Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

I found the Surface Book had a wonderful premium feel; I went into the shop with a list of specs in mind, and Microsoft was the last manufacturer I'd imagine going with, but it's a powerful machine and also just a beautiful object. Metal case, relatively subtle/classy logo, absolutely beautiful screen, nothing else was compromised for the sake of touch, clean baseline first-party OS. If you really want a premium feel from anyone-but-Apple and are willing to pay more-than-Apple prices for it, I'd very much recommend it.

View on HN

> I'd very much recommend it Same here!

I've bought myself a Surface Laptop 3 (15", i7 version) 11 months ago. I had been looking for a laptop powerful enough to code on, that would look "premium" for business purposes, lightweight and the charge had to last a full workday(or more). This laptop checked all the boxes, and performed wonderfully since then. To the extend that now we're considering getting it for our employees.

I wanted to like the surface hardware because it kind of seems to run Linux and it is portable. According to 'the internet' that is. I tried different products, all with Windows only before trying Linux (which never happened) and found them surprisingly bad overall compared to Lenovo or Apple. Either all of them were bad luck factory mistakes or some people here have rosy MS glasses on.

First off, The support was horrible: on my first purchase (with MS directly ever by the way) they blamed me squarely for a 1 day old (!) Factory broken display (it would turn on but when it got a bit warm it would show only stripes; switching off and waiting for cool off would 'fix it': did I say less than 24 hours old!?); I sent it in and they said I broke it and told me I could buy a new one.

Also when I got a new one, the new keyboard was broken and they refused to replace that as well. Again, blaming me from something that came broken from the box.

And the rest of the experiences was not much better but at least they took them back without whining (there i learned my lesson and went to a shop instead of order online). Horrible battery life (far from what is promised on the tin, even with relatively low workload), random freezes and crashes, weird balance feel compared to, say an iPad or mb air and slow compared to old and new apple products (iPad and macbooks).

After all I was most angry about the bad support; I never had that with apple even when it was my own fault (they repaired a water damaged mb air without issues and replaced two iPad pro keyboard which where damaged by dropping for free) which this was not.

I tried to give them a chance and I tried: I got most of my money back luckily as after the first fiasco I prepared for that and returned them to the shop in the box, but definitely will not buy again soon.

I am pretty unhappy with my Surface Book 2. It’s quite slow for its specs and has all kind of problems like “not enough resources for USB”, freezing, the multi display setup gets often messed after undocking and so on. Considering that its in the same price range as a MacBook I am quite disappointed.

> It’s quite slow for its specs

Didn't feel like it to me, for development and fairly casual gaming.

> “not enough resources for USB”, freezing, the multi display setup gets often messed after undocking and so on.

Not my experience at all; in fact I was impressed at how well it remembered all my different multi display arrangements.

Yeah, I've seen some similar problems with my Surface Book 2.

I didn't see this initially, but I now see frequent, .5-to-3 second lagging response to the touchpad, seemingly fixable only by reboot. Googling suggests a lot of other folks have seen a similar problem. For my machine, there's no lag from the touchscreen or from an external mouse...only the touchpad.

Re your USB problems...I'm not sure if I've seen that specific error, but I have noticed that I simply cannot plug in two external USB cameras and expect them both to work. The first one plugged in always works, the second appears as a device, but no software I own can get an image off of it (where the same two cameras can easily be used by other Windows boxes).

And, yes, I've also seen multi-screen problems when I put it to sleep with no external monitor and try to wake it up after it's plugged into the external monitor (plugged in through a USB-C hub). Basically, I had to plug in the monitor after it woke to avoid this.

Also...the detachable screen is a cool concept, but given that the seemingly larger portion of the battery life is in the keyboard half, and that the screen half has no power or USB ports, it really blunts the applications I might have put the detachable screen to.

Yes, definite problems here. I've wondered if I would've been happier with the Surface Laptop rather than the Surface Book.

Does it run Linux properly?

googling

Answer seems to be maybe:

https://www.most-useful.com/ubuntu-20-04-linux-on-surface-pr...

https://old.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/top/?sort=top&t=year

TBH I hadn't really considered Surface's before due to them being Microsoft devices.

I have a Surface Pro 2 running with the linux-surface kernel [0]. It feels like it has some rough edges - you have to decide between having pen support or having touch screen support, and suspend can be unreliable. These issues may be fixed now. Also, I encrypted my Windows partition, and now it requires the key each time to boot up, so I recommend against doing that.

Overall, I do agree that the hardware feels quite nice, and besides those issues I listed, the Linux experience is quite good. I was very happy to not be forced to use Windows.

[0] https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

You probably need a special Kernal. I got it running with Manjaro. I ditched that, and went back to Windows due to it not having a suitable writing app like OneNote. I found a few apps, but they weren't very good, and the pen had input lag. Also ran into issues with the OSK not showing at the right times.

These limitations seem small, but are enough to degrade the experience.

MS' support at their physical stores was fantastic. It's a shame they gave up on that. The phone support sucks if you have a hardware problem.

My wife has a surface laptop 2, and while it's a polished and beautiful device... It's not serviceable. In the slightest. If you want to fix something you have to cut through upholstery.

So with regards to getting as close to Apple as possible they've succeeded?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com