[ChuckMcM]

I wasn't really surprised by this, I've got a Surface Book (ordered after the announcement) and so far have been very pleased with the hardware, and hoping the software can catch up. For me, to replace a paper book and paper notebook you have to have a great reading experience and a great drawing experience. For me, the Surface Pro 4 has both of those.

That said, I'll probably end up getting the tablet version to augment the Surface Book unless they can fix detach. Way too often I try to detach and it won't because something is unable to release, and when I'm in "clipboard" mode there are no ports on the clipboard. I can get around that partially by using the dock which has ports but I'd really like a USB-C port and a micro-SD card slot on the display half.

[nextos]

It's really excellent harware. But sadly it's not very usable in Linux yet [1]. I'd love to use a fanless Surface with a tiling window manager as my daily driver.

But it comes nowhere close to my MBA 2012 (used by Linus for sometime) in terms of Linux compatibility. Almost perfect with a stock kernel except for really minor problems (no battery ACPI ticks when it discharges).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/surfacelinux

[ChuckMcM]

Linux support is, as you say, non-existent. That might be better with the new Dell Skylake laptops. That said, I've never found a pen-aware Linux sketching program that had any utility and I don't have the time to write one.

[pwnna]

Sketching or note taking? Xournal is a pretty good note taking software and I've been using it for several years at this point.

[nextos]

Yep, xournal was the one I had in mind.

For the remaining stuff I'm completely keyboard-driven. Yet I prefer Surfaces to regular laptops. This is for ergonomic reasons.

I find it easy to place them split from the keyboard, which makes a great mini desktop. Also I can hold them as a tablet if I'm reading or surfing casually.

[nextos]

Perhaps also with the new X1 tablet?