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.

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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.