JAjamesmcintyre·Feb 25, 2018
I'm a long-time osx user. Recently I bought a used Surface Book for testing out some of the touch and stylus functionality. Also I liked the idea of having a high-quality stylus functionality for Adobe applications.
This set me on my own WSL journey which, long story short, ended with me realizing it's just not ready.
- you're still forced to use windows apps for any gui (ie when you open atom from bash it'll launch windows atom)
- there were numerous times when I npm i'd and it failed because some dependency was trying to do fancy things that WSL just didn't like
- performance running builds with webpack seemed significantly worse.
- i thought maybe windows 10 UI is up-to-par, even as a long-time mac user I thought maybe I could get down in Redmond town but... no... just no. It's the little things, the obvious things. You forget just how
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well thought, how precise, stable and intuitive osx's ui/ux is until you're thrown into Windows. Now, I still think windows touch and stylus integration is wonderful and I hope Apple finds a way to bring something like this to mac os. Also I understand that a mac user is naturally not going to feel at home with windows but I was on windows for probably a whole decade before I was on mac and so it's that it feels totally alien it's just... meh.
So then began my journey to finding a way to dual boot Ubuntu on the Surface Book with as close as full-support for touch/stylus/trackpad as possible. Some angel made drivers/software to enable support for the various Surface hardware on Ubuntu (https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface) and so I went through the process of getting all that together. Also I tried a few different Ubuntu desktop environments including Deepin and Pantheon (Elementary OS UI) and:
- wow, desktop linux has come a long way and chrome on ubuntu is almost 100% how you'd expect it to perform.
- wow jakeday got the hardware support near perfect
- wow, desktop linux has horrible support for touch/stylus as in... near zero. Sure the inputs work but there's no intuitive UX to support the inputs and in general it feels like a hack because of this.
As a last resort I ran a osx image in vmware and unfortunately the graphics performance was not workable. The Surface Book's screen is so high resolution that you have to trick osx into scaling the UI for it which does solve the "everything's tiny" problem while keeping everything super crispy but then it seems vmware and hardware just can't keep up. OSX would likely feel super performant running native on this hardware, but via vmware- nope.
So now I still casually use the Surface Book with Windows 10 but my late 2012 macbook pro is still my workhorse and it still feels as fast and capable as the day I got it.
I have been predicting a sort of convergence of macbook and iPad (macOS and iOS) for a long time. I've always thought Apple would attempt to take it's arm chips to the macbook. I hope that however macOS evolves, alongside or in a convergence with iOS, it supports a sort of multi-modal type flexibility where you feel like you can stand up from your desk, walk away with a tablet/detachable-display/phone and seamlessly continue your session. I understand the wisdom of letting a desktop environment be a great desktop environment while letting a tablet UX be a great tablet UX but I still think the future has room for a seamless interplay and some more flexibility.