efficiency can hit 40-50W under load. Such a charger will let the battery run down if you actually use your laptop for intensive tasks while charging. I don't think that qualifies as "most laptops" (and forget high end Intel laptops that are more than a generation old, they'd draw more than that watching a 4k movie)
Wrong, they have the smallest chargers (for the same wattage). They seem to be bragging about some "new tech" that makes it possible to pack so tightly.
The UK plugs are ugly no matter what :) regardless of manufacturer. Fortunately I have Type C plug.
Put UEFI on the chromebook!! Argh don't write it off, chromebooks are the best x86 platform by far. MrChromebox provides pre-made coreboot+edk2 builds for a ton of chromebooks, but you can make your own too.
The Lenovo Chromebook Duet uses ARM, not x86, so I don't think MrChromebox supports it. I'm unclear on whether ARM Chromebooks even can support coreboot and/or edk2; do you happen to know if that's possible?
arm chromebooks usually run coreboot too; the utility of edk2 there would be questionable, as on none of them ACPI tables can cover all the HW, so u-boot would be good enough.
MrChromebox currently publishes only RW_LEGACY firmware (not full ROM, only replacing the stock SeaBIOS) for AMD Picasso/Dali and Intel Tiger Lake devices, but a) that's enough to boot whatever you want and b) you can build your own full ROM.
It's a "Solid Debian Tablet" because it boots. Linux religionists ignore all problems after booting.
Linux and Oss in general are religions like Apple is. "Apple has NEVER done anything wrong," an Apple cleric told me about Antennagate.
I've been using Linux for programming work for ten years now, but every time I buy a new machine I try to use Linux natively. In the last attempt, Linux stopped working after I tried using a Bluetooth joystick: Linux froze and never booted again.
In ten years I never got hardware that runs 100% on Linux. I remember using a ThinkPad in 2010 and the wifi randomly disconnects 10 or more times an hour. I have issues with Flash animations, Youtube, sound, etc, a mix of hardware and software issues. If the ThinkPad is the best hardware for Linux, the worst is not imaginable.
But... My friend, a religious Linux uses Linux every day, and for him linux is perfect, his laptop just needs a wifi dongle on USB because linux doesn't support the motherboard wifi chip.
And there is a problem when Linux changes the integrated graphics card to a 3D graphics card, the screen goes black because when changing Linux sets the luminance of the screen to 0.
The religious person accepts all weird religious things because it's good for you: "now I understand video drivers". No, you don't understand.
After every failure in my Linux experience, my religious friend and the internet have told me I'm using either too old or too new hardware, or hardware from a bad vendor (Nivida is Satan) or the wrong Linux distribution (anything that isn't be Debian, Ubuntu included) and I'm too stupid to use Linux. Linux is the land of enlightened people and I'm not one of those people.
And some people say "Linux is open, fix the bug yourself"...
I love Linux, but I'm not religious about Linux, so to me the current status of Linux on real hardware is a disgrace.
Linux works great on VirtualBox or equivalent, I use WSL for my daily work and I love working on Linux on WSL.
Windows is a shit show with a lot of problems. But I never lost a Windows because of a joystick.
I'd say your experience is atypical. When I'm preparing to buy a new device that I expect to install Linux on, I look it up and make sure that everything will work (or the steps to take to ensure everything will work.) I buy the device, install Linux on first power-up, it installs fine, I never have any significant problems that I wasn't expecting.
Instead of constantly accusing people of being religious zealots (in order to associate them with irrationality), how about just doing an hour of research before making your next attempt?
> When I'm preparing to buy a new device that I expect to install Linux on, I look it up and make sure that everything will work
My friend did the same thing and in the end the Wifi didn't work.
> Instead of constantly accusing people of being religious zealots
Many people are religious about one thing or another, Linux is no exception, it's a fact of life.
> how about just doing an hour of research before making your next attempt?
Needing to research whether the hardware supports Linux is a clear indication that it shouldn't be used!
Linux has been around for 30 years! if in 30 years the project has not solved the problem of drivers, it is a shame and a total failure in this area, because billions are invested in Linux per year.
I agree with your assessment. Linux and open source is, very often, an aftermarket solution. As such, it lags in things like hardware support, design trends, integration with other products. In fact, this is one of the things Microsoft made sure with their business tactics regarding Windows: that Windows should be the primary PC platform. They did their hardest to support this software-wise, with things like backward compatibility, and with ruthless business deals, bundling, support and discounts for govs and schools, and by letting people pirate it to their hearts' content. The result is what we see today: Windows everywhere, every hardware supports Windows, every software runs on Windows. Plug and play. (With caveats of course, for example I have an USB wifi stick that makes Win10 BSOD the moment I disconnect it. Linux has no problem with it.)
That said, I lucked out with my Linux experience. Everything I need works well, and I don't tinker with it more than I did with Windows. The main difference is that I have much more control over the situation, compared to Windows' typical unhelpful messages and opaque environment.
> ings Microsoft made sure with their business tactics regarding Windows: that Windows should be the primary PC platform...and with ruthless business deals
Yes, without doubt, Microsoft make a lot of bad things to Windows being the primary pc platform.
> That said, I lucked out with my Linux experience. Everything I need works well
My friend who uses a USB dongle for Wifi says the same thing!
> My friend who uses a USB dongle for Wifi says the same thing!
I reckon you may have not tried a recent Linux kernel. Network hardware support is definitely better than MacOS at this point, and is creeping up on Windows in the consumer segment. I've used 5 different devices from 5 different manufacturers on Linux. Only one of them had a WiFi issue, which was only because the distro I was testing didn't ship with the specific driver for it (FWIW it was also a Surface product).
It is curious though, I do see people who share your sentiment but, like the parent comment, I legitimately have no problems with it. My OEM Lenovo desktop from 2014 worked just fine. My new custom-built gaming PC with proprietary everything seems to work fine, too. I genuinely struggle to find devices that run Linux poorly, outside of maybe the gaming laptop space and Macbook market. It's probably one of those Paretto principle things: 80% of people will be offended by the 20% of drivers that are missing from your kernel.
It's not guaranteed to be an out of box experience unfortunately, and I say unfortunately, because of how the human mind works. For regular, pragmatic usage, Linux doesn't really have any upsides. So if someone changes, and everything works as it did before, yay, maybe we scored some privacy points, or one-upped a corporation? Great. But if someone changes and is facing issues, and sees no upsides, the conclusion will be clear: the change isn't worth it. This is among the first things that'll come to mind and again, with no positive effects to expect, the person is left with the feeling of regret, or feeling stupid.
This is why I'd like to see the following things in the technology space. Linux, Libreoffice, GIMP, etc being the default software they teach in schools. Them being used as defaults in governments. Linux coming preinstalled on computers by default, with Windows coming with an extra price tag. If these would magically happen somehow, the tables would have been turned - now it's up to Microsoft to adhere to a standard, and people would be confused as to why someone would bother tinkering with Windows and Office when the forms, submissions, contracts and presentations are expected in the libre formats anyways.
I don't think Linux's goal is to eat the world (or should be), which seems to be a common misconception in and outside of the community. Linux does not make a good desktop operating system in an age of smartphones and iPads, and I think that's perfectly fine. Linux effectively has 2 communities to cater to:
- Developers, sysadmins and power-users who intend to exploit the depth of it's featureset
or
- Crypto nerds, privacy advocates, free-software puritans, and other alt-software niches
To that end, I think it holds down both bases quite well. Linux is the #1 server operating system in the world by an insurmountable margin, and the alt-software crusaders are fat and happy. Linux isn't a panacea, it's a piece of software that was made to solve a problem. To this day, it continues to solve that problem (and people still misconstrue it's goals).
I disagree with this assessment. I'd love Linux, or any other free OS to eat the world; I think that standards, protocols, operating systems, and other utility-like components should be 100% open, free and unencumbered.
Also, Linux is pretty much a panacea. We have it demonstrated currently. It works perfectly well in server, desktop, laptop and mobile environments. It continues to prove itself as a viable alternative to whatever else these platforms run.
The crux of people's Linux issues is not a technical one. Linux, as a platform, doesn't have the clout the alternatives do have. This means that the tinkering that comes with integrating systems falls on the Linux people, and the end users. Neither of them have the information, which often doesn't leave the manufacturer, and the adequate time and know-how to keep up - so the systems end up working less reliably. Which, of course, works out well in favor of the companies that offer end-to-end integrated systems - Apple, Google, Microsoft.
Oh, well there's your problem. Gaming laptops are notoriously useless on Linux, oftentimes moreso than Macs. Gaming laptop manufacturers only sell products to Windows users, and likewise don't really care if they buy cheap components without proper driver support. It's a common and sad practice, but I kinda have to blame you for not doing your research here.
I do wish you luck in the future. Nobody deserves to be saddled with telemetry/adware just because their hardware is unsupported on other OSes, but blind-box reverse-engineering the drivers for all your esoteric Chinese WiFi cards is oftentimes not really worth the trouble. Like I said in the other post, Linux never claims to have driver parity with Windows (nor can it, really). However, informed consumers can pretty easily source hardware with excellent Linux support. HP and Lenovo sell first-party machines with Linux preinstalled and guaranteed driver support, as well as many other smaller manufacturers. With cheap, cobbled-together gaming laptops, that's often not possible.
I get your point about the friend, I was quite the zealot myself, and I have known a few others too - they were so obnoxious that I was turned off of Linux for quite a few years.
When I say that everything I need works well, I do mean it, but the "I need" part does a lot of work. I don't need the fingerprint scanner, or the built-in sound card, or the bundleware that comes with the rgb gaming mouse.
> In ten years I never got hardware that runs 100% on Linux.
You've never used XPS 13 Developer's Edition. It ships with Ubuntu. The hardware runs 100% on Linux.
I even checked with the intel GPU command that measures whether it's actually using accelerated video. Everything works on Firefox and Chromium. Well, except those Reddit videos that use the web blob API, but those seem to buffer and screw up on every OS I've ever used.
I understand that your point is about Linux zealots, but this isn't correct:
> linux doesn't support the motherboard wifi chip
Some drivers are included with the kernel and have 1st class support due to their importance but most wireless and video depends on manufacturers due to changing hardware and licencing issues.
You are a software developer, you know this should read "the manufacturer didn't release a Linux driver".
Regardless of why the driver doesn't exist, the result is the same:
Linux does not support the motherboard Wifi chip.
Probably many Linux problems are not just technical problems, but political problems or other types of problems, but the result is the same: A terrible user experience.
> Linux does not support the motherboard Wifi chip.
I'm sorry, this is a bald-faced lie. Every motherboard I've ever purchased has worked just fine with Linux networking out-of-the-box. If you bought a motherboard that doesn't support Linux, then I'm sorry to hear. That doesn't apply to everything though, so I'd recommend revising your wording in the future.
It's kinda like complaining that your new Nvidia GPU won't get recognized by your Mac Pro, therefore all GPUs are incompatible with MacOS!
Cool that they are happy with their setup. The author tried the Lenovo Duet Chromebook, which I also have. I agree that the resources on the Duet are light weight for running Linux containers, but I find it very useful nonetheless. To be honest, when I travel with the Duet, I usually SSH into a remote server, but, I do something’s locally. I would like something like the Duet for twice the price with more computational horsepower. The combination of zero-hassle ChromeOS with good Linux container support (also no hassle) is a time saver.
Agreed. The Lenovo Duet Chromebook is quite nice, and if one ever gets tired of Chrome OS (or once Google drops it, there's already a distribution [1] that supports it.
I recently got the same tablet in a cheap second-hand deal. Seller had never used it so battery is excellent. Bought it because I wanted to kill time by installing Linux, and it actually wasn't as bad as expected. Could have just disabled secure boot and be done with it, but that was probably where I spent most of my time. Waydroid is was easy to install so I can run both Android and Gnome, but x86-64 Android is so limited in software that I uninstalled it.
What I found was that it's a cool way to play Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Playing that game on a tablet gives the feeling of playing an interactive board game. It runs smoothly in Wine. A pretty important thing in the game is the ability to right click, which didn't work, and I would assume Windows have the same problem (I don't think Windows tablet support would be sufficient), so I wrote a mouse hook in win32 c that enables long press to right click.
There's lots of annoying nuances, like the Gnome 42 icons in the activity list is really small, the on screen keyboard is small and almost unusable in landscape mode (but big in portrait mode) and camera works for gstreamer apps only so no browser support (and the suggested fix doesn't work for Fedora 36).
I removed Windows and have locked the boot order so it won't be altered.
All in all 10/10 as a tablet for someone looking for excuses to tinker with Linux (and win32!).
> There's lots of annoying nuances, like the Gnome 42 icons in the activity list is really small, the on screen keyboard is small and almost unusable in landscape mode (but big in portrait mode)
I've switched to KDE (Arch) on mine. The on-screen keyboard is vastly better.
I've been messing around with Linux on some old Surfaces I pulled from the recycling cart at work. Linux on the laptop is fine, but boy howdy has it been a bad time on a tablet device. Wayland seems to have really thrown a wrench in the works. I tested:
- Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
- Login screen showed the on screen keyboard (OSK) after enabling it in the accessibility menu, but had annoyances like shift staying on after hitting a key
- Gnome was okay as a tablet interface, but OSK didn't work in non GTK apps, including Firefox
- Autorotate worked once, but then never worked again
- After waking up from sleep, the device would go back to sleep after 1 minute, regardless of what I was doing.
- Kubuntu 22.04 LTS was like using a desktop OS with only a mouse. No autorotate or OSK
- Fedora ran so poorly I gave up on it before testing it thoroughly
- Manjaro had a working OSK throughout the OS, but autorotate was busted. It had the same sleep issue after Ubuntu.
In addition, the camera didn't work in every OS I tried. I eventually just put W10 back on them.
I’m enjoying Debian on a Surface Pro 3. The hardware, especially the screen, is excellent, except for the keyboard on the cover, but I use a wireless keyboard. Cameras worked with no fuss. It’s not perfect—I have occasional issues after waking from sleep—but it’s close.
I was given years ago a Asus Transformer tablet (don't have the exact model here) by a relative who bought it by mistake and couldn't use it, so I installed Debian Linux on it. For what I can recall, everything but the camera worked, including audio although it needed some post-install tweaking. WiFi, BT, battery management, detachable keyboard and all else worked out of the box. I also seem to recall that the camera was supported later, but I had no use for it and never tried to make it work again.
I didn't keep the tablet however ; that was like 4-5+ years ago and at that time the only way to have a working screen rotation was to use Gnome3, which with only 2GB RAM walked like molasses.
Does anyone have experience with Linux on the latest model, the Surface Go 3?
I'm considering getting one of these as they seem like ideal travel devices, but uneasy about having to rely on a small community for basic driver support. Official Linux support would be much better.
I don’t have one anymore (it was an internal device that I gave back when I left Microsoft proper), but I had one last summer and while most of my testing on it was for Windows 11 builds, I did put Linux on it before and after release. And it worked well.
I don’t think official support will ever happen, but the Linux Surface project is very good and has lots of users internally at Microsoft who are very committed to helping report bugs/contribute back because they use it for work and for play. There’s a whole community of Linux enthusiasts at Microsoft and unsurprisingly, many use Surface devices, including the Surface Go line.
If I were to buy a Surface Go again — maybe the next model will be a little speedier (that was my main gripe with the 3), I think I would primarily use it as a Linux box, with Windows installed just in case , just as OP has.
This story inspired me to revive my Acer Switch 5 tablet. When I booted it last (before today), the display was glitchy. I don't know if it's faulty hardware or Linux, but I do know the glitches never appeared in the Windows recovery environment. Recent (5.13.x and later) kernels seem to have ameliorated the glitch problem, which would cause the display to flash off for a split second from time to time. Very distracting. Small glitches still appear, but very infrequently.
Anyway, with a fresh Void install and EFI fuckery-duckery, it somewhat resembles a working tablet now. I'll have to get a new battery for the pen but that's a minor detail.
Depending on your needs it may be easier to use WSL2 under Windows vs native Linux since you get full device support. Fwiw I used Surface Go <n> in this mode for years as my "light travel coding" platform but have recently upgraded to the arm-based Surface Pro X. Much (much) faster than the Goen, 16G ram and 1Tb SSD available. Also a full sized keyboard - the most annoying thing I found about the Go is not being able to type quickly. The Pro X is physically larger but not much heavier. Since my bags are all large enough for it, the practical payload difference when traveling is minimal.
I entered a project with the understanding that the client's systems work with Linux, but that wasn't the case. WSL saved me there -- for me it's much much better than developing on pure Windows. Still at the bottom of my choices though (Linux > Mac > Win WSL > Win).
I won't bore you with the details, but things are locked down and a dev folder structure is assumed and baked into the build system, both for sources and dependencies.
I am using WSL2 right now and it is not better than 'glass of cold water for someone stuck in hell'. It is better than running Virtualbox, but doesn't hold a candle to real thing.
WSL2 _is_ a VM, just nicely packaged by MS and well integrated into the Windows experience. Less faffing around than with VirtualBox or Hyper-v, integrated with Windows terminal, GUI works out the box if you need it, etc.
> Agree, honestly I don’t see the point of WSL, it is far less hassle to either Remote Desktop into a real Linux machine, or run a VM.
Windows is way more configurable than Linux. To this day, there's nothing like AHK on Linux! Also, Windows offers the best terminal experience.
I've tried foot on Wayland, it's ok, but I want better than ok. I've spend too much time trying to squeeze a good experience out of xterm (https://github.com/csdvrx/cuteXterm)
Surely you need AHK because Windows is less configurable? I want basic window management that's been in KDE for decades, but corporate IT won't let me have AutoHotKey. It's so frustrating having to move windows around all the time rather than them just going where they should. No focus options, no pin-on-top (except in OneNote) ... it's really a massive climb down from Kde/Plasma.
How are you using terminals in Windows? Like you want to SSH from a fresh install, what do I do? (I find Linux superior here, but interested to learn why you're the opposite; maybe I'm doing it wrong)
> Surely you need AHK because Windows is less configurable
No, but because it lets me do remaps, like having Caps be both Control and Esc - and I do the same with Enter being both Control when used with another key, and Enter alone.
My Alt keys are Alt keys when used with another key, or Home/End when used alone.
My physical Esc key is a "jump to terminal" key that takes me from wherever to my fullscreen terminal, then back. For example, from the browser: one press of Esc gets me to the terminal, another press gets me back to the browser - and likewise for every app (not just the browser). That's even better than quake-mode!
I have other sequences to copy/paste images as base64enc and other crazy things that make my life easier: like changing the system and app theme to dark (or back to light), applying a color inversion +- red filter (late at night, no white: it's all just red), an OLED-black filter (to convert bad greys to pure black)
> How are you using terminals in Windows? Like you want to SSH from a fresh install, what do I do?
I'd recommend the latest Windows terminal from the Microsoft store, or mintty from msys2, but that's just for comfort :)
> I find Linux superior here, but interested to learn why you're the opposite; maybe I'm doing it wrong
I like sixels, so I prefer mintty, but even without sixels, I find the Windows experience better. Yes, I want sixels and cute fonts with ligatures in my terminal. But I want proper support of bold, underline, italic. I want multiple tabs. I want to map key actions to everything - like, I want my terminal to change its color profile and font with just 1 key. I want keyboard shortcuts to different profiles with different shells or ssh hosts (with color or other titlebar/tab indicators to know at a glance which is which)
That's very hard on Linux, and sometimes just impossible. That's easy on Windows.
How about XPS 13 2-in-1 or HP spectre 360 ? They can be flipped 180-degrees backwards and have pen support. I recently had a post on reddit asking for the recommendation for a linux 2-in-1 laptop: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/vjc8ta/recom...
I have no idea why you'd willingly use a Surface with Linux (let alone call it a solid Linux tablet) given all these problems, but I have a Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 (available for under $300 as off-lease refurb depending on specs) which fixes almost all of these. The only real issue is the camera which does not work for similar reasons, but I don't find that to be a big loss because I have a phone with a far better camera on me at all times.
I keep checking youtube for reviews of people running linux on surface tablets. The surface-linux project looks like it's done some really great work and surface pro tablets do equally well. The one piece of hardware I wish there were more work on is the Surface X (especially after seeing how successful the Asahi project has been).
>The LTE version of the Surface Go 2 features the same Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 modem as the Surface Pro 2017 with LTE and the original Surface Go with LTE. The following thread is dedicated to enabling the LTE modem of those systems on Linux
Has anyone tried installing Linux on a Chromebook machine? I see that there are a few Chromebook tablet, but I am not sure that the support for this setup would be prevalent now.
Huh, I might go get a surface go* 1 (with 8gb of ram) as my Linux tablet. Trying to find out which android tablet I can install PostMarketOS on is a bit too difficult.
Any issues with the first generation?
Edit: sorry, my bad, I meant surface Go 1, not surface pro 1, which is too old I think.
Do your research, the surfaces tend to have a lot of hardware issues. There are many threads on the support forum about people losing functionality like touch after updates.
I have the surface pro 3 and lucky haven't had major issues, but it has series battery drain while powered off.
I've used one, not great, but why would you spec a Go out, its a cheap coffee shop laptop, and at least warranty is pretty good in Asia. Keyboard broke, okay do you have a CC, yep, well send you a new one, send us the old back, as long as it isn't your damage (i guess water or obvious drop) its job done and no charge to CC. Small delay as part had to come from Hong Kong to Thailand first. Much better than travelling to and speaking to bloody genius if you happen to get an on the spot appointment with one of the clowns.
This was meant in response to the people complaining about build quality
> I've used one, not great, why would you spec a Go out, its a cheap coffee shop laptop
I've done most of my recent coding work on a Go, like, most of my sixel stuff!
The size is just right, so it followed me everywhere, and by spending 5 min on it here and there, I could get a lot of work done!
Also LTE is great: I don't want to waste even a minute looking for Wifi password. That's another productivity multiplier!
After that, I got a X1 nano, it's a great device but a bit too big for me, even it's just about 1 inch larger in both dimensions and about the same thickness.
More recently, I've moved to a X1 Fold, and it's even smaller than a Go when folded so it's now my favorite device! There were a few drivers problems I had to tackle, but now it's rock solid on Windows 11. Also, the OLED screen is ideal to use at night!
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- EFI didn’t work.
- The camera doesn’t work.
- The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful).
- Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover).
- Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly).
This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d want this, and it sounds like the author might be trying to force a tablet to be a laptop when they’d have just been better of with a laptop to begin with.