This statement is fundamentally wrong. Asking enterprise users to settle for 8GB of memory in a premium $1,299 machine in 2026 is the definition of trading off performance and will tarnish the Surface brand’s reputation for long-term reliability.
In what world are surfaces reliable? All I hear from people who get them from work are what absolute pieces of shit these things are.
I use a Surface Pro 9, I bought it new specifically to install Linux on it.
Uninstalled Windows 11 one hour after it’s first bootup and installed Fedora on it, and I am pretty sure most of it’s problems are caused by Windows. On Linux, it is stone cold and dead silent when I am browsing the web, editing text, programming etc. I get about 6 hours of freedom when I got VSCodium and some browser windows open.
For sub 5 minute multicore workloads, the metal case eats all that heat up fairly quickly and I can say the device has very good thermal design. Though it does heat up to “hurts to touch” temperatures when I got hour long heavy workloads like compiling the linux kernel, I did expect that because it is an Intel after all.
I don’t really mind overheating since I don’t hold the device in my hands when I am compiling a giant project, what matters is that it doesn’t heat up in my hands when I am watching movies and stuff.
Plus; my favourite desktop GNOME is wonderful on touchscreens, I love their HIG, it is so comfortable. I can’t imagine the poor souls having to navigate Windows UI on a touchscreen.
My surface pro is okay whenever I have to take a windows laptop to a job site. The unreliability comes from Windows 11, but the hardware has been fine.
Hell you can have an overspec’d gaming PC and Windows still sucks the life out of it.
No, I am talking about the hardware. At least 4 seperate people I’ve spoken to had nothing but issues with work assigned surfaces. At least a cursory google turned up a few threads with similar sentiments.
I’ve bought a Surface Go 2 a few years back and the startup time has steadily risen from a poor ~2min to well over 5min. But ever since I’ve deactivated secure boot and installed Debian with Plasma, it’s become my beloved workhorse with a boot time of <1min after entering the LVM key.
Surfaces are great hardware for the (old) price. A pity hardware’s becoming unaffordable…
From my favorite e-waste retailer I saw that the pricing of surface go 2 and 3 is enticing and I wanted to try them - but with Linux. With Linux is usable, right? Plasma can recognize tablet mode automatically?
I do mean with Linux. I bought it with Widows on and eventually put Debian on it. KDE Plasma already does a wonderful tablet mode out of the box and it’s getting better. The stylus isn’t all that reliable yet.
I have a 2020 surface laptop that’s still performing admirably. I’ve been consistently using it the entire time and have seen no drop in performance, even after updating to Windows 11. Though I don’t use copilot, or many Windows apps for that matter…
They are trash like any other laptop as thin and unventilated as that.
I mean, it depends on what you’re using a laptop for.
Like you, I have pretty consistently also pointed out, when people talk about, say, doing heavy LLM crunching on laptops, that the form factor just is not great for heat dissipation or using a lot of power.
But, I mean, that’s not everything that people do on a laptop. I’m writing a comment on a Lemmy Web page right now. That’s not a terribly compute-intensive task.
Honestly, what irks me more about thin laptops is that they invariably have limited battery size. I’d be quite happier with a thicker laptop if it meant 100 Wh batteries, but most laptop vendors have smaller batteries. Lithium batteries are a lot cheaper in 2026 than they were some decades back. A lot of laptops ship with something like a 50Wh battery. Sure, it’s great to shave down cost, and a lot of consumers don’t think about battery life when buying a laptop, but in 2026, it’s less than ten cents per watt-hour for lithium-ion cells. From my perspective, the return here is just not great.
Yeah, we’ve also generally improved power efficiency, and USB PD is a thing, so you can carry powerstations, but I’d rather have a laptop that knows how much time it has left and don’t need to haul out an external battery and eat up a USB-C port. And you can always do something useful with laptop battery life. Brighter screens. More USB-connected devices. Degrading your battery less over time by not completely charging and discharging it. More fan cooling, more CPU capability, more GPU capability. The only people who don’t get anything out of more battery are people who always use their laptop as a portable desktop, never use it unless it’s plugged into wall power.
There’s some weight argument, maybe, but if that’s what you want, back when lithium batteries were more expensive, a number of laptop vendors used to provide the option of smaller batteries, often shipping laptops with an option of a smaller battery or a larger (more expensive) one. That could still be done today, and if you have a smaller battery, the laptop is lighter.
I can maybe understand someone arguing some thinness benefits from an ergonomic standpoint, but…desktop keyboards are almost always thicker than laptops. Desktop touchpads that I’ve seen generally are as well. If, given a situation where you don’t have size constraints for actual usage, users choose thicker devices, it’s hard for me to see the ergonomics argument for a laptop form factor.
In general a mobile device should not be running windows
Should not be used for heavy lifting
Should not be a desktop drop-in replacement
Should not be expensive. Or at least, not THAT expensive.
It still baffles my mind that I can use an android phone docked to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and have a better experience on the go than using a laptop that costs 3 times as much as that entire setup. People have done this on YouTube, it’s a great watch.
The issue imho is that consumers that buy laptops have no idea what they are buying so companies can get away with pretty much anything. If it turns on and runs chrome and excel the user is happy to spend $1500… For some stupid reason…
At my last job while doing a lot of win 11 computer replacements, I managed to snag a couple of laptops that were going to be ewasted. One I keot for myself was an early surface. SSD and RAM are soildered to the motherboard so no upgrade or replacement path. Runs warm and the cpu is kinda trash.
Whatever, free computer is free and running mint its usually fine.
Soldered computer components shouldn’t even exist. There are way more downsides with it than up sides - of course it might be faster, but what’s the point if in a year or 2 the capacity will be insufficient. What do you do then? Toss it in the trash?
Honestly, we are going technologically behind. Rather than making proper standards for modularity, they rather make up dozen of excuses of how soldered is actually superior.
In what world are surfaces reliable? All I hear from people who get them from work are what absolute pieces of shit these things are.
I use a Surface Pro 9, I bought it new specifically to install Linux on it.
Uninstalled Windows 11 one hour after it’s first bootup and installed Fedora on it, and I am pretty sure most of it’s problems are caused by Windows. On Linux, it is stone cold and dead silent when I am browsing the web, editing text, programming etc. I get about 6 hours of freedom when I got VSCodium and some browser windows open.
For sub 5 minute multicore workloads, the metal case eats all that heat up fairly quickly and I can say the device has very good thermal design. Though it does heat up to “hurts to touch” temperatures when I got hour long heavy workloads like compiling the linux kernel, I did expect that because it is an Intel after all.
I don’t really mind overheating since I don’t hold the device in my hands when I am compiling a giant project, what matters is that it doesn’t heat up in my hands when I am watching movies and stuff.
Plus; my favourite desktop GNOME is wonderful on touchscreens, I love their HIG, it is so comfortable. I can’t imagine the poor souls having to navigate Windows UI on a touchscreen.
My surface pro is okay whenever I have to take a windows laptop to a job site. The unreliability comes from Windows 11, but the hardware has been fine.
Hell you can have an overspec’d gaming PC and Windows still sucks the life out of it.
No, I am talking about the hardware. At least 4 seperate people I’ve spoken to had nothing but issues with work assigned surfaces. At least a cursory google turned up a few threads with similar sentiments.
Your experience is still anecdotal and moot.
Work assigned laptops are usually treated very poorly and die early.
Surfaces have pretty solid hardware (repairablity like is like Mac’s) and they work pretty well with Linux.
Never heard of such a thing? Care to elaborate?
Not that I’m defending Windows, it’s a POS
I’ve bought a Surface Go 2 a few years back and the startup time has steadily risen from a poor ~2min to well over 5min. But ever since I’ve deactivated secure boot and installed Debian with Plasma, it’s become my beloved workhorse with a boot time of <1min after entering the LVM key.
Surfaces are great hardware for the (old) price. A pity hardware’s becoming unaffordable…
You mean with Windows?
From my favorite e-waste retailer I saw that the pricing of surface go 2 and 3 is enticing and I wanted to try them - but with Linux. With Linux is usable, right? Plasma can recognize tablet mode automatically?
I do mean with Linux. I bought it with Widows on and eventually put Debian on it. KDE Plasma already does a wonderful tablet mode out of the box and it’s getting better. The stylus isn’t all that reliable yet.
What what other people in this thread are saying, Linux on a surface is really solid.
I have a 2020 surface laptop that’s still performing admirably. I’ve been consistently using it the entire time and have seen no drop in performance, even after updating to Windows 11. Though I don’t use copilot, or many Windows apps for that matter…
They are trash like any other laptop as thin and unventilated as that.
I mean, it depends on what you’re using a laptop for.
Like you, I have pretty consistently also pointed out, when people talk about, say, doing heavy LLM crunching on laptops, that the form factor just is not great for heat dissipation or using a lot of power.
But, I mean, that’s not everything that people do on a laptop. I’m writing a comment on a Lemmy Web page right now. That’s not a terribly compute-intensive task.
Honestly, what irks me more about thin laptops is that they invariably have limited battery size. I’d be quite happier with a thicker laptop if it meant 100 Wh batteries, but most laptop vendors have smaller batteries. Lithium batteries are a lot cheaper in 2026 than they were some decades back. A lot of laptops ship with something like a 50Wh battery. Sure, it’s great to shave down cost, and a lot of consumers don’t think about battery life when buying a laptop, but in 2026, it’s less than ten cents per watt-hour for lithium-ion cells. From my perspective, the return here is just not great.
Yeah, we’ve also generally improved power efficiency, and USB PD is a thing, so you can carry powerstations, but I’d rather have a laptop that knows how much time it has left and don’t need to haul out an external battery and eat up a USB-C port. And you can always do something useful with laptop battery life. Brighter screens. More USB-connected devices. Degrading your battery less over time by not completely charging and discharging it. More fan cooling, more CPU capability, more GPU capability. The only people who don’t get anything out of more battery are people who always use their laptop as a portable desktop, never use it unless it’s plugged into wall power.
There’s some weight argument, maybe, but if that’s what you want, back when lithium batteries were more expensive, a number of laptop vendors used to provide the option of smaller batteries, often shipping laptops with an option of a smaller battery or a larger (more expensive) one. That could still be done today, and if you have a smaller battery, the laptop is lighter.
I can maybe understand someone arguing some thinness benefits from an ergonomic standpoint, but…desktop keyboards are almost always thicker than laptops. Desktop touchpads that I’ve seen generally are as well. If, given a situation where you don’t have size constraints for actual usage, users choose thicker devices, it’s hard for me to see the ergonomics argument for a laptop form factor.
In general a mobile device should not be running windows
Should not be used for heavy lifting
Should not be a desktop drop-in replacement
Should not be expensive. Or at least, not THAT expensive.
It still baffles my mind that I can use an android phone docked to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and have a better experience on the go than using a laptop that costs 3 times as much as that entire setup. People have done this on YouTube, it’s a great watch.
The issue imho is that consumers that buy laptops have no idea what they are buying so companies can get away with pretty much anything. If it turns on and runs chrome and excel the user is happy to spend $1500… For some stupid reason…
At my last job while doing a lot of win 11 computer replacements, I managed to snag a couple of laptops that were going to be ewasted. One I keot for myself was an early surface. SSD and RAM are soildered to the motherboard so no upgrade or replacement path. Runs warm and the cpu is kinda trash.
Whatever, free computer is free and running mint its usually fine.
Soldered computer components shouldn’t even exist. There are way more downsides with it than up sides - of course it might be faster, but what’s the point if in a year or 2 the capacity will be insufficient. What do you do then? Toss it in the trash?
Honestly, we are going technologically behind. Rather than making proper standards for modularity, they rather make up dozen of excuses of how soldered is actually superior.
Same thing in automotive industry tbh. No fucking reason why every vehicle a lineup doesn’t share modules.
Toss it in the trash and buy a new one.
Now ask yourself again why hardware manufacturers love doing that…
Surface Pro owner. Can confirm - worst computer I’ve owned. Gets hot to the touch when you open Notepad.