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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

A few notes:

  - this is the first release supporting Surface devices out of the box (due the recent `linux-firmware` package)
  - people using PPA may have some troubles, since without tweaking, PPAs with obsolete keys are rejected
  - ack grep is not included (yet?), due to build issues with perl

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The surface support sounds interesting. Has anyone here tried that?

I'm a longtime Surface user; you don't really need 17.04 though - all you need on older Ubuntu version is to install a more recent mainline kernel, and install the artful version of the `linux-firmware` package (in such conditions, the installation process will require an external keyboard and the pre-downloaded package).

Arguably, a Surface device can work well as double device:

  - windows as tablet
  - linux for work, with minimalist hardware usage (no hw button, no pen, the SP4/SB have no camera support)

The Linux Surface community is mostly made of script kiddies, so it's very unreliable (there are a variety of reasons for this judgment).

My personal favourite options for this mixed use are:

  - Surface Pro 3: better compatibility, and cheaper
  - Surface Book i5: fantastic tablet

SB laptops above the i5 are expensive, and it's a waste of money for a laptop that is not completely supported (if I have to spend 2000$ on something, I expect sleep to work).

Just use ag (the-silver-searcher) or ripgrep in lieu of ack.

+1 for rg, it's amazing

Has anyone made a good and detailed comparison of all these grep replacements? People keep saying how great they are, but I can never trust them to what I expect the way I trust grep.

From the creator of ripgrep, so might be biased comparison, but anecdotally ripgrep feels faster to me too http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/#methodology

I work with a huge monorepo and ag/rg are noticeably faster. Might just be the out-of-the-box .ignore support but that's another point in favor.

Our complicated ignore rules make ag miss a directory though (known issue with ag) so rg it is.

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