[HN Gopher] A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4
___________________________________________________________________
A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4
Author : chazeon
Score : 191 points
Date : 2024-07-16 02:03 UTC (20 hours ago)
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| treesknees wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Does WSL handle multi-touch/gestures well?
| treesknees wrote:
| 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
| goosedragons wrote:
| No, it doesn't even handle Windows Snap.
| tstrimple wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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_
| vide...
| commandersaki wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes. Even the Zen4 AMD Ryzen chips do.
| Mashimo wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| On linux, I have to switch my headphone mode when going
| in/out of web calls. It doesn't auto-switch to mono-mode
| when the mic is in use by an application.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Win2K was pretty great, I do like aspects of the Win7+ app-
| bar though.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Largely the same here... I've been split windows+wsl and mac
| the past few years for work, and while I feel WSL makes
| windows usable, I'd rather run Linux directly than either.
| Muscle memory on a Mac is often painful to deal with (us-ansi
| 104 keyboard).
| memsom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/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
|
| 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 wrote:
| I use hibernate on the Acer Swift X 2022 edition and it's
| incredibly nice. Sleep crashes the wireless card though...
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| wouldn't you be able to plug in a USB keyboard?
| tstrimple wrote:
| 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!
| gnarbarian wrote:
| well you may only need the keyboard to install it right?
| there are thousands of USB keyboards everywhere. in the
| poorest most remote villages in Africa they probably have
| so many USB keyboards they make sandals out of them.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Except now you have sandals and perhaps still can't
| install Linux on a Surface.
|
| Seriously, though, it's kind of ridiculous to make a case
| that just because there is so much electronic waste
| already in the world, might as well create some more of
| it. I don't own a USB keyboard and haven't owned one for
| a decade or more. Because I exclusively use Surface. Imo
| Windows tablets are the true cyberdeck of the 21st
| century.
|
| Touchscreen devices should not require plugging in a
| keyboard to enter text or plugging in a mouse to click on
| things. The whole point of these devices is that they can
| work on their own, without peripherals. If you need to
| plug in to use them, then you might as well have just
| bought a laptop in the first place.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| your expectations are unreasonable.
|
| I think that if you are expecting Linux to work perfectly
| when there is no keyboard on a notoriously Linux hostile
| proprietary device maybe you should step up and write the
| driver for it yourself.
|
| nobody is getting paid to specifically maintain the weird
| workarounds required to support the surface and your
| problem can be avoided by spending a nickel at the
| salvation army.
|
| it might even work without one! I know the latest Ubuntu
| detects a touchscreen on my Thinkpad and provides an
| onscreen keyboard by default.
|
| edit:
|
| I sincerely believe that the best way forward is for
| people who use Linux to vote with their wallet and buy
| products from the companies who are not actively hostile
| to it.
|
| I apply this logic to nearly ever device I buy and it
| results in less waste because I buy stuff I can actually
| fix! see this:
|
| https://github.com/ubernaut/maintainable-device-scorecard
| e12e wrote:
| > "if you don't have a USB keyboard, don't bother"
|
| I think you should be able to hardware reset without a
| keyboard - but in my experience - you really want console
| access when messing with bootloaders and alternative os'.
| Even if it is just to get to a point where on-
| screen/Bluetooth keyboard works... Often an USB Ethernet
| dongle can be useful as well (avoiding the catch-22 of
| needing network access to download wifi driver).
| jraph wrote:
| > The main annoyance I face is probably the fact that touch in
| Firefox occasionally breaks.
|
| I have this on the two touchscreen laptops I use (HP and
| Lenovo). So I guess that's not hardware related.
| specproc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| old? 6.9.x as of today https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-
| surface/releases
| denysvitali wrote:
| 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...
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| i stand corrected. that was a huge progress from a couple
| years I last checked.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Packagekit is not essential for Fedora. I always disable it (I
| think it uses systemd to run) and then using ordinary dnf to
| manage packets.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tjoff wrote:
| This is OS-agnostic. I love the old fact that you should have
| twice the amount of swap as your RAM size. I could rant but,
| no. Just don't.
|
| Today, don't buy a computer (regardless of size) with less
| than 32 GB of ram. Yes, this applies to fruity products as
| well. Part from making it a more enjoyable experience it will
| also extend the usable life of the computer immensely.
|
| (The weird crap about apple computers not needing as much RAM
| comes from iOS vs. android and is for different reasons, does
| not apply to real computers)
| hhh wrote:
| I don't understand the sentiment. People should analyze
| what they actually use and what the need is. Sure, I bought
| a 64gb ram macbook because I like toys and don't want to
| think about it, but for 80% of my workload 8gb is fine, and
| for my partner it's fine for 100%.
| tjoff wrote:
| 8 GB can, even in this electron world, barely work. But
| it won't tomorrow. Buying something with 8 GB today is
| wasting an otherwise perfectly good computer.
|
| And when your partner gets a new computer, for whatever
| reason, the old one can easily live on for many many
| years. But it's utility will be limited if it only has 8
| GB of ram.
|
| The product in the article is only 8 years old but
| already stretching its usefulness for no good reason.
| sampo wrote:
| > I love the old fact that you should have twice the amount
| of swap as your RAM size.
|
| With a 32GB memory, 256GB ssd-disk laptop, it would be
| really weird to set up 64GB of the disk for swap.
| tjoff wrote:
| Maybe I was unclear, I despise that rule.
|
| (also, a computer with 32 GB and 256 GB disk is a very
| weird combination not quite fitting a typical general
| purpose computer)
| tetha wrote:
| I have similar experiences. I've been digging into this more
| over the years and my two conclusions are: (a) Linux memory
| management is overall rather complex and contains many rather
| subtle decisions that speed up systems. (b) Most
| recommendations you find about it are old, rubbish, or not
| nuanced enough.
|
| Like one thing I learned some time ago: swap-out in itself is
| not a bad thing. swap-out on it's own means the kernel is
| pushing memory pages it currently doesn't need to disk. It
| does this to prepare for a low-memory situation so if push
| comes to shove and it has to move pages to disk, some pages
| are already written to disk. And if the page is dirtied later
| on before needing to swap it back in, alright, we wasted some
| iops. Oh no. This occurs quite a bit for example for long-
| running processes with rarely used code paths, or with
| processes that do something once a day or so.
|
| swap-in on the other hand is nasty for the latency of
| processes. Which, again, may or may not be something to care
| about. If a once-a-day monitoring script starts a few
| milliseconds slower because data has to be swapped in... so
| what?
|
| It just becomes an issue if the system starts trashing and
| rapidly cycling pages in and out of swap. But in such a
| situation, the system would start randomly killing services
| without swap, which is also not entirely conductive to a
| properly working system. Especially because it'll start
| killing stuff using a lot of memory... which, on a server,
| tends to be the thing you want running.
| jorvi wrote:
| It is not just advice.
|
| Default configs of most distros are set up for server-style
| work, even on workstation distros. So they'll have CPU and
| IO schedulers optimized for throughput instead of latency,
| meaning a laggy desktop under load. The whole virtual
| memory system still runs things like it is on spinning rust
| (multiple page files in cache, low swappiness, etc).
|
| The only distro without this problem is Asahi. It's bespoke
| for MacBooks, so it's been optimized all the way down to
| the internal speakers(!).
| oblio wrote:
| > Default configs of most distros are set up for server-
| style work, even on workstation distros. So they'll have
| CPU and IO schedulers optimized for throughput instead of
| latency, meaning a laggy desktop under load. The whole
| virtual memory system still runs things like it is on
| spinning rust (multiple page files in cache, low
| swappiness, etc).
|
| LOL. A Ken Colivas problem, circa 2008, still there :-)))
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I have had systems completely die from hitting swap a few
| years ago. This is not a 2000s problem.
| a2tech wrote:
| I've learned to disable swap on my scientific computing
| machines where we're working on giant datasets. It's better
| for the machine to crash when it exhausts its RAM than go
| to swap.
|
| In my experience a machine is never going to recover when a
| workload pushes it into swapping because something has gone
| awry and that situation is not going to fix itself.
| oblio wrote:
| There are many reasons this situation could happen
| outside of your context and swapping on SSDs is
| comparatively harmless compared to the old days of HDDs.
| Random example: swapping due to VM. You just stop VMs.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Yeah on my current nvme linux systems, swap is just "the
| phase where the ongoing leak makes the system kind of
| sluggish, shortly before the oom killer goes to work". On
| 32GB, I ~never hit swap "legitimately".
|
| The most useful thing honestly has been a memory usage
| applet in the task bar. Memory leaks usually have a very
| clean and visible signature that provides a few seconds
| of warning to hit alt-tab-tab-ctrl-c.
| gmokki wrote:
| Was you kernel new enough to have MGLRU (kernel 6.1+).
|
| After that improvement one can be swapping constantly and
| the machine is still responsive.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| >At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the
| system unusably unresponsive
|
| Interestingly that was my experience on steam deck with its
| default 1gb swap. But after enabling both zram and larger
| ordinary swap (now also default setting for upcoming release)
| it became much more stable and responsive.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Swapping in any form always sucks, period. The machine starts
| behaving strangely and does not tell you why because it's
| trying it's hardest to hide the fact that it ran out of
| resources.
|
| Experience has shown me over and over that you just want to
| feel the limits of the machine hard and fast so you can
| change what you're asking of it rather than thinking that
| there is some perf issue or weird bug.
|
| It's the idea that swap is somehow useful that's old. It's
| not, it never worked right for interactive systems. It's a
| mainframe thing that needs to die.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| But where else are you going to put your anonymous pages
| when you don't want them for a while?
|
| Lots of the stuff you're using is backed by disk anyway --
| and will be removed from RAM when there's any memory
| pressure, whether or not you have any swap. If you've got
| swap then the system can put anonymous pages in it,
| otherwise it'll need to evict named files more frequently.
|
| Unless you have enough RAM that you're literally never
| evicting anything from your page cache, in which case swap
| still doesn't hurt you.
|
| I'll absolutely agree that swapping out part of the working
| set is unwanted, but most swapping is benign and genuinely
| helps performance by allowing the system to retain more
| useful data in RAM. You don't want to get into a state
| where you're paging _code_ in and out of RAM because there
| 's nowhere to put data that's not being used.
| speed_spread wrote:
| The whole concept of "virtual memory" has tainted systems
| design for decades. Treating RAM as a cache relies on the
| OS making guesses about what will be needed and what can
| be passivated without it actually knowing the application
| requirements. Except that compared to CPU level caching,
| the cost of page faults is big enough that performance
| degradation is not linear and breaks the user experience.
| The idea that a 4GB machine can do the same with as an
| 8GB one albeit slower is just not true. If you hit the
| swap, you feel it bad. I'll concede that Zram can work
| because the degradation is softer. But anything hitting
| the IO should be explicitly controlled by the app.
|
| Other random semi-related thoughts:
|
| - Rust having to define a new stdlib to be used in Linux
| kernel because of explicit allocation failure
| requirements. Why wasn't this possibility factored in
| from the beginning?
|
| - Most software nowadays just abstracts memory costs,
| partly explaining why a word processor that used to work
| fine with 64mb of RAM now takes a gig to get anything
| done.
|
| - Embedded development experience should be a requirement
| for any serious software engineer.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > Rust having to define a new stdlib to be used in Linux
| kernel because of explicit allocation failure
| requirements.
|
| This is phrased in a way that's a bit more extreme than
| in reality. Some new features are in the process of being
| added.
|
| > Why wasn't this possibility factored in from the
| beginning?
|
| So, there's a few ways to talk about this. The first
| is... it was! Rust has three major layers to its standard
| library: core, alloc, and std. core, the lowest level, is
| a freestanding library. Alloc introduces memory
| allocations, and std introduces stuff that builds on top
| of OS functionality, like filesystems. What's going on
| here is the kernel wanting to use the alloc layer in the
| kernel itself. So it's naturally a bit higher level, and
| so needs some more work to fit in. Just normal software
| development stuff.
|
| Why didn't alloc have fallible APIs? Because of Linux,
| ironically. The usual setup there means you won't ever
| observe an allocation failure. So there hasn't been a lot
| of pressure to add those APIs, as they're less useful
| then you might imagine at first. And it also goes the
| other way; a lot of embedded systems do not allocate
| dynamically at all, so for stuff smaller or lower level
| than Linux, there hasn't been any pressure there either.
|
| Also, I use the word "pressure" on purpose: like any open
| source project, work gets done when someone that needs a
| feature drives that feature forward. These things _have_
| been considered, for essentially forever, it's just that
| finishing the work was never prioritized by anyone,
| because there's an infinite amount of work to do and a
| finite number of people doing it. The Rust for Linux
| folks are now those people coming along and driving that
| upstream work. Which benefits all who come later.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Oh hello, thanks for the clarification! Having enjoyed
| writing some embedded Rust, I'm familiar with the
| core/alloc/std split. IIUC you're saying that the user-
| space Linux malloc API itself does not provide a reliable
| way for the application to think about hard memory
| limits? Which would fuel my pet theory about "infinite
| virtual memory" being a significant factor in the ever
| growing software bloat.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > I'm familiar with the core/alloc/std split.
|
| Ah, okay. So yeah, it's not a new standard library, it's
| "things like Vec are adding .push_within_capacity()
| that's like push except it returns a Result and errors
| instead of reallocating" more than "bespoke standard
| library."
|
| > IIUC you're saying that the user-space Linux malloc API
| itself does not provide a reliable way for the
| application to think about hard memory limits?
|
| It's not the user-space malloc API, it's lower than that.
| See " /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory" in
| https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc_sys_vm.5.html
|
| The default is "heuristic overcommit." This page does a
| better job of explaining what that means:
| https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/overcommit-
| accou...
|
| So, unless you've specifically configured this to 2,
| there are many circumstances where you simply will not
| get an error from the kernel, even if you've requested
| more memory than available.
|
| What happens in this case is that your program will
| continue to run. At some point, it will access the bad
| allocation. The kernel will notice that there's not
| actually enough memory, and the "oom killer" will decide
| to kill a process to make space. It might be your
| process! It also might not be. Just depends. But this
| happens later, and asynchronously from your program. You
| cannot handle this error from inside your program.
|
| So even if these APIs existed, they wouldn't change the
| behavior: they would faithfully report what the kernel
| reported to them: that the allocation succeeded.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Most of the time, you _want_ to use RAM as a cache for
| the disk. I was trying to make the argument that
| sometimes that disk cache is more valuable than an under-
| used anonymous mapping.
|
| Steve has responded to your comment about Rust; to your
| other comments:
|
| Modern applications do a _lot_ more than old ones. Even
| if you only use 20% of the features, you probably use a
| different 20% from any arbitrary other person. You also
| probably benefit from the OS being able to map everything
| into virtual memory but only actually load the bits you
| use :).
|
| And I strongly disagree with your stance on being
| "serious". I'm sure you don't mean to gate-keep, but we
| need to teach people where they are rather than giving
| them hoops to jump through.
|
| In my experience, some of the best software engineers
| have very little development background. And I say that
| as someone who implemented 64-bit integer support for the
| compiler and RTL for a DSP part back in the day. It's
| useful to have people _around_ with a variety of
| backgrounds, it 's not necessary for everyone to share
| any particular experience.
| izacus wrote:
| Swapping to zram is just fine and it will improve
| experience on many machines.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. The memory-to-memory + modern CPU power
| makes it transparent or at least gives it a soft roll-off
| that IO based swap never achieves. But it's still a hack
| which too often is used by manufacturers to cheapen on
| RAM in machines.
|
| As the gas-powered engine people will say: "there's no
| replacement for displacement" (I wont push the analogy
| comparing zram to turbocharging but, you know, they both
| deal with "compression"...)
| cameronh90 wrote:
| That's because when it comes to memory management on a Linux
| workstation, it is an unsolved problem. I've tried every
| piece of advice, distro and tool, and spent hundreds of hours
| trying to tune it over the years, and haven't been able to
| find a configuration that works as reliably as Windows or
| MacOS do out of the box.
|
| Linux memory management works well for servers where you can
| predict workloads, set resource limits, spec the right amount
| of memory, and, in most cases, don't care that much if an
| individual server crashes.
|
| For workstations, it either kicks in too early (and kills
| your IDE to punish you for opening too many tabs in Chrome)
| or it doesn't kick in at all, even when the system has become
| entirely unresponsive and you have to either mash magic sysrq
| or reboot.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > At that time suddenly dealing with memory swap made the
| system unusably unresponsive (I mean unusable, not just
| frustrating or irritating).
|
| I had a machine freeze _this month_ because it was trying to
| zram swap, and have hit shades of the problem over the last
| few years on multiple machines running multiple distros.
| Sometimes running earlyoom helps, but at that point what 's
| the point of swap? So no, this isn't out of date.
| webdevver wrote:
| compiling clang on ubuntu 20.04, the link step used up all my
| ram and started swapping on the nvme.
|
| htop froze, so i hit ctrl-c, but nothing happened. no mouse
| movement, no ssh'ing in, just totally hard-locked. i ended up
| having to physically powercycle the machine.
|
| after that i turned off swap so that it killed the process
| rather than the machine (and remembered to pass
| -DLLVM_PARALLEL_LINK_JOBS=1)
| jcelerier wrote:
| Use easyoom or systemd-oomd
| chronogram wrote:
| On my SBCs and VPSs I use a cache-heavy zram setup with LZ4 and
| `vm.page-cluster=0` being the most important changes to the
| default, and cache pressure and swappiness both to 200 off the
| top of my head, and things like only doing foreground IO when
| the background write buffer is full. This type of swapping is
| fast, and is easy on the CPU, and gives a lot of extra disk
| cache on this type of low performing storage. I disable disk
| schedulers because they haven't been necessary and would just
| add overhead.
|
| This means there's a lot of available RAM capacity, that
| there's a hefty read cache to avoid the SD card, that when
| there are disk writes on writable storage it can still read
| from it, and with the lack of clustering and the speed of
| decompression there's no swapping lag whenever a page needs to
| be swapped back. This swap early, swap often is the complete
| opposite of the OOM-prevention swapping you used to use on
| disks, which was slow and interrupted IO whereas LZ4 in RAM is
| fast and doesn't interrupt IO.
|
| I have been using this setup since 2022 and have not had any
| issues but I don't compile anything on those setups, though I
| see no reason why it would not be safer than compiling without
| zram at all.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| could you please write a ELI5 guide that I could follow on my
| tiny VPS? It's debian-based. Thanks!
| chronogram wrote:
| Of course! Just touching these files should be everything
| you need: /etc/sysctl.d/99-240716-vm.conf
| vm.dirty_background_ratio = 1 vm.dirty_ratio = 100
| vm.page-cluster = 0 vm.swappiness = 200
| vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 1
|
| dirty_background_ratio = starts background writing when
| it's at least 1% of available mem; dirty_ratio = starts
| force writing when all avail (not total) ram is full; page-
| cluster = swap in only what's needed; swappiness = lower
| means swapping is expensive higher signals swapping is
| cheap; vfs_cache_pressure = lower keeps more dentries and
| inodes in memory.
| /etc/udev/rules.d/99-240716-ioschedulers.rules
| ACTION=="add|change",
| KERNEL=="mmcblk[0-9]*|nvme[0-9]*|sd[a-z]*",
| ATTR{queue/scheduler}="none"
|
| Removes schedulers from typical local writeable storage.
| /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf [zram0] zram-
| size = ram compression-algorithm = lz4
|
| Might have to install systemd-zram-generator if it doesn't
| already exist.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Personally, for a long time I disabled swap and made _sure_
| that I had an OOM killer running.
|
| This was always in a setup where I'd have ample RAM for my
| everyday tasks, and was doing numerics. Running OOM would
| invariably mean two things:
|
| 1. I had a bug in my scripts, which typically meant I'd
| accidentally materialized a huge sparse matrix or some such,
| and thus
|
| 2. The system wouldn't go "just a little" OOM but rather
| consume memory an order of magnitude over the actual system's
| capacity. And it would _not_ recover.
|
| In that scenario, the system would typically start swath-
| thrashing so hard that I'd just cold reboot. An OOM daemon
| fixed that and let me iron out my bugs.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Don't know if it's "legitimate", but I've got 64GB of RAM.
|
| Allocating 16/32/64/128GB of NVME storage to swap is mostly
| just a waste of disk space for me. When I had swap enabled, it
| was constantly showing 0 used. (Not "pretty much none",
| literally "0.0".)
|
| Further, if I'm trying to use more than 64GB of RAM... I'm fine
| with things getting OOM killed. I don't know that I've ever had
| anything OOM-killed when something wasn't clearly misbehaving.
| (I count Chrome eating 50GB of RAM because I haven't closed any
| tabs all week as me clearly misbehaving for the purposes of
| this discussion.)
|
| And as far as zram... I guess same sorta arguments. I'm not
| running out of RAM, so why use up CPU cycles (and presumably
| battery power)? why use up brain cycles setting that up?
|
| Until I've maxed out my system's RAM, I'd rather just throw
| more RAM at it.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| I have access to a build machine with 256GB of RAM and it
| suffers from OOM killing during certain builds unless I
| allocate like 2GB of swap
| nucleardog wrote:
| Yeah I'm not trying to say "64GB is enough for anyone!" so
| much as "I have way more RAM than I realistically need for
| my workloads." I've got all the things I need open right
| now and `free` shows I've got 40GB of RAM available.
|
| If your workloads involve using more RAM than you have you
| can... add more RAM, use swap/zram/etc, or just not do that
| thing.
|
| Absolutely makes sense to me to throw some swap into the
| mix. I'd probably do the same if it were an infrequent use
| case (otherwise preferring to just add more RAM).
|
| But also absolutely makes sense to me to not have any swap
| enabled on this machine right now.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Similar opinion here on my destop. I was running 128gb, only
| exceeded 64gb a handful of times. That said, my RAM started
| causing lots of issues (thought my ssd was going bad). I only
| bought 64gb to replace it with as I felt the extra cost
| wasn't worth it to maintain, also likely to upgrade early-mid
| next year.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Actually, zram is great! When an "excessive swap event"
| happens with zram, the system stays somewhat responsive,
| enough to let you kill the offender even from a graphical
| session. Without zram, I hope you were going for lunch break
| anyway...
|
| zram does basically nothing while your working set fits into
| memory, no performance penalty.
| burnte wrote:
| > Disables Swap and Zram, gets OOM killed, surprised pikachu
| face
|
| On a machine with FOUR GIGABYTES OF RAM at that.
| Havoc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The Surface Pro X (with Linux) runs pretty well. When I was
| running Windows on that, it worked nicely too
| maxboone wrote:
| 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#issuecommen
| t-2... [2] https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-
| pro-x/issues/1#issu...
| denysvitali wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Imagine an iPad that automatically switches to MacOSX if
| plugged into an external monitor, keyboard/mouse.
|
| It'd be glorious, not that I'd ever happen - for multiple
| reasons. One of which being that ipadOS is essentially iOS,
| so no overlap with MacOS
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The real big roadblock is Apple, but if the DMA forces them
| to let third party software, we could get a fully exposed
| subsystem opening the door to what users really ask for.
|
| Right now the joke is Windows XP emulation making it what
| it always needed to be, getting containerised/emulated Mac
| apps with decent Perfs from low level access would be a
| huge win. We could be close to your ideal, with the iPad
| still running, and a Mac instance pinned to the external
| screen.
| weberer wrote:
| >not that I'd ever happen
|
| In my eyes, Apple's transition to ARM on Macbooks looks
| like a stepping stone on that path. I wouldn't be surprised
| if they announced something like that for the iPad Pro
| eventually.
| jahnu wrote:
| As a first step wouldn't it be amazing to have multiple
| user accounts on an iPad that doesn't require MDM.
|
| But such technological wonders are but a fantasy.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| So iDEX? There have been multiple attempts at that from
| motorola, the nokia n900, sailfish, ubuntu touch, linux on
| DEX, DEX, maruOS, windows whatever, citrix,...
|
| Sounds nice in theory but people rarely actually use it.
| jclardy wrote:
| This is my ideal setup. And I'd have it switch to macOS
| mode just with keyboard/mouse, so inside the magic keyboard
| it is just the most slick 11" macbook air ever built. Pop
| it out and you are dropped back into iOS.
|
| I'd easily pay $3k for a top end version of such a device.
| I think this is Apple's main holdup - if the iPad can run
| macOS in this dual mode setup, the MacBook Air becomes
| pretty boring and a pretty bad deal. And they can no longer
| sell people two devices that accomplish the same task, only
| differentiated by one having a touchscreen.
| justinclift wrote:
| > ... with slow Windows on it.
|
| Was yours a 4GB ram model like the article author's?
| jbstack wrote:
| IMO the advantage of the Surface is that it's one of the only
| tablets out there which is (a) reasonably priced for what you
| get, (b) has a x64 processor, and (c) can have Linux installed
| on it without too much difficulty. So if you want a Linux
| tablet, the Surface may end up being one of your only viable
| options.
| weberer wrote:
| The Steam Deck is also a great option nowadays. Its a lot
| bulkier than a tablet, but I personally prefer it having a
| controller attached. Its biggest advantage is that it comes
| with Linux out of the box, so you don't have to go through
| the headache of installing an OS yourself and messing around
| with drivers.
| edude03 wrote:
| Not trying to be snarky, but I'd like to understand who you
| think the steam deck would appeal to? The original article,
| and the comment you're replying to seem to want pen input
| to do work/draw art, and like the tablet form factor
| (presumably for the large display), neither of which the
| steam deck provides.
|
| With "only" 16gb of ram, a relatively meagre 8 core 6800
| series APU, and small screen it wouldn't make sense for
| most software developer workloads, and because of the
| attached controller(s) it's not super portable so not great
| for content consumption.
|
| Other than gamers, who likely don't even care that the
| steam deck runs linux (and in fact are hindered by it in
| some ways) is there a group you can imagine that would
| appreciate preinstalled linux so much that the steam deck
| makes sense over the surface pro or even a framework?
| INTPenis wrote:
| How about the new Lenovo Tab? It's very reasonably priced,
| but I have no experience with it.
|
| All I can see right now is that it has a battery bump that
| people might object to.
|
| My goals with any device is to be as slim and as vanilla
| Android as possible, which means Samsung can go to hell.
|
| A friend said he liked the OnePlus tablet.
| jbstack wrote:
| Not sure which Lenovo Tab you mean specifically, but I just
| had a glance at a few now and none of them were x64. If
| we're talking about ARM tablets, there are an abundance of
| those. It's Linux-capable x64 tablets which are rarer.
| inhumantsar wrote:
| I use a surface pro 9 for development, diagramming, note
| taking, media, light fusion 360 (on the iGPU), and gaming (with
| an egpu). it's a great machine with a few minor flaws,
| primarily battery life and cooling performance. at a go
| anywhere device, it's hard to beat. the price is obscene
| though, especially considering it's not OLED.
|
| I'm keen to try the arm version though, and the Minisforum V3
| is interesting tho not much of an upgrade
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| My wife and I have been very happy with our Surface Pro 8 16Gb
| we bought last year running Windows 11 Pro. Mostly we use it
| with the keyboard attached.
|
| My wife needed a personal device because her company issued
| laptop was so locked down that she couldn't do a lot of basic
| personal admin stuff on it (for example online ordering of
| groceries).
|
| We considered an iPad, but in the end chose the Surface Pro
| because it allowed multiple user profiles. Windows Hello works
| super well that for either of us as we pick it up and look at
| it it's pretty much instantly on the correct profile and thanks
| to cloud sync with OneDrive and Microsoft Edge, I'm at home on
| either my own machine or the Surface.
|
| Only thing to mention is that the out of the box experience
| wasn't as good as I would have liked, especially compared to my
| experience with iPhones (despite liking iOS over Android, I
| have no love for macOS).
|
| Firstly, it wasn't running the latest feature update of Windows
| 11 and trying certain apps (like Instagram) off the Microsoft
| Store failed to install with a largely undescriptive error.
| Eventually I realized it wasn't running the very latest Windows
| 11 feature update which resolved the issue once installed.
|
| The other problem was that my user profile was laggy, but not
| my wife's. For example the Start Menu was very slow to come up.
| After a few days of this and no luck Googling the issue, I just
| formatted and re-installed Windows using Microsoft's official
| ISO download image. I normally do this with any new Windows PC
| I get, but assumed it wouldn't be essential for full on
| Microsoft hardware, but even though there was no obviously
| extra bundled rubbish software, something was clearly not 100%.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I liked the first two iterations of the Surface Pro line, but
| it dropped off the radar for me when they went to NTrig
| digitizers.
|
| The Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was about the perfect computer for
| my needs:
|
| - decent-size high-resolution screen
|
| - small enough to fit in a bag for when traveling
|
| - Wacom EMR stylus --- I find this essential for drawing,
| sketching, annotating, and when I'm not inclined to connect a
| keyboard, writing
|
| Performance was quite good, but then Fall Creators Update
| crippled the stylus down to an 11th touch input which scrolled
| in web browsers and made selecting text quite awkward, as well
| as making using older applications quite difficult. I rolled
| back to 1703 twice and stayed there until circumstances forced
| a replacement --- the best option I could find was a Samsung
| Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- I have to keep the Settings app open
| so I can toggle the stylus between acting/not acting like a
| mouse.
|
| It kills me that we had such great innovation in the tablet
| space once-upon-a-time (the ThinkPad was so-named because it
| was originally planned as a stylus computer) and my NCR-3125
| (since donated to the Smithsonian) running PenPoint was one of
| my most-favourite computers and things seemed so promising w/
| Windows 8... at least it's easy to write into text fields
| again.
|
| Hopefully the Lenovo Yogabook 9i will be popular enough that
| someone will make a dual-screen device using Wacom EMR.
| forgotacc240419 wrote:
| I'm a big fan of used Surface Go models. They tend to be for
| corporate use which seems to have a knock on effect of them
| being sold off very cheaply when people want rid and with
| seemingly minimal use. For use when traveling they're pretty
| exceptional, I even managed to get away doing a few days dev
| work on one while railing around Japan
|
| Have gotten multiple people a Surface Go 1 with 8GB ram and the
| keyboard and have never paid more than PS80. Bizarre that they
| even made a 4GB model, let alone that they kept it until the
| second most recent version
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I think Surface Pros are very use-case dependent. It's perfect
| for mine, to the point I'm astounded there is no real
| competitor.
|
| Use case: While traveling or at coffee shops, be able to switch
| between full laptop mode (as long as you have a table; doesn't
| work on your lap), and use with the pen for taking notes,
| drawing things etc. While not as critical as pen use, being
| able to take the keyboard off quickly when reading or watching
| videos saves space, and lets me get the screen closer.
| jclardy wrote:
| I just bought a Surface Pro 11 and love it. I've jumped from
| mac into the surface line every few years and I totally agree
| with you - the fans on the old models were spinning just by
| having a few chrome tabs opened.
|
| But...if you can live with Windows on Arm (Which has improved
| greatly in the past year) the SP11 has been great. Battery life
| is incredible.
|
| For me I was never looking to fully replace my actual laptop,
| but more to replace my iPad with something that is actually
| capable of doing any sort of development work if needed. The
| iPad is a much better tablet, hands down, but even just
| updating a static website on an iPad is an absolute chore and
| requires multiple apps to function.
| mg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yay, that sounds promising. Which protector do you use?
| artisanspam wrote:
| 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
| throw0982 wrote:
| Minisforum has Ryzen based tablet, that has matte screen.
|
| 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/
| pizza234 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 ) 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?? :)
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Agreed, people can sometimes get too much into minor
| things like laptop brands.
|
| Yes, I am a mathematician and have a few colleagues who
| are happily using their surfaces for notes and online
| teaching. I have seen some "rivalry" with people using
| iPads instead, but luckily no hate thus far.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Right? Exactly! It's a personal thing, I mean using it is
| not minor for me, it's super useful, but I don't see the
| point in challenging others about it. Just like different
| strokes for different folks, like diffeomorphisms haha :)
| Did that math joke work? I don't know as i'm not a
| mathematician. Lucky you haven't seen the hate, it's
| definitely out there. The refined world of academia must
| be too pleasant for it haha :)
|
| I also really like how you can just plug whatever
| keyboard in to it and use a desktop OS on tablet form
| factor, and it just works.
|
| You ever post your work on here?
| tiahura wrote:
| I've been all in on surface since the sp3. They had me at
| 3:2.
| deng wrote:
| 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
|
| So in the end, while it's working, there's still a lot of janky
| behavior, which makes the experience just frustrating.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| I've seriously been considering moving all my development to
| Linux. Microsoft is giving me the creeps lately.
| chrsw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's because the XPS were built to run ubuntu. You can even
| buy one with it pre-installed.
| chrsw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sorry, I should have specified Developer Edition in my
| first post.
| trelane wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The biggest problem with System76 laptops: their screens.
|
| $1400 for a laptop with 1920x1080 at 60hz in 2024 is a
| joke. $200 more gets you a 3024x1964 @ 120hz, with an M3
| processor and the ability to get warranty service walk-in
| anywhere around the world.
| trelane wrote:
| I agree that a better screen would be great, and walk-in
| service anywhere in the world would be fantastic.
|
| But I want a _Linux_ laptop, not Windows or OSX. I also
| want a computer that obeys _me_ , not some megacorp (not
| unrelated to the previous point.) I also want to not
| fight it all the time.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I bought Dell 3410 once which was shipped with Ubuntu. I
| closely inspected that Ubuntu, compared it with vanilla
| Ubuntu install. All I've found are branding packages
| (desktop pictures, etc) and one package which blacklisted
| some module. No secret drivers, no secret kernels.
|
| Can't comment about XPS, but I feel that it'll be the
| same.
| freeqaz wrote:
| Dell does the work to upstream the hardware support into
| the kernel. It's pretty rad. I miss my old XPS 13!
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I've had a Dell XPS 13 9343 (2017 model, non-Developer
| edition) running Fedora for years without problems. I
| suppose you might consider it cheating because I replaced
| the original Broadcom WiFi card with an Intel WiFi card,
| as that driver was a bit flaky in the early days (whereas
| the Intel driver has kernel support).
|
| Other than the pitiful 4 hour battery life, the laptop
| still runs fine, and mostly does what I need it to do for
| a permanently-docked daily driver.
| haspok wrote:
| Hey there! I no longer use my 9343, but I remember I was
| not able to run Fedora without breaking the sound support
| for it (Ubuntu had some kernel option set on startup that
| put the sound card to some legacy mode, instead of the
| I2C that Windows used). And I never managed to setup palm
| rejection, it was a constant pain whenever I had to use
| the (otherwise excellent) trackpad.
|
| (The external "carbon-like" skin texture just
| disintegrated on it after a few years, and the hinges got
| loose, but otherwise it is tip-top, still functional!)
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| If memory serves, the audio issue you're describing was
| fixed by a BIOS update:
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dell_XPS_13_(9343)
| gosub100 wrote:
| I ordered one with Ubuntu pre installed and it worked well,
| however there was an annoying issue where the mouse would
| freeze for a few seconds every couple minutes. I eventually
| swapped it with Garuda Linux and got a much faster UX, but
| suspend/sleep doesn't fully work. Doesn't bother me.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I have Thinkpad which is supposedly built to run ubuntu as
| well and even certified for RHEL and Ubuntu. It doesn't work
| so good, though. It works, but there are rough edges around
| sleeping, external displays, power management.
|
| I feel that it has nothing to do with manufacturer, though,
| just not good enough Linux support for laptops.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I feel that it has nothing to do with manufacturer,
| though, just not good enough Linux support for laptops.
|
| On the contrary, it's down to the model. As I type this on
| a fully-functional Thinkpad, I can assure you Linux is fine
| on laptops.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > It works, but there are rough edges around sleeping,
| external displays, power management.
|
| Windows has these rough edges, too, though. It's actually
| pretty shocking that here in 2024, PC manufacturers and OS
| vendors are _still_ struggling with basics like sleep
| /wakeup. Last job I had with Windows laptops, everyone
| would walk around the office from meeting to meeting with
| their laptops propped open because nobody could be sure
| that their OS would actually wake up when they opened the
| lid. And when you closed it and went home for the day,
| would standby actually work or would it be on fire and out
| of battery the next morning? Somehow, only Apple has seemed
| to be able to solve this Herculean problem.
| szundi wrote:
| If you have an issue with windows, it's abnormal - while
| with linux is pretty expected on several fronts
| Willish42 wrote:
| > Somehow, only Apple has seemed to be able to solve this
| Herculean problem.
|
| Bit of a stab in the dark here but I would assume ARM has
| at least something to do with this? Tablets, phones, etc.
| get standby a lot better than x86 systems seem to. My
| pre-M1 Macbook Pro does not handle standby well but my
| partner's M2 Macbook Air lasts for forever and handles
| sleep etc. well. The lower power consumption in "standby
| mode" on ARM seems like at least part of the picture for
| why Apple gets this so much better. I bet it's part of
| why Windows is trying to release their ARM variant and
| have been working on it for 10+ years
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > My pre-M1 Macbook Pro does not handle standby well but
| my partner's M2 Macbook Air lasts for forever and handles
| sleep etc. well.
|
| Intel mac on sonoma?
| m_st wrote:
| Woah! Standby is working fine too?
|
| I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these
| machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't
| work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the
| battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell. This is
| a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening.
| Which is just nonsense. I'm a Mac user at home and just never
| shut these laptops down ever.
| chrsw wrote:
| Yes, standby is working fine. I don't have the machine in
| front of me now but I don't remember fiddling with any of the
| power settings either. It was all working after the install.
| I definitely run software update so that might explain why
| it's working so smooth too.
|
| Meanwhile, my other machine from work is a Precision
| workstation running Windows 10 and it gives me all kinds of
| power issues, more invasive updates, random restarts, random
| high fan RPMs, etc. Dell has already serviced the machine,
| twice. What a mess.
| trelane wrote:
| Standby doesn't work on _Windows?_
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Certainly doesn't appear to on my thinkpad
| trelane wrote:
| _Ouch._
|
| Maybe 2025 will finally be the year of Windows on the
| desktop!
| rqtwteye wrote:
| The year of windows on the desktop was around 2004. Since
| then Microsoft has diligently worked to make things
| worse.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Standby on windows just appears to be a cue for the OS that
| the user isn't actively using the machine so it should use
| the time to install updates and restart itself 5 times.
| evilduck wrote:
| Almost never in my experience.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| In the last few years; Microsoft started pushing this
| "Modern standby"[1] thing, which lets the CPU run while
| suspended or something. IIRC it is so a PC can run
| background services, wifi and what not, like tablets + cell
| phones.
|
| It is causing so many issues, because the common use case
| for a laptop is to close the lid, and then stuff it into a
| padded bag. If anything starts up the laptop for whatever
| reason, all that heat is trapped in there, cooking the
| device. Some system BIOS are removing the option to even
| disable modern standby mode (vs traditional standby where
| just the memory was energized)
|
| 1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| hardware/design/de...
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > Some system BIOS are removing the option to even
| disable modern standby mode
|
| The _CPU manufacturers_ have stopped providing support
| for developing firmware with an S3 ("traditional
| standby") function for recent CPU generations, except for
| a couple of laptop manufacturers receiving special
| treatment.
| criddell wrote:
| This should work much better than it does. Microsoft is
| right - Windows machines should be able to run background
| services as well as a tablet or phone.
|
| Their Modern Standby requirements should have included a
| clause saying that the machines efficiency core (which I
| assume is what would be running in standby) should not be
| able to raise the temperature enough to require a fan.
| haspok wrote:
| No, Microsoft did not ask the users if they wanted this
| or not (or made this behaviour configurable). Just as
| they did not ask users if they wanted to see ads in their
| Start menu...
| criddell wrote:
| You only want an option because Microsoft and their
| hardware partners did a poor job with this.
|
| Pretty much nobody asks for the same feature to be
| configurable on their iPad because it works well.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| It works well on mobile devices because from the get-go,
| it is established that the operating system can
| aggressively suspend or halt processes. Laptops + PC's,
| on the other hand, have 40+ years of legacy that assume
| that the OS won't kill a process unless the user insists,
| or a resource disaster is imminent. They can deal with a
| pause, provided the processes external view of the state
| of the CPU + memory are not drastically changed.
|
| Windows finally had suspend working reliably, where
| memory was frozen, and nothing else on the PC could
| change the state of memory or the CPU. Modern standby is
| Intel/Microsoft's effort to hoist that mobile-style of
| operating system management onto PC's, in an environment
| that was not expecting it.
|
| They should have slowly rolled it out, with thermal
| protections from the get go to prevent disaster, and
| after a generation or two when the hardware + software
| are working correctly, made it on by default. It seems
| like they rushed it for Win 10, and then made it the
| default on Win 11 before it was really stable.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I really hope this doesn't become a contributing factor
| in a future plane crash from an onboard fire in the
| baggage compartment. I could see someone throwing their
| laptop in a suitcase with a bunch of clothes and having
| that heat building up into a thermal runaway. It's
| asinine to me that there isn't a hardware thermal sensor
| that just shuts off power if the heat is too high. In
| addition to the tragedy of an accident, what will happen
| is they'll probably block everyone from bringing laptops
| with them.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Oh, you haven't touched your laptop in 30 minutes and we
| just reached 35,000 feet? This must be a good time to run
| "Antimalware Service Executable"!
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >I could see someone throwing their laptop in a suitcase
| with a bunch of clothes and having that heat building up
| into a thermal runaway.
|
| There's this thing called Shut Down. Use it sometimes.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Why just sometimes?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Gotta learn to crawl before you can walk.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The rumor is that this is a bug that happens when you
| close your laptop screen to put it to sleep BEFORE you
| pull out the power plug, so the laptop basically never
| realizes it stopped being plugged into the wall, and does
| work it shouldn't, like a windows update. I always remove
| the power before putting a laptop to sleep and do not
| have this problem anymore.
|
| It happens on macbooks too weirdly.
|
| A sleeping laptop, even "modern sleep" should not be
| doing enough work to create a meaningful amount of heat.
| vel0city wrote:
| Standby works fine for me on Windows and has for a long
| time across dozens of different devices.
|
| Chances are if the system keeps waking from sleep, they
| have some third-party app that keeps waking the system.
| throwaway3306a wrote:
| Macbooks also wake from sleep while closed and yet it
| doesn't destroy the computer. How is the computer
| supposed to do background checks / send its location etc
| if it can't wake up for a short while?
| vel0city wrote:
| Connected Standby has worked on my devices for a decade.
| When I plug in my laptop to my dock in the office and it
| wakes up, it comes on pretty much instantly. Its already
| on the WiFi, which it joined when I walked in the
| building. My email has already synced. My chat has
| already synced before I even log in.
|
| It has been doing this just fine since Windows 8 came out
| across multiple Thinkpads, Surface tablets, and other
| devices.
|
| Even pre-Windows 8, sleep has generally worked perfectly
| fine for me. I'd have my computer on sleep between
| classes, open it up and pretty much instantly be right
| back in OneNote ready to take notes. Cheap Compaq
| laptops, expensive HP laptops, IBM Thinkpads, Lenovo
| Thinkpads, Surface tablets, no-name cheap Walmart
| laptops, all kinds of devices. In the last almost 20
| years I've had less than a dozen instances of a hot bag
| running XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, now 11.
|
| I had issues with sleep on some desktops in the past,
| where it wouldn't want to stay in sleep. Every time it
| was some dumb app waking up the machine. Never due to
| some specific Windows issue, always something I
| installed.
| haspok wrote:
| I don't want my computer to do _anything_ if I set it to
| sleep, other than keep the memory contents alive for some
| time. Although these days even Ubuntu with KDE starts up
| so fast that the only reason for sleep (instead of
| shutdown) is to keep some programs running, with some
| mid-work state.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "How is the computer supposed to do background checks /
| send its location etc if it can't wake up for a short
| while?"
|
| Why would I want it to do that? OTOH, coming back from
| pay of on modern hardware is fast enough that I just
| reenable hibernation and use that instead of sleep, now
| that MS has made sleep less sleep-ish.
| criddell wrote:
| The machine isn't waking from sleep, it's that the
| standby processing is intensive enough and the hardware
| is so poorly designed that the computer heats up which
| requires the fan to run.
|
| > When Modern Standby-capable systems enter sleep, the
| system is still in S0 (a fully running state, ready and
| able to do work). Desktop apps are stopped by the Desktop
| Activity Moderator (DAM); however, background tasks from
| Microsoft Store apps are permitted to do work. In
| connected standby, the network is still active, and users
| can receive events such as VoIP calls in a Windows store
| app. While VoIP calls coming in over Wi-Fi wouldn't be
| available in disconnected standby, real-time events such
| as reminders or a Bluetooth device syncing can still
| happen.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| hardware/design/de...
| vel0city wrote:
| > hardware is so poorly designed
|
| So, don't buy poorly designed hardware? Even my $300
| Walmart (Motile) laptop suspends with Connected Standby
| enabled without issue.
|
| I've had over a dozen devices since 8.1 came out, none of
| which had problems with Connected Standby.
| haspok wrote:
| FWIW I had similar problems with my X1, sleep on lid close
| was working about 50% of the time (which is probably worse
| than not working at all, because you genuinely don't know
| what is going to happen...).
|
| As a quick fix I assigned Ctrl-Meta-L to Sleep (Meta-L is
| screen lock - I'm using KDE btw). It didn't take long for me
| to automatically press this combo before closing the lid - I
| got so much used to it that I had stop stop and think when I
| got a new laptop later and installed linux fresh on it. And
| of course I just set it up like before, even though this one
| works :)
| martzy13 wrote:
| https://system76.com/laptops
| sbrother wrote:
| Are they built better now? I've bought a lot of stuff from
| them in the past and while their support is great and their
| pre-built desktops are fantastic, their laptops were just
| rebranded Clevo trash.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| No, still Clevo. Although the CEO said they are currently
| designing a custom laptop chassis in house. Probably still
| a minimum 2 years away, but at least they are working on
| it.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| They don't exclusively use Clevo and they're now
| leveraging their business relationships to have designs
| guided by System76 priorities.
|
| There's been no updates on the Virgo project for about a
| year. I hope they're able to get it to market, but it
| seems a ways off.
| cevn wrote:
| They are not. I have one and the trackpad sucks, and it has
| a USB C port which charges the laptop EXCEPT when it is
| fully dead..
| tracker1 wrote:
| I really wish that System76 would offer a Framework based
| option... would definitely pay a bit of a premium for Pop
| OS support on Framework hardware. Those two companies are
| just screaming for a teamup IMO.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Don't waste your time. 1920x1080p @60hz in 2024...
| cevn wrote:
| I have the Pangolin which is 144hz, but good luck hitting
| that on the AMD 780m. Also the touchpad and charging sucks.
|
| Other than that I have had some good gaming experiences but
| the drawbacks are too much for me to recommend.
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| This is such an elitist attitude, and I'd like to see less
| of it.
|
| The _vast_ majority of users aren 't going to be bothered
| by those screen specs. For many coming from low-end
| hardware, it's actually an upgrade. Most work won't be
| significantly impacted by increasing the refresh rate, and
| while better resolution can be helpful if you keep multiple
| windows on the screen, most programs still feel tailored to
| 1920x1080 screens. Office workers writing emails, reports,
| purchase orders, and basic spreadsheets aren't likely to
| notice a better refresh rate and they're more likely to get
| a positive impact from turning a monitor vertical to fit
| more of a page on their screens.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I use two 2560x1440p monitors at 144Hz
| at home, but I honestly get just as much work done on my
| dual 1080p 60Hz monitors at my desk at work. Saying that a
| laptop with 1080p@60hz is a waste is elitist and
| unnecessary in my opinion.
| 39896880 wrote:
| This is all I ever hear from the linux crowd. "Demand
| less." Gets really old.
| treyd wrote:
| My first laptop in 7th grade was 1366x768(@60?) and it's
| what got me into the whole industry. I still use
| 1920x1080@60 as my daily driver work laptop and it's fine.
| If I need bigger screens / higher refresh rate I have my
| desktop.
| rty32 wrote:
| I assume it does not come with a touch screen or pen support?
|
| Then it is really an apple to orange comparison.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I have a cheap Ideapad Pro with an AMD proc that gives me the
| same experience using Pop_OS.
|
| MacOS doesn't run on anything(1) but a Mac and people seem to
| be okay with that, but good grief, you tell them to pick a
| machine that is compatible with Linux and they lose their shit.
|
| (1) Please don't be pedantic, I get it.
| jt2190 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I feel like the forces around device driver development
| conspire to make sure this rarely happens, that is, we can't
| have "commodity" hardware that has "cutting edge" device
| drivers because the time and expense of developing the driver
| isn't justified with commodity pricing.
| philistine wrote:
| Here's my massive pet peeve around PCs that I don't even
| believe that the Dell XPS 13 has resolved:
|
| All those computers charge over USB-C with the full force of
| the port. This is fine. But the second the battery is
| completely drained, the port cannot revive that computer. You
| must use the laptop's crappy barrel plug.
|
| Only Apple allows you to use only USB-C as a charger.
| trelane wrote:
| Interesting that slapping Linux on a Windows computer doesn't
| work well. I wonder how OSX would fare.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| 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.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Sounds like every experience of mine with desktop Linux.
| Excitement, initial success installing, days of esoteric
| troubleshooting, then disillusion and abandonment.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| F40 works fine enough on my SP2. Only complaint is no deep sleep.
| I just shut down instead. Same with my framework 16.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm mostly impressed this person has an SP4 that still has a
| working battery and no screen issues.
| dublin wrote:
| 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#
|
| 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...
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