I have been using the original Surface as my laptop since it was released. To mu surprise iy has worked out very well. All of my applications, including odd ones like NMAP, work great. The only thing I dislike is the lack of ports. One USB port makes working with external devices a pain. I have purchased USB adapters so I can connect to devices via serial ports. The one things I have not purchased and that kills me is a USB to Ethernet cable. There are times I cannot be plugged into a docking station and need an Ethernet port. All things considered though, the Surface is a great laptop.
The one thing I still struggle with is Windows 8. (Yes, I updated to Windows 8.1 but it is still a pain to work with.) I open a PDF and it goes into tiles mode. Switching between the desktop and tiles is an insane design at best. Running on the desktop only seems like trying to avoid the inevitable. I have really tried to get comfortable with Windows 8 but the UI is just bad. It is by far the worst UI ever designed simply because you basically are using to operating systems at once.
I needed a laptop with a bunch of ports so I took an abondoned Windows 8 laptop and loaded Ubuntu Linux. (It was harder to delete Windows than it was to load Linux.) To my great surprise the load went well. The laptop had a touch screen which Ubuntu detected. Everything just worked. Installing software and hardening the OS was simple for an IT guy. What amazed me though was the interface.
When I use Linux, I typically don’t even load the GUI. What can I say, I love text only CLI interfaces on Linux. (I hate the Cisco CLI though.) This was the first time I loaded a GUI on Linux in years. Frankly, the GUI was stunning
In all fairness, the Windows 7 interface is probably easier to use because it is about the same as every other version of Windows going back to 98. I realized that the change from Windows 7 to Ubuntu was minimal while the change form Windows 7 to Windows 8 was gut wrenching.
I am considering doing some A/B testing with users. I believe that if I were to have one group use Ubuntu and another use Windows 8 I would find the Ubuntu crowed more efficient. I might concede that they would be equally proficient but for the cost savings Linux would bring, why not use Linux?
I won’t inflict anything on end user that I won’t inflict on myself. I decided to go rouge and use Ubuntu as my only work laptop.
- Email: Evolution seems to be a fine Outlook replacement. It does everything I need. I don’t know if it will work with Office 365 or newer version of Exchange though. If it doesn’t work, I can live with email on my phone and OWA.
- Web Browsing: Everything but Internet Explorer. If you have to have IE, Linux won’t work.
- JAVA: I have yet to get websites that use JAVA to work on Chrome. I will eventually but that seems to be a pain. (Hints are welcome.)
- Security Tools: NMAP, Wire.Shark, and all my other favorite tools work better on Ubuntu than Windows. I run these on Linux anyway.
- Visio: I love Visio but DIA seems to work well enough for me to diagram everything I need to diagram.
- Office: LibreOffice does everything I need. I have yet to try to load a bunch of my Office docs in Linux but I suspect they will work. If not, I am willing to convert them all over time. I don’t use Office much anyway. I would prefer to use the web apps in either Office 365 or Google Apps anyway.
- RDP: Yep, I can remote control all my servers.
- Putty: I can remote control everything else
- Printing: Paper is dead. I never print. I’ll have to test it at some point though.
- Patching: We use Dell’s KACE system for patching. It works on some flavors of Linux. I still need to test this. If it doesn’t work, I can use the built in patching engine to keep everything updated.
- Encryption: You can encrypt the hard drive during installation making laptop theft less of an issue. Password management might be a pain but so is data loss.
I don’t know if I would throw Ubuntu into production but if Windows 9 isn’t significantly easier to use, it may be hard to justify the cost of Windows anymore.
Are you listening Microsoft?
Decomplexification 