Microsoft Surface Laptops and Tablets Not Recommended by Consumer Reports
consumerreports.org
consumerreports.org
Professionaly I'm now in management but the majority of my development experience had been with .Net. Sure I dabbled with all the open source hyped techs when I was younger, but ultimately settled for .Net and enterprise (which I'm happy is also open sourced now by the way, even if .net core isn't really production ready and takes up way too much devops time to deploy).
These days windows just feels wrong though. It's probably just me but I feel like my windows machines are basically iPads with keyboards that I can't really do anything with the way I want to.
Git sucks on windows, paints replacement sucks, almost anything that isn't .Net development sucks and Visual Studio has to live in a cage or it takes over everything from wanting to debug your steam library to howling at the moon.
And now you're telling me the life expediency of a surface is 2 years. Heh.
That being said if they ever put out a fully functional VS for linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Git sucks on windows, paints replacement sucks, almost anything that isn't .Net development sucks and Visual Studio has to live in a cage or it takes over everything from wanting to debug your steam library to howling at the moon."
You are being far too polite :) It is not you: Windows is fine as a launcher for consumer applications, but for setup of development tools, it is appallingly terrible, and outside .NET the user experience with developer tools can be pretty rough. For many things, it is now a third-class platform (Mac is first, then Linux).
I definitely agree with Git, specifically. This isn't Microsoft's fault: Git is so UNIX-y that you have to wrap it in a kind of miny-UNIX distribution to run it on a non-UNIX platform, but they are the only desktop vendor with a non-UNIX platform.
I am looking forward to having an opportunity to work with WSL, to see how much that helps.
Not sure why you feel Windows is "appallingly terrible" for set up of development tools either? Care to expand on why this is the case?
Genuinely curious, if only becasue I don't have these problems...
Aside from that, window management is awful on Windows (ironic?). Alt tab is kinda stupid, you can't scroll windows behind the active window, the taskbar and start menu are generally a mess, and god help you if you have multiple monitors.
Anyway, window management is great on Windows. It's definitely more robust than the Mac OS and more stable than whatever minority Linux desktop you're using. And alt tab is definitely not stupid and if it were, it would certainly not be because of some lack of scrolling because nobody wants to scroll stuff while they're alt tabbing.
Also, the start screen is better than anything and not messy at all. I can't even organize the equivalent on my Mac the way that I want to. Windows handling of multiple monitors is better than any other OS too and way more stable.
Nothing about my comment says that I'm a shill or that I work for Microsoft. Please look again at my response and compare it to the comment that I was responding to. I answered each claim or opinion in like fashion. Should I have instead asked that person if they were Linus Torvalds?
I wish I was able to reply to your comment as well as jbob2000 did.
His point-by-point reply summarizes my understanding of reality perfectly.
Because on Unix systems, the CLI commands are not archaic and you can move way faster than a GUI using them.
> window management is great on Windows. It's definitely more robust than the Mac OS and more stable than whatever minority Linux desktop you're using
I'm comparing it to Mac. The gestures a mac laptop provides make window management very smooth. The keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements required to replicate this on Windows aren't the same. MacOS remembers my multi-monitor window placement, yet every time I unplug and re-plug in my windows laptop from my monitors, I have to drag all the windows back to their monitors.
>Also, the start screen is better than anything and not messy at all. I can't even organize the equivalent on my Mac the way that I want to
It's a jumbled mess of colours and rectangles. The old school start menu is just as bad - nesting folders upon folders, hunting pixels so you click the right spot. It's just an old school way to manage computing that many people are used to and therefore think is better.
I use the keyboard to operate the Windows GUI though and Windows is definitely known for having better accessibility hooks than any other system. I am confident that I can operate my GUIs faster than a CLI user for a broad range of tasks. It's certainly faster than looking up commands.
> I'm comparing it to Mac.
Well I use Macs too. I think the touchpad is extremely overrated since you have to take your hands off the keyboard to use it. I'd rather operate the entire system with my keyboard, something that Macs don't let you do as easily as Windows where knowing a few simple principles let you do everything. I have a Mac Pro besides my Macbook Pro and I'd have to buy a separate trackpad to operate that and where would I put it? That's annoying.
Speaking of multiple monitors, I don't think even Sierra lets you soft-disable monitors yet. Windows has had this since forever. It's so annoying that I have to physically unplug my Mac from the monitor or else I can't use the monitors built-in KVM to share it with other computers because the Mac will still think the monitor is there and open windows on it. I won't buy a third party program for it either (for reasons).
> It's a jumbled mess of colours and rectangles.
No, it's not. Knolling [1,2] is a well known process for arranging objects and that's what the start screen/menu lets you do. (I use the full screen).
It's way better than Apple's launchpad that you can't even organize the way you want. It's launchpad and spotlight all in one.
Anyway, it just sounds like we have different problems - I don't plug either of my laptops into external monitors (unless mirroring on a projector), so I don't have your problem. You don't have my problem because you probably don't have a Mac desktop that you'd like to share monitors with your PCs. I could talk for hours about all of my problems an every OS. None of them are perfect and it really comes down to "what do you need it to do for you easily most of the time and can it do that without a problem?"
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolling [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ
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off topic (bikeshedding?) comment: you don't need to tinker with linux: install ubuntu, use it, profit. At work we went from "windows 8 + osx" to "ubuntu + windows 10". Nobody tinkers with anything and everything just works. Its just a bit faster and cheaper now.
It was relatively easy and the ubuntu forums were really helpful, but it's things like that that I don't want to have to do.
You must be one of the lucky few whose workflows jive well with what Windows enforces.
I personally have never been able to get Windows to work the way I want.
I bought a Surface book this year, and it embarrassingly cost $4000. It's great, but I'm convinced that in two years I'll be having a stern conversation with Microsoft support about the Australian Consumer Law guarantee of acceptable quality.
How is this enforced? If you have a file a lawsuit, the costs/time/effort might not be worth it.
1: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-takes-action-agai...
Besides that, it's going strong four years later.
They are not even slightly repairable.. so warranty is just a straight swap out.
I have had a Surface-book ($3k i7 Performance base model) for the last month or so... the only complaint I have is that that the bluetooth in it is pathetic. A set of headphones and a mouse connected and I get disconnections and drop outs and slow mouse behaviour constantly.
It is exquisitely engineered... I just love using it.
Left one day with it docked, came back to a broken screen