The popularity of Microsoft’s Surface is the least realistic thing on TV
I don’t know about other people but I’m really unhappy with my surface. I’ve bought it with a hope that I would have one device for everything - a tablet and a laptop and ability to do handwriting but all I’ve got is constant annoyance. I wasn’t expecting it to be very performance, but at least basic stuff could be covered.<p>OneNote for example keeps bringing up screen keyboard when I’m using my pen. At the same time screen board sometimes doesn’t appear when I tap on an edit field in Edge or other UWP software - it flakes, sometimes I need to tap it twice or triple to bring screen keyboard, sometimes it doesn’t work at all I need to reach for button in start panel.<p>In tablet mode, window decorations appear on slightest mishap on the edge of the screen and hide important controls in windows and there is no gesture or button to hide it back, you just sit here for like 5 seconds waiting for that thing to hide and allow you to switch to that tab you wanted in Edge&#x2F;Chrome.<p>After recent update the camera stopped working in UWP, so no video in skype anymore for me. Both of them, front and back “Some app using you camera”. Not there is no such app. If I turn it off and turn it back on in BIOS then it works once, that back to “Some app already uses you camera”<p>No CalDAV&#x2F;CardDav for 5 freaking years even though the protocol is implemented - you can hack you way around by creating iCloud account and changing server addresses, but it’s flakes too - doesn’t work for mail, only for calendar and contants, so I need to have two separate accounts for my fastmail.<p>260 characters limit for path length in file system is just a joke in 2017. I can’t install node - installer fails because of the path length limit. Well, I can if I install it into C:\ but I don’t want to install it into C:\.<p>No decent terminal emulators and yes, I’ve tried Hyper.js, yes this is the best you can get, but it’s not even close - it doesn’t allow me to have keyboard shortcuts I want to and this breaks my workflow badly. After years of WSL being in work they could have invested sometime into making standard windows ConsoleHost or whatever it is a bit more usable.<p>When it comes to WSL the situation is “it works until it doesn’t”. Doing simple stuff - yes, it works ok but try to build large java project in it with maven. IO performance is so awful then it takes 1 hour and a half to build a project that builds in 10 minutes on my mac. Ok, my mac is more powerful but not to the point of 9 times difference.<p>Explorer. Boy, do I have to say stuff about this crap. That thing gets laggy for no reason. The latest thing I had was that whenever I play DRMed music through Groove Music it just kills Explorer performance. All animations get laggy, alt tab takes couple seconds to redraw the screen, resizing explorer window lags like Linux with 3D thing enabled back in 2007. I’m not using Groove anymore and things improved a bit but it still gets a bit choppy and I need to restart explorer and restart sound system for some reason in order to fix that. I even have written a script “makeWindowsGreatAgain.ps” which does restarting of explorer and sound service.<p>Dock. I don’t know what is wrong with that thing but when I have my 4K Dell (not that Dell that they have on they Q&amp;A site) connect it blinks. SOmetimes quite often, sometimes it doesn’t blink for hours but it keeps blinking.<p>Power saving settings in windows. Boy, is it peace of crap. The setting is “You block me, I sleep for 15 minutes then I hibernate”. Oh, you wanted to quickly use me? Nope, wait for me going through POST and all this shit. CHange settings? Nope, no change, gotta hack the registry.<p>Updates - well, many people have said a lot about SUDDEN reboots in most inconvenient times.<p>AutoHotkey - I wanted to automate something and bring keyboard shortcuts I have for managing windows in my mac and Linux. Well, it can do it except that sometimes when it brings window it doesn’t bring it but just highlight the icon on taskbar and you need to press it twice.<p>Having said all that, the hardware is a marvel. The cooling system keeps it as low as 70 under most hard load without visible throttling. THe sound system is better than my mac - at least I like the sound in headphones better. Speakers are awesome and done in a right way - they are facing listener so the sound is much crisper and louder than in those iPad Pro speakers which are facing back - I don’t understand that solution at all. Pen is awesome and for writing feels much better than Apple Pencil. I do miss eraser on other side of the pen when I use my iPad with Apple Pencil.<p>So whenever I use my Surface I feel like I’m fighting with a system instead of using it. I need to hack registry here and there and don’t forget to hack it again after certain updates. Here and there are bugs and it behaves in a wrong way. Palm rejection in OneNote sucks, backend devtools suck a bit less now but still suck and the most important things is all of this quirks are flaky, they are not stable. If they would be constantly broken, I’d write a script or find a workaround but not, it works until SUDDENLY it doesn’t.
WHenever I with my Surface I feel constantly stressed because I don’t even no will the certain hotkey work or not, will it do what I want right now or will it flake. I can’t work on a machine like that.<p>So I’m typing it from my iPad Pro with Logitech keyboard case right now.
I’ve bought Notability app for handwriting and boy, is it good (APple Pencil still sucks a mile compared to MS pen). I do all my life tasks on iPad now and for development I run T25 with Linux with i3 as my personal machine and I have mac from my employer as my work machine. Those two set in a way that they have same keyboard shortcuts for windows manipulation and other stuff. The dream to have one device keeps being just a dream (And I had soooo much hope for Windows Continuity back in the WinPhone days...)