Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

More and more I get the sense that there is a gap in the market for a device that ticks these boxes:

Ultraportable

Stylus enabled

Fully capable desktop operating system

Ports to allow hook-up to external monitor

I wanted something like this as a frequently traveling and programming, conference hand written note taking engineer. Then I notice some of the designers in my office experimenting with iPads, Pencils, and Mac minis (seeing if they could depend 100% on the iPad for portable work). The main complaint has always been, why didn't they stick osx on this thing?

Devices that have come close, besides the iPad:

Acer Chromebook tab 10: stylus support great, ultraportable, but abysmal battery life and lacking peripherals to turn it into a reasonable laptop alternative. Chromeos though, with Linux Apps on Chrome combined with Android Apps on Chrome, now seems a powerful contender in this niche. USBC. Stylus built in.

Lenovo y500: ticks all boxes but ultraportable - thing is a tank. For now I swap between this and the x1 yoga on trips. Runs chromeos which means I take notes in onenote for Android, and program in a vscode for Debian binary or emacs or vim. Getting localhost to work kosher is tricky. USBC. Stylus built in.

Lenovo x1 yoga: not ultraportable, just a damn good laptop. Unfortunately, there's no good handwritten note taking app (at the level of onenote, anyway) for Linux, so I swap between Ubuntu or windows 10 depending on what I'm doing. Same for photo editing, which is a deficiency I forgot to mention for the chrome books. Usbc. Stylus built in.

Surface pro line: probably actually ticks all the boxes, I just hate programming in windows and haven't touched one of these that are powerful enough to run Ubuntu in a VM in a reasonable fashion. Also, the keyboard is awful imo. And, I don't know if they do USBC yet? That would mean no charging from the backup battery if so. Finally, the stylus isn't built in, which is obnoxious.

I've heard fun things about Linux on Android and other Samsung specific offerings that I'm looking forward to experimenting with. The hunt for this device has become a mild hobby.

Interestingly, this new 7" ipad is really good value for money with regards to raw compute. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it's possible to buy a new complete computer scoring 11k on geekbench for under $500. This one is $400, with an efficient fanless design and a nice screen as a bonus. If it could run linux, it could potentially be an interesting server solution. That's a first for apple I think, to be the cheapest available performance per dollar. Of course the big caveat is that it's locked into the ios ecosystem...

You could buy a Poco F1 for $285 - which does 8.5k on geekbench. The bonus being that it's also a phone and has an open ecosystem (with an official LineageOS port).

I work for HP so take this with a grain of salt. Have you seen the HP Spectre x360? I was in the market for something very similar to what it seems like you're after. I was completely willing to use another company's device if it was better than what HP makes but we actually came out as the best value for money. The screen flips around for a decent tablet experience, it has thunderbolt 3 with power delivery and a pretty good feeling keyboard. Battery life is approximately 6 or 7 hours with light use. As far as I know, we also offer Linux installations but I always recommend installing your own.

Just took a look at it at the Microsoft store - I think it's a tad too big. I'm trying to find a device in the 10-12" range.

So far it's just a couple Chromebooks and a surface go that fits the bill. Lenovo had the Tablet 10 but I believe it's been discontinued, looked like one of the better options but impossible to say until I get my hands on one (nobody even has one up on eBay).

Note 9 with Ubuntu on DeX actually comes close to fitting this bill. Although the issue here may be that the primary display is only few inches :)

> I just hate programming in windows and haven't touched one of these that are powerful enough to run Ubuntu in a VM in a reasonable fashion.

I have a hard time understanding where this sentiment comes from. WSL is categorically better than using Homebrew on macOS. It is basically an Ubuntu userspace with apt, running directly on the Windows kernel. Using Ubuntu in a VM seems pretty superfluous when all the useful parts are already there with fully native performance. As a longtime Linux user, I am increasingly convinced that Windows is the best desktop Linux distribution.

/shrug the workspaces/desktops are not how I like it

Also i always had trouble configuring my windows tools to talk to my Linux tools. Simple stuff like vscode or emacs magit talking to git in wsl

If I could run gnome or cinnamon on windows I'd agree

I can't claim to know the OP's perspective w.r.t. why he / she doesn't like programming on Windows, but as an early (and current) user of the WSL I can say that I too dislike the overall experience, mostly due to how it colors my experience programming and using the system. Windows has an intensely corporate feeling to me that I can't seem to shake; it's obvious to me when I'm using it that I don't in any sense "own" my system, and that my behavior is being monitored and recorded on some level. The next update will inevitably bring some setting reversion to a pro-tracking default, and the lack of visual and system-level customization options takes a lot of the joy out of system setup, management, and exploration for me. Windows is, and always has been, a corporate productivity environment at its core, and it's very good in that role, but it feels awfully stiff and suffocating as a dev environment to me. Minor technical frictions like moving data and files between Windows land and my WSL home directory add just enough unnecessary overhead to my workflow that I find myself constantly questioning what actual value the entire thing provides. I suppose for people who are chained to specific Microsoft productivity software it's a good option, but in the absence of such a requirement I don't really understand the appeal.

To be fair, the environment is nice, and the WSL is certainly an impressive technical accomplishment (no question there!), but it doesn't have the feeling of a Linux to me. The freedom, control, and transparency just aren't there.

> and the lack of visual and system-level customization options takes a lot of the joy out of system setup, management, and exploration

Exactly this. A good part of the joy I get in seeking out an awesome ultra-portable (and in doing so, experimenting with my mobile workflow) is the high customization I get from Linux machines. Sadly the two best portable contenders (ChromeOS and Windows) in terms of feasibility, don't meet this.

IMHO Homebrew is much better than apt on Ubuntu. E.g. when I read in the news that a new version of my favorite tool is released, i know that’s normally only a brew upgrade away to have it. And i mean now and not until the next OS release happens. With brew it’s also very easy to go back in versions of individual packages in case the current release is buggy or breaks something. You can have this with 3rd party repos in debian, but that’s usually more hazzle from my experience.

The surface pro line has had USB C for a long time, and at the higher end is about as powerful as you can get in 2019 in a machine that size.

I hate Windows too but you're not going to see a macOS device like this for obvious reasons (well, Apple can do anything, but I wouldn't count on it). If you don't mind running Linux natively, most Surface models do reasonably well there.

The Surface Pro has never had any USB-C ports.

Microsoft released a Surface Connect adapter only last year, and it has terrible reviews: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-connect-to-usb-c-a...

The Surface Go, Surface Book 2, and Surface Studio 2 are the only Surface devices with USB-C ports.

Does it have USB C?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-6/8zcnc665slq5...

1 x full-size USB 3.0

3.5 mm headphone jack

Mini DisplayPort

1 x Surface Connect port

Surface Type Cover port6

MicroSDXC card reader

Compatible with Surface Dial*

Doesn't seem to...

Hmm, it looks like I got the pro and non-pro lines confused. Thank you for correcting me.

No worries, I went to the Microsoft store after to scope some out and actually the surface go seems like a pretty solid little device so I appreciate the recommendation. Gonna drive on it until the return period and see how it feels.

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