My own belief is that Microsoft didn't enter the laptop market to dominate it but to force the competition to get off their lazy backsides and start thinking again. We've had a stagnated market for over a decade and it's taken the software & keyboard kids to initiate change. Apple has had to improve it's hardware to compete with both Surface Pro & Book; HP and Lenovo have had to reconsider their clamshell laptop propositions too.
Moving beyond a simple single-OS laptop replacement a growing number of penguinistas have noticed the Surface and blogged about supporting it. Personally, I'd gotten to the point with Ubuntu 15.10 on SP3 where I was pretty much using it for everything work-wise - bar Visio and Excel situations, firmware updates for the Microsoft hardware and games or modern apps such as movie streaming or Kodi.
I don't use Windows for email and have my PGP keys available only on non-Windows OS's; all my remote work is done on servers via SSH and I lock drives up with a multi-platform encryption solution. Ubuntu handled all of that and seemed to get the most support for SP3 out of all the Debian-based distros.
Ubuntu didn't really do brilliantly with touch-screen but the stylus was a pretty good mouse replacement (assuming you don't need a right click...). The SP4 stylus was a big improvement on the SP3 variant - and didn't go to sleep at random whilst you were using it.
A big plus. And not generating a BSOD when you attempt to disable power management would have been a bigger plus. Although Windows 10 - in all it's greatness - decided to fail software licensing management services without any bidding on the replacement SP3, meaning I had to deploy W8.1Ent anyway...
Then the connector between the SP3 and the type cover stopped detecting anything - I have Type Cover 3 & 4 so tried both - and with John Lewis' support policies meaning a 3 week period without a laptop whilst they repair it; I was running out of options as I need a laptop to earn money / work on client site.
Perhaps rashly, I elected to buy a Surface Pro 4, take an image of my old SP3 and deploy straight onto the SP4.
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| I used dd more in the last month than I have in years |
Dick move Microsoft.
I wasn't prepared to disable the driver signing checks and manually install 100+ drivers. Looking forward another 12 months I would not have thanked myself for the maintenance overhead.
After a lot of research and swearing I gave up. Reset the PC.
Plan B. Good thing I took a backup of the SP4 drive before I started eh? Redeploy the boot partition, the W10 partition and the W10 recovery image (a partition at the back of the drive) and run the re-deployment.
What's this? I can put Debian straight onto the SP4? Skip a few kernel versions and maybe get that Surface Pro driver support OotB? Why mess about with downstream distros like Ubuntu? A big thumbs up to Alexander Clouter who's been persistent enough to plug away at Debian 8 on the SP4.
All went fairly well until the reboot then I discovered a problem where putting the home mount point on a LUKS provided partition seemed to keep taking out the installer. Seemed to get confused, dismount the home partition cryptsetup preventing selection for home.
I tried putting all mount points into one partition and got Debian 8 loaded on it. But as soon as I got further into the configuration (around the kernel rebuild) things started going wrong. Despite long hours of research I couldn't get initramfs or hid_multitouch to deliver the right state prior to kernel build. Although I sorted out the sources I think it just needed someone with more linux experience to resolve the errors when it wandered off Alexanders plan.
More swearing. I used a couple of the old SP3 pens as darts on a dartboard and chucked some kittens in a wood chipper to make myself feel better.
At this point I had to carry the old SP3, a usb keyboard and the stylus on to client site and wasn't happy. I'd got plenty of other things to do (on top of the consultancy work during the day) and paperwork to sort out.
Right - so plan B stuffed. Plan C. This time I already had the partitions set up so just invoked the PC reset / W10 recovery process. W10 set up and updates re-installed I just grabbed the ISO for Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop and plodded through the deployment.
Same issue with the LUKS and separate home mount point - eventually gave up on the idea altogether and created a shared encrypted partition which is usable by W10 and Ubuntu, along with separate partitions for later use.
Thanks to Spideroak it was pretty easy to download and re-deploy all those custom .bashrc and .bash_alias type moments - and Evolution backups that I use to replicate my environment across machines.
Finally Operational
Windows 10 is an utter disappointment. If I'd never seen Windows 8 I would have loved it as it's a great step forward from Windows 7. It makes even more sense when you use it on a touch screen device like a Surface and with the stylus & OneNote the whole thing takes on new meanings in meetings.However my faith in Windows 10 is gone - 8.1 was a pinnacle in user experience and there's a lot of it's logical workflows that I hope will one day be amalgamated into 10; e.g. VPN - the charms allowed me to select a configured VPN adapter whereas in the W10 right-side menu it opens the control panel VPN settings page - a wholly unnecessary screen jump for an "on/off" operation. For now though it's a step backwards.
W10 also has a recently introduced "undocumented feature" which has touch-screen and stylus stop responding seemingly at random. I'm pretty much steering clear but OneNote, Excel and Visio keep that productivity link - there's nothing that comes close on Linux unfortunately. The majority of my work is done in Linux - Architool, LibreOffice, Evolution and Office365 Enterprise (depending on the client).
Game streaming from an Xbox One though is a huge plus for W10 and the new processor & cooling fan doesn't sound like a helicopter on take-off when the slightest CPU utilisation spike hits. Did I mention that I like it that the SP4 pen doesn't fall asleep at random whilst you're using it?
Security Concerns
After all of the recent nag-malware, privacy issues and Microsoft’s collaboration with various data collection schemes I'm left only with concern that my security and data investigation work would potentially be compromised by continuing to use the ecosystem in any great way.I've already encountered a swathe of spear phishing attempts using email addresses only available to the subjects of spam hunts or AV firms (more of that another time) and not reading my emails on Windows is good way to cut out 99% of that threat vector. The rest I can deal with via opsec & security solutions on Linux.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and what I should have done was buy a replacement [new] SP3 i7 and just redeployed the machine image from old to new. Maybe there would have been some software licensing tied to hardware ID's - or perhaps a re-sign of secure boot certificates. But nothing as relentless as the SP4 option or as expensive. It has not proved value for money and I'll not be buying an SP5 unless it's device vendors provide drivers for the open source community.
