
How’s the development environment on the Surface Laptops? - uyuioi
I have had a hell of a time with Apple lately and quite honestly I don’t think they deserve the thousands of dollars I give them for the MacBook Pro 15”. I’ve had the power brick die on a one month old device. Catalina is one of the most buggy operating versions I’ve ever used.<p>For those on the surface laptop range what’s the development experience like on windows? How’s the power in the 16GB models and are you enjoying the laptop?
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nailer
Moved from macOS to Windows in 2016. And yes, obviously apple no longer has a
dedicated macOS group and tells regular people who want laptops to run iPads.
macOS doesn't get a lot of love.

Surface is basically just a high quality Windows machine. The dev environment,
for most of the HN crowd, will be WSL2, which means Ubuntu 16.04 or 20.04.
apt-get is way better than homebrew.

Surface specific:

\- I've had good experiences with the Microsoft store, if they exist in your
country.

\- Alcantara can get gross after a year of palm sweat and personally I find it
tough to clean.

Surface is cool, you can also look at Lenovo kit or the Dell XPS 13.

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uyuioi
I’m definitely looking for premium support when something goes wrong. I think
Apple no longer offers this service in real terms.

Ubuntu is ok. I’ve used it before. OSX is usually very good. Just Catalina is
dreadful. I’ve picked a surface because it’s as close to the Mac as I can
find.

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nailer
Personally I think OS X peaked in 2010, and the keyboard debacle sealed the
deal for leaving. But fair enough.

The terminal you'll be using is Windows Terminal. It's good, and has a lot of
attention from Microsoft.

What language are you coding in?

Personally a Surface Book 3, non Alcantara is the best dev machine. They all
have great keyboards though. If you want to save money Surface Laptop 2 is on
sale.

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uyuioi
I’ll see some YouTube videos about Microsoft terminal. If the new Ryzen CPU is
in the latest surface laptops I think my mind will definitive made up.

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wprapido
A Windows dev here who transitioned from OSX back in '14\. Surface is
basically MS flagship, a highend Windows machine. Speaking of dev environment,
mine is: \- WSL \- Virtualised Linux \- Remote Linux machines

Works like a charm.

