Microsoft Surface Pro 8

You should try Linux on it someday, to really see what the CPU can do, night and day difference :) With that said, I'd probably prefer a Windows laptop over a MacBook too, their hardware is great, but the software is just so awful. But whatever you do, don't get Microsoft's hardware, I got a Surface Pro 8 some years ago and throughout my ~25 years of computing I've never had a worse laptop, and just 2-3 weeks after the warranty went out, the entire machine bricked itself during an update and it no longer boots at all, basically threw 1500 EUR into the sea with nothing to show for it.

> Apple is vertically integrated and can optimize > Compare that to how many cooks are in the kitchen in Wintel land. Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows laptop won't go to sleep and cooks itself in your backpack So, I was thinking like this as well, and after I lost my Carbon X1 I felt adventurous, but not too adventurous, and wanted a laptop that "could just work". The thinking was "If Microsoft makes both the hardware and the software, it has to work perfectly fine, right?", so I bit my lip and got a Surface Pro 8. What a horrible laptop that was, even while I was trialing just running Windows on it. Overheated almost immediately by itself, just idling, and STILL suffers from the issue where the laptop sometimes wake itself while in my backpack, so when I actually needed it, of course it was hot and without battery. I've owned a lot of shit laptops through the years, even some without keys in the keyboard, back when I was dirt-poor, but the Surface Pro 8 is the worst of them all, I regret buying it a lot. I guess my point is that just because Apple seem really good at the whole "vertically integrated" concept, it isn't magic by itself, and Microsoft continues to fuck up the very same thing, even though they control the entire stack, so you'll still end up with backpack laptops turning themselves on/not turning off properly. I'd wager you could let Microsoft own every piece of physical material in the world, and they'd still not be able to mak

> I often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t go full-apple on its hardware and software. To be honest, I kind of understand they don't want to do that. I bought a Surface Pro 8 some years ago and is probably the worst computing hardware I've experienced in a long time. Even basic things like thermal management is horribly broken when using Windows on it. Running Linux on it gave a slightly better experience, but seems so backwards that they cannot even make their own hardware work well, I thought the combination of hardware+OS by same company would lead to a better experience but nope.

Some year ago I bought a Surface Pro 8 thinking it was the best hardware to run Windows on and holy hell was I wrong. Overheats in two seconds, performance is probably worse than my Steam Deck purchased years ago and the only way I can have it run relatively well is a barebones Linux install. Before that, I gave WSL(2) a try and besides giving me half the performance compared to running Linux the normal way and introducing various compatibility issues (although it's just a VM?!), a recent Windows update broke the WSL image on disk leading to a corrupted install, never managed to recover from that and gave up. I can't wait for Ableton to (eventually) get their thumbs out of their asses and make Ableton work on Linux so I can dump Windows fully. Written from my Linux X1 Carbon which also somehow magically works on my patio, don't ask me how.

I'm not sure which year you are from. Over ten years ago, it was definitely the case. But now, Windows 10, especially 11, bothers me much much more than Linux. Just in around 3 months, this is already the 2nd time that Windows 11 screwed up and I wanted to clean wipe it. I never imaged a triple hit before: a bad update f cked up the external display; then uninstall the update again f cked up the whole system; and at last system restore did not work. And that's on a damn surface pro 8. On the other hand, another toy laptop with Fedora installed has running flawlessly for quite a few years, started from Fedora 30 to 37 without a single hiccup. For Macs, never liked Apple products, so no comments.

I have the opposite problem. I acquired a Surface Pro 8 together with the keyboard. It does "disable touch-pad while typing" automatically and by default, and I haven't found a way of disabling it in Windows 11. On gnome I can disable that functionality easily, so it doesn't seem to be a hardware thing in the keyboard/touchpad, but on Windows 11 there doesn't seem to be any way of disabling it, built in or 3rd party. Makes it kind of difficult to play certain strategy games when you want to be able to pan with the keyboard at the same time as you're selecting/moving the mouse around.

I've never used Windows on a Apple laptop before, but the experience of using Apple touchpad with Linux/Gnome (with a little bit of tweaking) is definitely a better experience than using Linux/Gnome on for example a Surface Pro 8 touchpad. The size matter, but also the material and hardware implementation. There is a clear difference in just the hardware, not just software.

Yeah, Ubuntu upgrade process is also trash, probably the distribution I've had the most upgrade pains with. No argument there. But the Windows issue I mentioned happened literally today, and was the reason I wrote the post in the first place. And it was on a Surface Pro 8, which is a Microsoft device so thinking it should be the best device to run Windows on. But yeah, took awful long time and login took forever compared to how fast it normally is. Running Windows 11, as it came with when I bought it. Not really doing anything extreme with it either, the most "complex" thing I'm doing on it is running WSL2 I guess, but also a official Microsoft project and shouldn't impact the upgrade process as far as I know. The computer is just a couple of months old as well.