The press tends to treat Microsoft like Cinderella's stepmother treated her: unreasonably critical.
Historically, Apple absolutely would have been the risky platform to go for (I waited until their Intel laptops, using Boot Camp as an insurance policy). But these days people have iPhones, iPads, some even have Apple TVs... the Apple hardware ecosystem is actually far stronger than Microsoft's. You absolutely are risking that syncing with your iPhone etc will be worse.
iPhone market share in the US is 43%. Macbook market share is 12%. So the vast majority of iPhone users are "risking" this.
Which is really not a risk at all, because if it really were a risk Apple would be shooting themselves in the foot. They would be killing one of their most successful products for the sake of some of their least.
The Microsoft hardware product line is arguably more complete than Apple's at this point, when you factor in the Xbox. There's minimal risk to casual users in switching.
I find it very interesting that Apple is now the "default" laptop and Windows is the strange alternative that people are worried about switching to.
Only in a tiny minority of wealthy dev/artist types.
It'd help a lot if Microsoft manages to get .NET applications to become popular on OSX. That's only possible since this year, and it'll probably take a few more years for applications to become properly crossplatform.
The Surface line is not as flexible. It's perfect for people who are immersed in the Windows world, but a lot of people are not anymore.
As it happens, Windows 10 is actually pretty great from a basic UX point of view. In many ways I find it better than OS X now in this regard, which I didn't think I'd ever say.
But the lack of Unix underpinnings was a big loss. My solution was to run Debian in Virtualbox. I set it up with xfce as the default window manager, since it tends to run really well in a VM. But in truth I almost always use xmonad, which runs even better in a VM. For me at least, this has been a nearly perfect solution.
I imagine the same would work on a Surface Book.
I heard they're adding SSH soon too. May get a usable workstation out of windows one of these days...
/ducks
I think that's what I'd do. I don't have a problem running Sublime etc. in Windows, so I figure I'd only need command line access to the Linux box, so even windowing isn't a problem.
But still, my Macbook Pro is only about a year old. As much as I want to justify that upgrade...
I plan to sell my 2014 MBP when I get this. I'd lose around 20-30% for one year of utilisation, good enough for me.
I'm pretty heavily invested in Linux, and before getting my SP3, I only ever used Windows for gaming. I considered dual-booting Linux, but I was nervous about accidentally screwing things up ahead of my trip, so I decided I'd postpone that to after my trip.
So I installed stuff to make myself comfortable instead. PuTTY was one of my first installs, so I could SSH into my VPS whenever I wanted a familiar command-line environment (and with that, access to my coding projects and vim). Another was the suite of KDE apps, so I could use the GUI apps I'm familiar with. TortoiseHg, too, so I could pull stuff down that I wanted to work on (I use Hg as a means of backing up my stuff -- not just code, but a lot of plain text documents and stuff -- to my VPS).
So, yes, if you want a Nix-like ecosystem on a Surface, you can do that. I could've gone even farther and installed a full Cygwin environment, but I didn't bother just because PuTTY into my VPS was a much more efficient way of accessing a CLI environment. For that matter, I could've installed a Linux VM, too (and I probably would have, but I forgot, and it didn't come to mind until I was already packing).
And it's totally possible to install Linux, if you want. There are guides for installing Arch, Ubuntu, etc. on the SP3, and I doubt the SP4 or SB will be much different. Only reason I didn't is because I wanted to make 100% sure that if I accidentally did something wrong and blew away the wrong part of my SP3, it wouldn't happen until after I'm home from my trip.
I currently do my dev on a Macbook Pro but exploring the options available on Windows because I intend to switch to either the Surface Book or SP4.
I think with babun for a basic unixy terminal and vagrant to manage projects I'll have a nice dev machine. The massive plus to the surface is having ability to sketch out anything I want which helps immensely trying to solve problems, kind of like an ultra mini whiteboard.
Nope.
Here's my blog post addressing that myth: http://www.kentran.net/2015/10/how-macnix-users-can-stay-pro...
1. Commands in MSYS2, while fast in its shell, are slower than Cygwin's commands when run in PowerShell. 2. MSYS2 can't be installed via Chocolatey. It's because MSYS2 owners are against Chocolatey (insane!). Which makes it harder to automate the replication of my environment across machines. 3. Cygwin does has package managers. I use Cyg-Get, which is also available via Chocolatey.
The only bugs related to this are to do with slow LDAP/AD lookups - can you elaborate?
https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow
Which work extremely well. I can go back and forth between Debian and windows without too much trouble. Many tools are cross platform.
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Of course, Windows is still a mess under the hood, which is why I also run a VM (debian with xfce or xmonad).
Go a little deeper. The Windows NT kernel is decades ahead of UNIX paradigms.
“unicode as expected
Unicode in midipix is not an afterthought, but rather an essential concept. When your application enters its main() function, for instance, its argv and envp point to utf-8 strings, just like they would on modern unix systems. Similarly, the size of the framework's native wide character (wchar_t) is four bytes, meaning that your unicode application can share its entire code-path between platforms. Last but not least, midipix adds an important 'M' (as in multibyte) variant to the 'A' (ansi) and 'U' (utf-16) GUI flavors, meaning that you can seamlessly call functions such as GetWindowText or SetWindowText using utf-8 input and output.”
I've run Ubuntu on a variety of Mac and non-Mac hardware since 2007, and the experience has only improved over that time frame.
I'm certainly intrigued as you.
This is the reference article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html
It's difficult to test drive that idea, though. VirtualBox on my Macbook to Windows, SSHing to another VirtualBox for development? Hmm.