I believe that it's a good idea for you. Surface 3 is a good device, the battery won't keep you alone during classes, it's not heavy to hold it on your backpack (and you'll save space). I have one Surface RT 2 and it's perfect to travel, or presentations and events. Just keep in ming that with Surface Pro 3 you can install any kind of stuff and with Surface 3 you are limited to apps and Microsoft Office. But, as a device to school it's fine.
No. You will learn more and be better off buying a system that is supported by an open source operating system. A lot of people like Linux, with a good portion using Ubuntu [1], although some prefer distributions like Debian [2], and there are plenty of other Linux distributions out there.
Hacker News itself runs on FreeBSD [3] and many people run it for their laptops and desktops. There is also a variant of FreeBSD called PCBSD [4] which is more geared towards regular desktop/laptop use. There is also DragonFlyBSD [5] and NetBSD [6]. Personally, I prefer OpenBSD [7].
Always be sure to read up on the hardware supported by a given open source project so you make an informed decision when purchasing a new system. Ask around in the various communities (usually mailing lists) if you have questions.
The average US school isn't a great place for open source programs still, sadly. Whether it be teachers giving out notes in .PPT or requesting that essays be sent to them in Word's format so they can leave notes and send them back. This happens at the university level too outside the known-for-computer schools like MIT, Stanford, etc.
I will say, though, if you're going into a computer-related field in the future, having a Linux box will put you ahead of a lot of your peers--at least it used to. Maybe Ubuntu is too nice now, but years ago by forcing myself to use Linux as my OS exclusively, I learned a lot of skills I still use much later in life. From SSH to manually mounting drives to xorg configurations to SSH forwarding to etc etc. The forcing yourself to use it exclusively is best for learning, but even having a small headless Debian box in the corner of your room is helpful for learning about different things.
Yeah, good luck doing school projects on those OSs. Nothing against them, they are great, but it will slow your work down due to the nature of university projects.
Given that you are asking a site populated with computer programming types, I would assume you may be interested in computer programming.
Programming on touch enabled or tablet sized devices is going to be difficult. If you want to leverage open source software to learn things like web programming and server side stuff then you will want to run those things typically under a Unix variant, Linux being the most used. You can do this on Windows with virtual machines and software like Vagrant.
If you are getting the device to take notes, do research, email, twitter, facebook, whatever-cool-kids-use, etc. for high school work then sure it will probably do the trick. Most anything these days would work for that so it would be hard to justify the cost.
>>> If you want to leverage open source software to learn things like web programming and server side stuff then you will want to run those things typically under a Unix variant, Linux being the most used.
Or just use NodeJS... which I believe is quite popular for web dev work these days.
Personally, as a college student, I love taking my notes digitally. OneNote automatically runs OCR and indexes every note that I take, which means I can search through my handwritten notes (at least for me, it's immensely useful come test time). Plus, you can ink right on top of powerpoints and PDFs distributed by professors, which helps give some additional context to whatever you're saying and saves some effort note-taking wise. I can't go back now that I'm able to harness fully digital notes.
Also, there are other tablets out there (see: iPad), but the lack of a digitizer makes note taking pretty frustrating. It's irritating that they don't support any degree of pressure sensitivity, palm rejection, etc. Surface 3 (base model) is actually very reasonably priced, in my opinion, for all of its value add.
If you are even slightly familiar with using Apple devices then switching to a Surface is a somewhat annoying & frustrating experience.
Some of the decisions that went into the Surface just don't make sense from a user experience point of view.
The stylus has a click button which is cool until you realise it only opens OneNote and you can't change that - unless you want to start messing round with reg edits. The dock has a magnet to hold the pen until you realise it's only on the left hand side and inconvenient for right handed users.
The on screen keyboard has a poor layout, click areas on screen are far too small for finger touch and takes repeated touches. It's awkward to switch between physical keyboard and touch screen to the point that neither feel natural.
The Surface itself gets quite hot under the kickstand and doesn't seem to dissipate heat well enough. Out of a number I have used quite a few had the BSOD out of the box. The battery compartment in the pen is shoddily made so that the spring often touches the metal body shorts out and makes the pen dangerously hot. Oh and the pen takes 2 batteries - one for the stylus and one watch battery for the button - neither of which are rechargeable.
Not sure if windows 10 will make them any better from an OS point of view but overall they are a good idea in theory but very awkward in practise.
Your best call would be to just buy one at a place with a generous return policy and live with it for 2 weeks to see if it is a fit. More often then I would liked, a product seemed really appealing but was useless to me because it did not feel quite right and I stopped using it (My E-Reader vs iPad, Cross trainer vs. TV, Desktop vs Laptop)
I just bought a Surface 3 for the following reasons:
1. It is a Windows machine that I can run desktop apps on it.
2. It is very light
3. It supports 1920x1080 resolution. Yes, everything will look small, but when you need full HD, it gives you full HD.
4. You can charge it with a micro USB charger or even a power bank. It means easy to find a power source and one less gadget to travel with
5. The keyboard is not as good as Apple's notebook, but it is not that bad either
I might get the stylus, since I prefer to write as I aged. :)
31 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 70.7 ms ] threadHacker News itself runs on FreeBSD [3] and many people run it for their laptops and desktops. There is also a variant of FreeBSD called PCBSD [4] which is more geared towards regular desktop/laptop use. There is also DragonFlyBSD [5] and NetBSD [6]. Personally, I prefer OpenBSD [7].
Always be sure to read up on the hardware supported by a given open source project so you make an informed decision when purchasing a new system. Ask around in the various communities (usually mailing lists) if you have questions.
[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/
[2] http://www.debian.org/
[3] http://www.freebsd.org
[4] http://www.pcbsd.org
[5] http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
[6] http://www.netbsd.org/
[7] http://www.openbsd.org/
I will say, though, if you're going into a computer-related field in the future, having a Linux box will put you ahead of a lot of your peers--at least it used to. Maybe Ubuntu is too nice now, but years ago by forcing myself to use Linux as my OS exclusively, I learned a lot of skills I still use much later in life. From SSH to manually mounting drives to xorg configurations to SSH forwarding to etc etc. The forcing yourself to use it exclusively is best for learning, but even having a small headless Debian box in the corner of your room is helpful for learning about different things.
The (physical) keyboard sucks, the on-screen keyboard sucks more.
The screen is great if you like to write your notes by hand.
You'll have very little luck running linux on it though.
Programming on touch enabled or tablet sized devices is going to be difficult. If you want to leverage open source software to learn things like web programming and server side stuff then you will want to run those things typically under a Unix variant, Linux being the most used. You can do this on Windows with virtual machines and software like Vagrant.
If you are getting the device to take notes, do research, email, twitter, facebook, whatever-cool-kids-use, etc. for high school work then sure it will probably do the trick. Most anything these days would work for that so it would be hard to justify the cost.
Or just use NodeJS... which I believe is quite popular for web dev work these days.
Do you have other uses where a computer is necessary?
Also, there are other tablets out there (see: iPad), but the lack of a digitizer makes note taking pretty frustrating. It's irritating that they don't support any degree of pressure sensitivity, palm rejection, etc. Surface 3 (base model) is actually very reasonably priced, in my opinion, for all of its value add.
Some of the decisions that went into the Surface just don't make sense from a user experience point of view.
The stylus has a click button which is cool until you realise it only opens OneNote and you can't change that - unless you want to start messing round with reg edits. The dock has a magnet to hold the pen until you realise it's only on the left hand side and inconvenient for right handed users.
The on screen keyboard has a poor layout, click areas on screen are far too small for finger touch and takes repeated touches. It's awkward to switch between physical keyboard and touch screen to the point that neither feel natural.
The Surface itself gets quite hot under the kickstand and doesn't seem to dissipate heat well enough. Out of a number I have used quite a few had the BSOD out of the box. The battery compartment in the pen is shoddily made so that the spring often touches the metal body shorts out and makes the pen dangerously hot. Oh and the pen takes 2 batteries - one for the stylus and one watch battery for the button - neither of which are rechargeable.
Not sure if windows 10 will make them any better from an OS point of view but overall they are a good idea in theory but very awkward in practise.
I believe this is not a concern on the Surface 3 in question. One the Pro model, especially with the higher end processors it definitely is.
I might get the stylus, since I prefer to write as I aged. :)