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Comment by ZuLuuuuuu | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody see this as a great front-end development machine? You can install Chrome, Sublime or Visual Studio Code since it is full Windows and I assume it would be able to handle those programs performance-wise with its Pentium processor. You can test mobile touch experience since it has touch screen. It has a nice keyboard with touchpad and you can even connect external display on your home setup if you want.

I don't know if the processor can handle it but maybe you can even install PyCharm to the 8gb memory version for some back end programming as well?

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If you need to type a lot, I think you would probably get a better millage with a true keyboard / laptop. I was struggling with the keyboard of the larger Surface Pro. Haven't tried this one but I doubt it is going to be very comfortable. I imagine the use case is rather people who need to use it a lot as a tablet, i.e. to view presentations or emails during meetings or on the go.

This is absolutely on-point.

I used the Type Cover "3" and "4" (current) extensively; while they're impressive feats of engineering and some of the best keyboards for the weight/size/thickness, they're nowhere near a normal laptop keyboard, the attachment angle is wrong, and if you have large hands, outright uncomfortable.

I actually try to steer people interested in Microsoft's Surface line towards the Surface Laptop and Surface Book these days, in no small part because of the improved keyboard experience. I'd strongly recommend going to BestBuy/Microsoft Store and trying a Surface Pro with Type Cover for a long period before buying, then try the Surface Laptop/Book.

Visual Studio Code is based on electron. Electron does need a lot of resources. I would argue no or not something you really wanna do.

Weird. Because on my Mac, VSCode only uses a few hundred MB.

Quite fine on a machine with 2GB of RAM.

> Weird. Because on my Mac, VSCode only uses a few hundred MB. Quite fine on a machine with 2GB of RAM.

uhh.. what ? So, the OS in itself takes 700mb of RAM and that's being optimistic. OS + VSCode ~ 1 gigabyte of RAM used. In the remaining gigabyte, what can you do ? open firefox with three tabs, and maybe a music player if you're lucky ? what if you need to run a VM or two ?

I run vs code on my old 2011 11" MBA and it never misses a beat. MS has done a really good job dealing with performance issues.

I run VS code on the older surface pro 4 and it is fine. Electron isn't that slow.

If VSCode is too heavy, Sublime Text runs like a dream on all sort of low end hardware.

Don't you need like a big screen if you want to do front-end development? Especially if you are debugging with Chrome and need the editor on the side too.

No, although they do help a lot. I tend to make heavy use of virtual desktops when I'm away from my big monitors.

I wouldn't consider any machine with only a 10" screen to be a great development machine of any kind.

10" is really, really small.

If you’re really buying it for just the touchscreen then there’s a large swath of laptops that meet that requirement as well. I can imagine it’s 10” form factor being more useful for testing sites and android apps for that factor, though.

The Pentium Gold processor used in the Surface Go is surprisingly robust. I would put it on par with the Core m3 series; not a powerhouse by any means, but for a productivity tablet it's more than up to the task.

But not Sketch. And I havent been able to find anything similar.

Try lunacy[1] it supports .sketch files and is quite good for the early stage it is in, sometimes it has strange behavior (e.g elements disappearing from the screen after dragging)and the navigation needs a bit of polish etc. hopefully they will get these issues ironed out soon in future updates. There are also online solutions like Figma[2] and Gravit Designer[3] which also has an electron based app for offline use. Not exactly a Sketch replacement but they will get the job done.

1. https://icons8.com/lunacy 2. https://www.figma.com/ 3. https://gravit.io/

> Chrome, Sublime or Visual Studio Code

and discharge battery in 25 minutes.

Would you really like to program on such small screen, weak battery, low performance, flat unergonomic keyboard and mouse? It's for kids playing games in a car or reading documents.

>I assume it would be able to handle those programs performance-wise with its Pentium processor

On my laptop with i5 doing `yarn start & ./gradlew bootRun` takes over a minute, on a PC with Ryzen it's 8seconds, on a tablet, I don't want to know how long it would take on a tablet with slower disk and RAM.

The CPU specs for the Surface Go are on par with a slower current-gen i5:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4415U...

And the idea you can't do front end (or really any) development on a slower machine is completely ridiculous. People are doing this around the world every day especially with incremental compilation.

I suspect that the single threaded processing will be slower than i3 as its missing the Turbo Boost spec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Turbo_Boost

The 4415Y in the Go is much slower than the 4415U. 1.6GHz vs 2.3GHz. I'd expect a CPUMark score +/- 2,200.

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