I had a Surface Pro 2 for a while, and it was pretty great. But, I couldn't shake the memory of an instructor telling me about how Microsoft did a bunch of great work revamping Windows Vista, but was forced by the US government to basically pull back on all the changes that would've forced businesses to upgrade their stuff. As he put it, "You think Microsoft can't hire the best engineers in the world?"
So, I feel that while everything looks nice on the surface (heh) and this new direction of theirs is great in terms of opening up their code base, I still feel like it's a waste of time using Windows when Microsoft is always going to be crippled by its own success behind the scenes as long as they still are dominant.
So, I sold the Surface Pro and went back to my old laptop. No regrets.
I use Ubuntu Mate for a laptop that's 8 years old and is currently serving as a media PC. For my main laptop, I use Fedora/Ubuntu, depending on where I'm at professionally. Right now, I like having Ubuntu maintain updates for Vagrant and Virtualbox for me, since I don't have to worry about manually adding repositories and taking care of dependencies myself. But I love how clean and committed to free software Fedora is, as well as the fact it always has much more recent software than Ubuntu. Fedora requires a bit of fiddling to get licensed stuff (like for mp3/DVD codecs) though whereas Ubuntu is able to get away with providing it in its repositories due to Canonical not being incorporated in the US.
I'm thinking of moving to Arch Linux for the rolling releases (meaning that I'll never have to do a complete reformat to install the latest version of a distro again, ideally).
On servers, I use CentOS for the stability.
TL;DR: On desktops: Ubuntu for easy software installation and Fedora for minimal base/up-to-date software support. For servers: CentOS.
I had a Surface Pro 2 for a while, and it was pretty great. But, I couldn't shake the memory of an instructor telling me about how Microsoft did a bunch of great work revamping Windows Vista, but was forced by the US government to basically pull back on all the changes that would've forced businesses to upgrade their stuff. As he put it, "You think Microsoft can't hire the best engineers in the world?"
So, I feel that while everything looks nice on the surface (heh) and this new direction of theirs is great in terms of opening up their code base, I still feel like it's a waste of time using Windows when Microsoft is always going to be crippled by its own success behind the scenes as long as they still are dominant.
So, I sold the Surface Pro and went back to my old laptop. No regrets.
Will your laptop run Windows, or are you on Linux?
I'm running Linux full-time on it now, but I was using Windows 8.1 with no problems previously.
I know this is a Windows thread but I'm just curious what distro you settled on?
Heh, does one ever really settle?
I use Ubuntu Mate for a laptop that's 8 years old and is currently serving as a media PC. For my main laptop, I use Fedora/Ubuntu, depending on where I'm at professionally. Right now, I like having Ubuntu maintain updates for Vagrant and Virtualbox for me, since I don't have to worry about manually adding repositories and taking care of dependencies myself. But I love how clean and committed to free software Fedora is, as well as the fact it always has much more recent software than Ubuntu. Fedora requires a bit of fiddling to get licensed stuff (like for mp3/DVD codecs) though whereas Ubuntu is able to get away with providing it in its repositories due to Canonical not being incorporated in the US.
I'm thinking of moving to Arch Linux for the rolling releases (meaning that I'll never have to do a complete reformat to install the latest version of a distro again, ideally).
On servers, I use CentOS for the stability.
TL;DR: On desktops: Ubuntu for easy software installation and Fedora for minimal base/up-to-date software support. For servers: CentOS.
Thanks for the info!