> Its battery management is horrible. I don't know if the hardware or the OS are more to blame for this. The worst part: I can pretty much expect that if I close the lid and open it some hours later the thing will be dead.
Often times web browsers are to blame for this. I have seen more than 1 browser keep my laptop from sleeping if there is some sort of embedded video content open in a tab somewhere.
The OS is limited to what the software running on it tells it to do.
On the flip side of this, I have also had pending Windows Updates keep my computer from going into hibernate. Because apparently that makes sense. :/
You can run the command
powercfg -requests
at an admin prompt to see what is preventing sleep. For example, right now Opera is keeping my machine from sleeping with an active WebRTC connection.
> - The pencil is a gimmick to me since the apps (like OneNote) are very poorly designed for serious work with a stylus.
I have done very serious work with a stylus in OneNote. It really depends on your use case. For most office work? Meh. For math class? OneNote + Stylus is an incredibly powerful combination.
> - WSL still has some serious gaps and isn't as productive as Linux / OSX for programming tasks.
I have been programming on Windows my whole life, no WSL. Right now I am doing NodeJS and React Native development. In the past I've done C++, Python, and C#. Obviously C# is best of class, but I rarely had issues with the others.
What I did miss from C++ was having access to the wide range of tools, such as Valgrind, that are widely supported in the *nix ecosystem.
The debugging tools on Windows are top notch, and I'd be more than willing to put a talented WinDBG user up against the equivalent on any another platform.
Windows is not some sort of developer wasteland. For nearly two decades, the majority of software written in the world was written by developers using Windows.
> - For example: My Surface Book just updated and now it's stuck on a Windows 8 looking home screen and I haven't yet figured out how to get back to my "normal" desktop.
You're in tablet mode, lower right corner, tap (or do a left swipe from off screen to on screen from the right side of your monitor) and deselect tablet mode.
Or un-dock and re-dock your keyboard, that should kick it into gear.
FWIW my mother loves tablet mode, and loves her touch screen. She found tablet mode on her own and is rather annoyed when Windows exits it. The feature is not made made for us, it is made for consumers who have only a few apps open, and who naturally want to poke at their screen.
> - Windows update continues to be a bad experience.
It is 30 minutes or less once a month, with much of the work done in the background now days. Heck the monthly security patches often take less than 5 minutes to install end to end.
The large feature patches can be a nightmare, but major version revs aren't fun anywhere, user forums for all major desktop OSs are full of complaints about things that break during major patches, Linux, Windows, and macOS. Windows has an order of magnitude more users, there is an order of magnitude more complaints.
Also if you at at Microsoft, with MSIT managed hardware, you are not getting the end user upgrade experience. You are getting MSIT's upgrade experience, some of their releases have been super buggy messes, while other times they have gone the extra mile to make the internal upgrade experience better. On top of all that, odds are you are signed up to one of their beta-testing tracks, so getting pushed a buggy internal release, and then a fix for that buggy internal release a few days later, is not going to be the best experience.
Then again my previous smart phone was an LG made Nexus 5x, which literally had a non-trivial chance of hard locking/bricking itself after rebooting for updates, so my expectations for OS updates may be a bit low.
> - Windows is still awful at multi-desktop workflows.
Install one of the utilities[0][1] that add more multi-desktop shortcuts. The built in ones are quite anemic, especially compared to the otherwise awesome shortcuts for managing windows and multiple monitors. (Related, I actually wonder if at some point the global shortcut namespace is becoming too crowded, I do have problems finding new unique key combinations for global shortcuts!)
None of your actual complaints appear to be about the Surface Book, which is odd, because, at least the first generation Surface Book, is a rather buggy piece of hardware! My friends who worked on it or who worked with the teams that made it, were not recommending it to their friends/family.
[0]https://github.com/mzomparelli/zVirtualDesktop
[1]https://github.com/sdias/win-10-virtual-desktop-enhancer/blo...