You can have a similarly bad experience with Linux on a laptop; all these issues (except for virtual keyboard related ones) also occur there:

- EFI is a bit difficult with distributions when Secure Boot is enabled. Ubuntu and Fedora support it, if you choose a different distribution you may have to tinker, as evidenced in the post;

- camera: Well, Microsoft was doing fancy stuff here; and most distributions just don't support anything but UVC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class) style webcams. It's a pain point now, but may not be in a year or two. Also, depending on the lifestyle and the devices one uses, a non working camera may not be an issue at all;

- SSD: Yes, this may be painful, but... for me personal it works well enough. Networking does wonders ;-)

- Lap friendliness... I have had a Surface Pro 3 years ago, and with that device I would agree. With the Surface Go 2 it's way less of an issue. The device is just so much lighter. Works on the subway for me without fear or trouble so far.

Now on the "Why would anyone want this experience" point: I just love desktop Linux, and it's nice to have some full desktop Firefox or apps like rNote [1] on a small, portable device. It's nice to run the OS you know, be able to replicate the same experience on a small form factor device so that you can have it, when you need it, while also being able to use it as tablet - more and more touch friendly apps are available.[2] With GNOME Shell adapting to mobile [3], this experience is only going to get better.

[1]: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.flxzt.rnote

[2]: https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/

[3]: https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2022/05/30/towards-gnome-s...

> You can have a similarly bad experience with Linux on a laptop

Yes, but not with a laptop mentioned in an article called "I Finally Found a Solid Debian Laptop".

This is not a solid debian tablet, it's a shitty unsupported tablet. Thinkpads (t series) are solid linux laptops, with occasional mini quirks, this tablet is far from anything "solid".

Honestly, I have one. I put KDE Neon User Edition (based on 20.04) on it (a somewhat bad choice, as it does not ship a virtual keyboard by default yet, GNOME is generally better there), and it installed just fine.

Touch works, the Pen works (with pressure sensitivity) rotation works, WiFi and Bluetooth work, Standby (deep sleep, I put to sleep for 8 hours and it only lost 5%) works (including wake-up).

Non working: Webcams.

All that OOTB, without switching to a special kernel or similar. If that’s "shitty unsupported tablet" in your book that's ok, but in my book it's pretty cool and way better than what I've seen on my last ThinkPad (L380 Yoga) when I got it, where standby wouldn’t just work.

Debian supports UEFI with secure boot too so this must be some specific quirk.

Have you noticed a big problem with ZFS on 8GB of RAM? I've successfully ran fairly large (2TB, thousands of snapshots) zpools out of 4GB of RAM, with dedup off of course.

Since ZFS is the greatest filesystem in the world, I use ZFS -everywhere-. Including, on my very old Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (2013) with a slow dual core, and only 8GB of ram. ZFS works great, on that device I need to manually limit the ARC size so that it doesn't eat all my ram:

  # cat /etc/modprobe.d/tiny-modprobe.d-zfs.conf
  options zfs zfs_arc_max=2147483648

I don't use ZFS, so I can’t comment. Maybe the blogs author just wants to use that RAM for the web browser :-)

Not disagreeing with you per we, but I will note that the author may be judging the tablet as compared to other mobile devices running Linux. With the exception of the PinePhone and a few other devices Linux on mobile devices is truly painful/broken in most cases (and in ways that make this tablet look almost fully featured...).

Not true. Linux on BayTrail hardware is pretty much rock-solid by now (at least if you're running Fedora-derived distros). The thing is it can take many years to get to that level of support. It's absolutely normal for newly released hardware to be broken in many ways.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but isn't Android already Linux? What's the advantage of installing another distro?

I thought the whole point of Android is to make a curated touch friendly Linux experience. If you want a more traditional distro, wouldn't a touchscreen laptop (yoga etc.) be a better choice, if only for x86 support?

Android is running a Linux kernel, yes. But, as an enthusiast GNU+Linux desktop user you'll find that you can't do your linuxy stuff on Android - sure, termux does a lot, but it's just not the same.

The Surface Go 2 that the article is about, is an x86_64 device - I recently aquired one and it's really quite nice with Linux in my limited testing. The biggest difficulty with a standard desktop GNU+Linux on a tablet is that most distributions are not optimized for easy tablet use - KDE Neon User Edition e.g. does not come with a virtual keyboard preinstalled.

On Yoga style laptops: Well, they are easier to get started with, but they often are quite a big bigger and having those keys on the back all the time... It's doable, but if you want a "nice 10" tablet" experience these devices are just not what you will want: Too large, too thick, too heavy.

> The biggest difficulty with a standard desktop GNU+Linux on a tablet is that most distributions are not optimized for easy tablet use - KDE Neon User Edition e.g. does not come with a virtual keyboard preinstalled.

Ubuntu 22 on a Lenovo X1 Fold gave me the OSK without installing anything - though the touchscreen was not supported by default, the driver is under work cf https://github.com/quo/ithc-linux

Some distros do, and GNOME has been good to me too on many distributions with delivering a working virtual keyboard OOTB. KDE Neon, however, which I wanted to try after reading that KDE Plasma 5.25 has better tablet support, comes without a virtual keyboard (and AFAIK does not come with an easy option to install one, you need to know that it you have to install maliit-keyboard).

Android is a proprietary OS filled with spyware. Linux kernel is irrelevant.

Is that true even if you compile AOSP from source? (not being sarcastic here, just never looked into this)

You lose the spyware if you use AOSP (except any that’s baked into your OEM’s kernel blobs), but you also lose a lot of functionality. You can regain some by using a community-maintained AOSP-based OS like Lineage, but chances are that a bunch of device-specific hardware/software features will still be missing.

I am writing this from a Fairphone 4 with e/OS installed (AOSP based) and don't miss anything so far.

To add: my wife has a Samsung and can't add a shortcut for locking the phone on the lock screen (needed to enforce PIN) which the Fairphone enables.

I see, thank you for the explanation!

Yes, Android is Linux. That means that you can just install the GNU OS with the kernel that comes with the device, and get a GNU/Linux installation running on top of it.

But by doing that you get to maintain all the malware that comes builtin on the mobile OSes.

The OP wants to replace the kernel. But most mobile devices use very specific hardware that do not have drivers compatible with the standard kernel you get from your distro. Technically, the manufacturer should have to supply you the source of the drivers they use (so you could port them), but good luck enforcing any right of yours against a large company on the legal system (any country's one actually).

I wonder what tablet is used by GNOME developers.

It's pretty broken on the Pinephone too

Untrue. I'm no expert, but I have never had a problem setting up LineageOS on a Samsung - works like a charm, and I love it.

Lineage is not Linux in the sense that Debian is. They share the kernel and that's it.

As a person who has tried setting up Linux like 5-10 times over the years this sounds exactly like my experience and basically what I assume Linux use is always like.

It’s just like cars, there are people who are super comfortable just tinkering around with cars and fixing crap and say “this car is great” and if I tried to drive it it’d break down 5 minutes in and I would consider it a total loss.

I've been using Linux professionally for a decade, on many machines (desktop/laptop), and the compatibility is really hardware-dependent. It's "for tinkerers" on some hardware, and "fully mainstream" on other.

Choosing a Microsoft laptop to use Linux is asking for trouble :) I had two of them, and Microsoft had this awful idea of the connected standby, which caused standby/suspend problems (power-hungry standby, which is a very serious problem on a laptop). At least the older machines should now have a good upstream support, in other words, everything working out of the box, with the exception of touch (Linux is just not there).

Regarding other brands, it depends. I remember IBM/Lenovo (Thinkpads) as always just working out of the box. Dell used to be also very compatible, but paradoxically, the Dell XPS developer edition is marketing garbage (it's not very compatible as they claim).

I've installed Linux on a couple of budget computers and they worked fine. I suspect that low-end laptops tend to be much more compatible, since they use more common/cheap components.

Bluetooth has started to be compatible just in the last couple of years - bluez is poor software (and Ubuntu has been sloppy in handling it), but it finally reached a usable level.

I don't remember having to do any tweak on desktop machine, except the time where I had a very modern Ryzen that was supported by very recent kernels only.

Which makes sense. If manufacturers designed laptops exclusively for Linux—only writing Linux drivers and rarely even testing Windows during product development—how well do we think Windows would run?

Hardware designed to run one operating system isn't necessarily going to perform well with a different operating system, and expecting otherwise of every arbitrary machine on store shelves is unrealistic. Prospective buyers need to do research beforehand.

You can see with the Steam Deck. Valve is slowly releasing drivers over time but in early stages Windows was inefficient, sound didn't work or didn't work well, sleep wasn't snappy, the list goes on.

It had all the problems your average Linux install will encounter without the enthusiast-written drivers to work around manufacturers' lack of support.

That said, the Steam Deck seems to be the first non-enthusiast device where the manufacturer actually cares. Even laptops that get sold with Ubuntu preinstalled from the factory don't seem to receive that much support over the years.

I'd say pretty confidently that Lenovo has done quite a bit of caring over the years. I've had a bunch of T-series ThinkPads that have been super good under Linux.

This might have more to do with the glut of off-lease corporate ThinkPads being available at very competitive pricing for FOSS developers to pick up rather than any indication of Lenovo's commitment to FOSS.

> Choosing a Microsoft laptop to use Linux is asking for trouble :)

Not true anymore.

> I had two of them, and Microsoft had this awful idea of the connected standby, which caused standby/suspend problems (power-hungry standby, which is a very serious problem on a laptop).

When? Which models?

ACPI S01x when well done works better than ACPI S3, and Linux support for S01x is now getting quite good.

On a X1 nano, I've got less than 0.2%/h of power draw: so 10h of sleep consumes about 2% battery

On the X1 Fold, I was able to reduce that to about 0.5%/h after some workaround for Intel drivers bugs: cf https://csdvrx.github.io/ or just the graph https://csdvrx.github.io/X1_Fold_(20RL_20RK)_Optimization/pa...

It's still a work in progress, but I can't remember ACPI S3 consuming less that 5% overnight and resuming instantly.

> I don't remember having to do any tweak on desktop machine, except the time where I had a very modern Ryzen that was supported by very recent kernels only.

Laptops often need more tweaks than desktops.

Have you ever had anything that resembled the experience or a MacBook Air with a M1?

I have a windows running Lenovo t14 for work, and it’s a decent enough laptop but it’s sort of like the stone ages compared to my personal MacBook. It has a terrible mousepad, it’s bulky, it runs out of battery after a two hours even though its factory new (developer specs in non-tech enterprise), the screen isn’t very nice and it’s actually more expensive.

I ask because I kind of want to get out of the closed ecosystem. Not so much because I dislike Apple but because I figure that with the way things are going for big American tech companies I’ll likely dislike them sooner or later. But I’ve never found a Linux (or windows) laptop that came close to the daily usage of a MacBook Air. Obviously I’m not in need of a powerhouse or a computer, weight, battery life and a good mousepad is my primary requirements, but yeah.

Have you tried an LG Gram? I got myself one, it is one of the closest laptops to a macbook air M1:

- extremely light (my 14 inch is a little under 1kg), you'll absolutely feel the difference when holding it vs holding a macbook air M1, and it is very significant.

- great screen

- amazing keyboard

- the fan is very quiet, but the laptop can get a bit warm under load

- the touchpad is lacking on windows but is amazing on linux (I mainly use ubuntu / pop os)

- expect 9-10 hours battery life in most use cases, it sometimes goes as high as 14h+ if you're simply surfing the web/reading or as low as 6 hours on heavy use

When installing a linux distro, in some rare cases you might need to tweak a few bios option just to start the installation, but everything after that works out of the box.

That battery life is impressive! Thunderbolt 4 and a better selection of ports than the MacBook Air M1, also.

But, as great as the screen is, looks like it falls short of the 12" MacBook screen. Same 8GB of RAM in the base model as the M1, but memory bandwidth not the same. And the processor isn't going to keep up.

I mean, it's nice, but I picked the base model M1 Air about a year ago for $750 - still seems like the laptop to beat, if you can live with MacOS.

I quite like my work M1 Pro, but (to help coworkers with Mac problems while I was using a ThinkPad) I had an M1 Air 8GB from work for a while and I honestly found it really pretty bad because of the RAM limits. It seems like there's a floor against which MacOS bumps pretty hard if you want to use the machine for development-ish stuff and it reacts really poorly to memory starvation if you get ahead of yourself.

Having 16GB and up, though, an M1's fantastic. If I had to be resource constrained, though, I think I'd prefer something that handled Linux well.

Agreed, 8 GB is just not enough even for basic needs in the era of remote work and electron apps. I don’t know why they are continuing that as the base in this year’s MacBook Air M2, because it is just a worse user experience. These are already premium computers, even at the base models. I wish Apple would be a little bit more forward thinking about keeping users happy rather than saving a few pennies in the short term.

I’ll certainly look into them.

I have had excellent experiences with System76. They fully support Linux, and work hard to make sure the hardware works with Linux. Also, their support is very responsive, though limited to business hours.

Putting Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game.

I'm personally expecting Apple Silicon machines to become really good Linux devices within the next year. A killer team is working on it, and they can benefit from the game console effect—ie, Apple sells a limited number of models in large quantities.

Same. I follow a number of team members on twitter and can't wait for it to be a bit more complete. I'll buy an M1 or M2 at that point for sure.

Apple has no incentive to pick e.g. wifi chips with reasonably open specs. And history has pretty much proven that no amount of volunteer effort without specs will make Broadcom chips behave well.

Future Apple hardware being usable with Linux is not a bet I would make. I used to run Linux on a PowerPC iBook, and it's been downhill from there.

That would be the best option. My last MacBook lived for 7 years, ideally this one will do the same.

If you have an old MacBook lying unused, then Ubuntu tends to run out of the box on them. It is a lot lighter, so even though my 2014 MacBook Air is unusably sluggish with macOS, it runs Ubuntu 22.04 great.

This does not exist. System76 and some others do a good job at trying, but despite many efforts over the last 20 years, this just isn’t possible.

Consider that even the best Windows laptops are worse than MacBooks (and I would say this was true before the M1 but is inarguable now), despite the billions of dollars of investment from Intel, AMD, Dell, Microsoft, etc. I think the Surface line has historically had the closest experience for Windows, thanks to Microsoft's investments, but battery life and heat have been an issue on all x86 laptops for at least 5-7 years, with very recent improvements only coming from AMD and now on the 12th-Gen Intel processors. But nothing exists that matches the battery life and power/performance of the M-series. You can get a more powerful machine, but not one that will have battery life worth a damn.

And even as trackpads have improved with the Precision Touchpad drivers, Macs are just better here. Period.

If you don’t count Chromebooks (and I really don’t), there is no one investing anything close to what Microsoft and OEMs are in Linux, not just in software, but hardware, so even the best scenarios are going to fall short. It doesn’t help that the latest and greatest hardware takes to hit the kernel (understandable, of course), meaning you’ve got a lagging timeline from when the stuff is new/hot and when it works.

My Framework is quite good and with Linux, but it took a few months for drivers to be included in most distros (Fedora being so bleeding edge made it a real hero), and now 12th-gens are coming out and I don’t know the status of those chipsets (though WiFi 6E and the like are supported), and Framework cares about Linux and that community.

System 76 and Tuxedo basically just buy Chinese or Taiwanese laptops from Clevo or Tongfang and can make some adjustments to the firmware and hardware config, but they don’t control the whole stack. And even Purism, who sells itself as offering an Apple-like experience, falls embarrassingly short (like, their own firmware updates are bricking $2000 laptops running 2019/2020 specs. And the keyboards are terrible and their own Debian spin distro is not great).

So it’s amazing we have what we have. That we can buy pre-configured Linux laptops. But unless you want to do a Chromebook and tweak into run Linux apps, nothing has the experience you have on Windows, let alone Mac.

Someone will try to refute what I’ve said, but unless the hardware is very specific and the distro is very specific, you don’t get anything close. And it absolutely won’t have the power or niceties of a Mac. It just won’t.

System76 has started designing their own machines.

They haven’t designed their laptops yet.

Make sure you don't forget display nits. So many laptops not made by Apple are so dim that you don't want to use them. Apple is at 500 nits with the newest Air with an M2 chip. That's positively bright!

The dell XPS developer edition that comes with linux pre installed has worked great for me. What are your complaints?

These are two acknowledged issues on Ubuntu (which is supposed to be fully supported):

1. sleep draining batteries: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1808957

2. keyboard lights turning on even when disabled: https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/keyboard-light-keeps-turning...

The second is just annoying; the first is serious (for a laptop).

I've run debian on a non-dev xps 13 for years trouble-free.

My biggest gripe is docking station compatibility with the Dell TB16 which, to be fair, is largely own fault. Suspending the laptop while connected to three ext displays and input devices, then spinning it back up before re-connection produces some gnarly results.

Arch linux on non-dev xps 13 here. Install went smoothly and it's been working very well for the past few years. Admittedly, the trackpad is not as awesome as Apple's, but it's adequate by my standards.

AFAIK Macbooks are slso mostly supported, albeit with a lag (e.g ATM graphics supporton M1's GPU is not ready yet).

Also had to tweak kernel with a recent Ryzen GPU a few years ago on a desktop, but after that it worked. (Now the tweak isn't required anymore.)

I just went through trying to install Linux on my 2015 15” retina MacBook Pro (model 11,5 with Radeon dGPU) and it was not usable. Every distro I tried (Ubuntu, Pop OS, Fedora, and NixOS) had severe Bluetooth instability (most times the computer booted, Bluetooth worked for about 15 seconds after boot and then it would die completely until the next reboot). Graphics switching seems non functional on this model as well.

I’m looking for an alternative when Apple stops supporting Mac OS on this machine, and I was surprised at how flakey the hardware was in Linux on a 7 year old machine.

I have a 13" Macbook from the same year and it pretty much just works with Nixos. There was a bit of trouble getting Bluetooth working, but as I'm not using it much can't say for it's instability.

What is graphics switching, there is one (integrated) GPU, no?

I teach a university course for which we require students to install Linux on their Windows laptops, all of them different. These are overwhemingly inexperienced students that we give a short manual, mostly about tweaking a few bios settings before you insert the installation medium.

Of the 35 students in my class, 25 completed the installation without issue, with all hardware (never asked about fingerprint scanners) running fine. The rest required some help from expert googlers like me and some patience, in most cases related to Nvidia drivers. We got all but two to work fine or well enough in the end.

Having 5 to 10 consecutive bad experiences sounds like a fluke to me, given the 70% instant success rate I've seen.

It's not just about getting it to run. The devil is in the details: sleep mode, bluetooth, power usage, etc etc. Usually, the first 90% went great, and the last 10% took whole weekends to fix.

I included that in 'running fine', though admittedly some of these laptops may not be showing great battery life and may experience the occasional issue waking up from sleep mode. These students have been using their Linux installations for almost a year now; enough time for any subtle problems to emerge.

> I teach a university course for which we require students to install Linux on their Windows laptops

Can’t they use a normal cloud instance or a VM?

Our first year consists of a pretty intense dive into programming, with many assignments for which we provide starter material. And for that we want all students to run a predictable environment. Also, dual booting helps some students to cleanly separate course work from gaming. :-)

A few students (those whose laptops we could not convince to run Linux) work within a VM, but that experience is comparatively miserable.

You should try some cloud development environments - could give people a completely predictable environment.

This, Microsoft needs to identify this institution for eradication.

To be fair every time I’ve tried it has been on a cheap or free computer and I haven’t needed to get it running… I’d probably have gotten better results of it was my only option or if I went out and tried to plan my computer purchase to make Linux work. And this is extending back like 20 years, so it has, I’m sure, gotten better somewhat.

I don’t think it’s a Linux problem. It’s a trying to run Linux on arbitrary hardware problem.

On one hand that’s kind of the whole point of open-source. Because it can be extended to support almost anything it usually is extended over time by someone else that has already had the same problems you do getting a thing to work. That’s not the same as just assuming everything already works without checking though.

There are some very suitable laptops that would have had support out of the box.

Oh yeah definitely. I bet the experience would be at least a little better if I had ever wanted to switch to Linux and spent money on the effort.

But I bought the (perhaps unspoken?) promise that it would be an easy test drive to find a crappy old laptop and throw Ubuntu on it… and those test drives ended up with me not wanting to switch to Linux.

> As a person who has tried setting up Linux like 5-10 times over the years this sounds exactly like my experience and basically what I assume Linux use is always like.

It's not my experience at all. When I buy a computer to run Linux I normally get one with Linux preinstalled (normally the latest LTS Ubuntu). Then if I ever need to upgrade to a more recent version of Ubuntu it generally goes smoothly.

Pop!_OS is a piece of cake to install and has been my daily driver on a Lenovo CX1 for the past 3-4 years. (I’m assuming your comment is referring to Linux in general, not on a tablet). And I’m not a former CS major or anything. I’m on the verge of recommending it to my dad who only has experience with windows machines.

Lenovo hardware is known for being Linux compatible. Microsoft hardware is not. Let us know how it went when you try to install popos on a Microsoft Surface 2.

The Intel monoculture in laptops has been a boon for linux compatibility. A random mid-range laptop with the an Intel CPU, Intel WiFi chipset, and integrated graphics will usually run linux straight out of the box. Most webcams in laptops are UVC devices so also work.

Desktops are somewhat more hit-and-miss, as are discrete GPUs (I hear the newer AMD GPU drivers are much improved, but have no personal experience with them).

Most Dell equipment supports Linux well, out of the box.

I agree, the hurdle is too high for most still, but I’m expecting a System76 tablet or Framework Tablet.

It’s only a matter of time till one of the linux-first companies does it, and it’s been a 30 year wait already, what’s 1/2/3 more.

Well actually I guess there’s PineTab[0] but something with better specs is bound to come around

[0]: https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/

> Well actually I guess there’s PineTab[0] but something with better specs is bound to come around

I monitor their news section almost daily to follow the development of their devices, especially the PineNote and PineTab. I've almost given up about the PinePhone however because of my reading difficulties with smallish screens; Having no needs for a smartphone, I've found that a 4G capable dumbphone working as hotspot plus this Thinkpad are the perfect pair.

It's not the first time I read a review from somebody, "it's great!", they say, and immediately after they start listing all the things that are not in fact great.

Reminds me of that meme that shows Brits using "it could be worse" to mean anything less than average, and "not too bad" for everything else, while Americans say "awesome!" for any kind of sentiment, good or bad.

I'm not saying OP is American, just that adjectives in reviews have lost most of their meaning.

I suspect it's a linux "enthusiast" thing, rather than an american thing.

Virtually every thread about linux on laptop starts out with someone claiming that it runs perfect on this or that hardware, then 20 other people chime in with all the things that actually don't work on the same same machine, and finally the original poster concedes with some weasel statement along the lines of "well it works for me". And the year-of-linux-on-x circle of life continues...

OEMs sometimes will do things like use different Wifi modules (among other things) on the same exact model and it can be somewhat luck of the draw as to what works well with Linux.

Distro choice also has a big impact. Like I tried Guix on my P14s and haven't been able to get Wifi working even with the latest non-libre kernel among other issues. Literally EVERYTHING works perfectly on Ubuntu 22.04 despite in theory non-libre Guix having a newer kernel so something must be going on there.

Your WiFi module in any ThinkPad should be a M2 card and there's a wide selection of alternatives for about thirty bucks.

Agreed, this is why I find Chromebook, with its great Linux container support, so nice. I know the author mentioned he tried this on a Lenovo Chromebook and said it was dog slow. I have it running on my Pixelbook and with maxed out RAM it worked well.

Soooooo sad there hasn't been much news on a new Pixelbook, was such a great device.

Can you properly install a browser other than chrome on a chromebook these days?

you can install firefox on linux and run it as an app in chromeos but the performance isn't great on pixelbook i7. I ran into a lot of issues with regard to networking between the chromeos layer and the linux layer, its like they're nat'd or something rather than bridged, so good luck running a test environment for some things without extra steps.

I agree with you, but also think for a linux experience on a device that wasn’t meant for it, it’s par for the course. Of the above, the only critical flaw would be the camera not working, the rest is manageable.

It’s been a while, but updating a DELL laptop ended up with flacky sound that wouldn’t work for video calls, and the video card drivers sometimes crapping the bed and bringing the system down with it.

Sometimes these issues can be fixed by adjusting process priorities. Try giving Pulseaudio a higher priority.

Giving pulseaudio a higher priority to avoid it bringing the system down... ?

No... if videoconferencing software runs slow, with choppy audio and low framerates, try prioritizing the sound daemon and whatever videoconferencing software you use so that the scheduler makes sure those processes run in a timely manner.

Yeah, have to agree, wish they actually made half of that it work because it can, as they say it requires _effort_ to setup properly,...

Tbh the surface pro 3 and sp4 were about at the same level of fiddlyness, but the battery life was just up there with a normal laptop, definately not ipad territory.

This is what Linux true believers put up with, no matter what laptop or tablet platform.

that's pretty good for Debian!

This is my experience with every “Linux works on…” post. It’s always caveated down to an unreasonable definition of working.