I’m afraid this isn’t really the place to ask for such a device. If you ask for any kind of laptop, they pretty much only tell you to buy a ThinkPad X1 Carbon here. Sure, it’s probably a great laptop, but not for every usecase.
You’re probably not going to find a tablet with modular RAM, but 4GB will barely run a web browser these days. You will be using swap a lot and that will put a lot of wear on the non replacable SSD.
Oof. Didn’t even think of the SSD bit. The surface devices are generally good quality but the repairability is apparently atrocious with all these soldered Chips.
I’m using a Thinkpad X1 Yoga with touchscreen and stylus support. Works flawlessly with Fedora. Bought the 8 GB version with an 8th gen i7 from a local shop in Vienna for 200€, but there’s also a 16 GB one.
I would say that Surface is too old for proper use especially for that price. Have a look around more, and better deals just gonna fall into your lap.
I was specifically hoping for something with the 10" form factor. I already have a thinkpad as a laptop and was hoping for something with a smaller form factor.
Unlike ram, ssds die after some use. So the lifespan of this device depends on this SD card, eMMC is basically a soldered SD card, a bad quality ssd. I have 3 old tablets with dead eMMC, they are otherwise perfectly fine devices, but unusable for anything
I’m not too familiar with the surface lineup, but iirc there are higher end devices with replaceable ssds. I think soldered ram is not a big deal in this form factor if it’s enough for the expected use case, but a soldered hard drive lowers the lifespan of your device
First you will need to get the VPN up (or be in the office, in the same network to be able to join the AD domain.
Then you need to join the AD domain using realmd. This will join the computer to the AD domain like any regular windows PC. It will set up the Kerberos client, DNS and everything for you (this part is done in sssd).
Once joined you should be able to access the network shares with SMB.
RedHat and deriviates have good support for this. So I would recommend Fedora Workstation, CentOS Stream or RHEL Desktop to set this up in.
But based on OP it seemed to me that the larger intent is to get a Linux workstation set up in an AD environment. He wants to show to his boss it can be done, and this is the most integrated way.
First off, I want to make it clear that the distro doesn’t really matter. Different distros are just what it comes pre-packed with by default.
TLDR:
For something easy to use: Linux Mint
For something that has pre-installed audio software (but maybe not the ones you want): Ubuntu Studio
If you want to build your system from scratch: Debian (or Arch if you want the latest and greatest software, and don’t mind the occasional update breaking your system around once a year or so, and needing to spend an hour fixing it)
Regardless of which distro you get, use JACK or PipeWire for your sound server. PulseAudio (on its own) has too much latency.
More details:
I first tried Ubuntu Studio. It comes with a lot of software related to audio production. But I found it to be insanely slow, and it didn’t even come with Reaper anyway.
I tried OpenSUSE because I liked that it had the option to manually deselect the software you don’t want (and I was too much of a beginner to know how to pick my packages from the ground-up). It worked well.
Eventually I moved to Debian. I didn’t want any of the extra fluff and found it was pretty easy to choose everything myself. One thing that’s important is that you don’t want to use PulseAudio. Either use JACK (which I think needs to be used in conjunction with PulseAudio actually) or use PipeWire, which is what I use.
For any Windows software, use Bottles to emulate them on Linux. I actually ended up needing to go back to windows because of one audio software: Wwise. There was no way of running it in Linux. A VM probably would’ve worked, but that would’ve been a massive hassle for how I’d need to use it.
I didn’t get to spend too too much time doing pro audio on linux because as soon as I realized Wwise will not work, I didn’t spend much more time in Reaper after that. But it was good, especially with an audio interface (if you’re buying an audio interface, check to see how well it works with linux. Apparently some may have issues)
By the way, the whole point of Debian is that it has older software, and in exchange you’re almost guaranteed to have a system that doesn’t break. But for some professional software you’ll want the newest version. I recommend using Flatpak for that stuff instead of Apt (like for Reaper)
When installing Debian, when it asks “Allow login as root?” be sure to select “no”. This one step is why some people don’t recommend Debian, saying it complicates the install process. But if you get that right, then you’re all good. Or I think sometimes it will instead ask you to create and type in a root password, in which case you should leave it blank and click next. You only want to make a password for your user, not for the root.
As an aside, distro doesn’t matter but should make sure realtime is set up properly for the optimal latency. That usually requires the linux-rt kernel. The default one isn’t quite as bad as it used to be, but linux-rt will be able to guarantee low latency processing without dropouts. Also worth tuning/hardcoding latencies in JACK or PipeWire if the audio delay is too big out of the box.
Proprietary software I use on a regular basis with no Linux alternative:
Revit, AutoCAD, Houdini, 3dsMAX, SolidWorks, Rhino, Grasshopper, Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign (and/or their Affinity alternatives), CUDA optimized simulation and rendering plugins, etc.
I use at least one of these every day, almost none of them have any functioning compatibility with Wine or other emulation. Even just using Affinity has caused some issues with team projects when someone picks up where I left off and there’s no layer information and a ton of clipping groups instead.
If all you do with your computer is program, work with documents, use a web browser, and play video games sure go wild don’t use Windows on any of your machines. But I just don’t understand how some people in the FOSS community cannot fathom that there are entire professional workflows and industries that just have zero possibility of moving to Linux.
Do I like using Windows? No. But I do like being able to use all the programs my work and research requires.
I contribute actual, tangible research into FOSS CAD/CAM/BIM software development and implementation. I love it and want to see FOSS options grow and become widely adopted. But it just isn’t anywhere close to having feature parity. And that matters, just as much as industry interoperability matters.
I’m just so tired of this thought process in the community that the only reason someone isn’t using Linux/FOSS is because they’re some fanboy or something
Not OP, but my personal (mild) meh with Libre is it’s visual style. But to be fair, I use it rarely and for those few occasions I’ve been too lazy to check if there are design alternatives (which most definitely exist, we’re on Linux after all).
Even the tabbed view was hard to use for me, especially the impossible to use “styles” box that scrolls a narrow view. I use it all the time on MS Word, and much prefer how they handle it.
Also, no CSD, so the title bar kinda just chills there, meanwhile it’s used in Microsoft Word.
The same wayland bait is posted every week from new ban evading accounts which eventually also get banned.
They keep coming and getting shown the door, like Barney here.
Yea, don’t hesitate to report them.
Honestly, I literally couldn’t give a shit that anyone criticizes Wayland itself, but they’re a generally toxic user that’s easily recognizable by their constant hateboner for Wayland (among other things).
X11 and Wayland are just protocols. These protocols are used to abstract the window drawing from the actual hardware and runtime environment as much as reasonably possible - because nobody wants to maintain 3215 versions of their app for different runtime environments. So in order to be shown on the screen an app needs to implement either the X11 or the Wayland protocol (or both!).
The piece of software that is on the other side depends on whether the app is using X11 or Wayland. For the sake of simplicity let's assume that the app does only support one of those. If the app supports Wayland then it will try to connect to a Wayland compositor. The compositor implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app. If the app supports X11 then it will try to connect to a X server and take the role of an X client. This is (on Linux, essentially) always X.org*. X.org also implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app.
Unless you're running a Wayland compositor, then it will connect to XWayland which passes through the window to your compositor.
Wayland compositors have full control over the apps while the abilities of apps are purposefully restricted.
A window manager is just another regular, boring, old X client connecting to the X server. It doesn't actually abstract anything. It can move windows because the X11 protocol allows it to, but any other X client could just as well move all other windows around, read all user input to all other windows and even move the mouse around as it pleases.
So, to be specific, there is no mouse pointer bug in Virtualbox while using Wayland. There is a mouse pointer bug affecting specific Wayland compositors, likely because they enforce GPU hardware acceleration that is lacking in either your VM or the Linux kernel because of missing drivers. Try using a different compositor, (re)installing Virtualbox Guest Additions with the correct version on the guest system and/or check whether hardware acceleration is enabled for the VM and has enough video memory.
As someone who just had to shell out the money to do a lateral move from an Nvidia 2080 to a RX 6700XT - don’t go with Nvidia if you’re wanting to have a good time.
That’s what I got from my past experiences as well, but I haven’t owned anything Nvidia since the Pascal (GTX 10x0) era so I wanted to check if anything got better with their open source efforts.
Yeah, I wish it had just been theory, I wouldn’t blatantly say something like my original comment if it weren’t based off experience. I’ve written numerous comments on my experience with Nvidia + Linux [+ Wayland] - such as this comment, primarily the the second, third, and fourth paragraphs. Sadly I don’t think its possible to “relative” link direct comments, so I’ve just linked my instance instead.
Since you mentioned it’s a mobile GPU, I’m not sure if perhaps you have also have an internal GPU that is drawing your regular desktop. My friend doesn’t have nearly the same amount of issues that I have with Wayland, because he’s able to drive his desktop with his iGPU and does GPU passthrough to play games through a Windows VM - the 5600X that I have doesn’t include integrated graphics so this was not possible for me.
Either way, if it works for you then fantastic. It certainly didn’t work for me, and definitely not for a lack of trying.
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