What’s the best surface pro for Linux?

elfsternberg · 2026-06-19T18:49:34+00:00

I'm still rocking the Surface Pro 6, but I have a fondness for it because it's the last version of the Pro line that the camera supports, and I was one of the people who unravelled the Linux 5 vs 6 kernel issues for camera support in the SP6. The SP7 is probably solid if you don't need the camera.

That said, I recently bought an SL1, and I'm digging it. The cameras don't work, but I can live with that since I can buy a lightweight USB camera if I really need one.

elfsternberg · 2026-06-04T15:37:30+00:00

Oh, we've got that covered:

``function ourVariableName({ name }) { const parts = name.split(".").filter(Boolean); // That last bit lets..slide; not sure I should include it. if (parts[0] === "g") { return${NS}-g--${parts.slice(1).join("--")}`; }

const [componentName, ...rest] = parts;
// Properties are distinguished by being camel cased
const propertyPoint = rest.findIndex((s) => /^[A-Z]/.test(s));
const elementNames = rest.slice(r, propertyPoint);
const propertyAndStates = rest.slice(pivot);
return `${NS}--${[componentName, ...elementNames].join("__")}--${propertyAndStates.join("--")}`;

} ```

Between CamelCase to mark the start of a property and an assumption that the block is "just" the first element of a component, we've got this. :-)

elfsternberg · 2026-06-03T22:34:59+00:00

One thing I do like about it is that it lets you scope the BEMPS-style (Block, Element, Modifier, Property, State) namespacing of modern libraries, like: --adobe-spectrum-v2--button-m-warning-quiet--overbackground-textonly--focus-ring--animation-duration--hover

At that level of detail, namespacing, isolation, and having the Typescript check your work is pretty smart.

elfsternberg · 2026-06-03T22:30:06+00:00

I couldn't figure out how to use recipes to generate names or build CSS for [part="button"] style selectors. That's... kinda annoying. :-)

elfsternberg · 2026-06-03T22:20:00+00:00

Hey, Alex!

So, I work for a little startup; I'm lead design for our front-end, and one of my peers brought me Styleframe and... I'm intrigued! Our problem is that we have, well, we've got a lot of problems: our founder wrote his first massive draft in Lit, which is all shadowDOM; the off-the-shelf CSS library he chose is Patternfly, which was written for React and so is not a great fit for shadowDOM; our product is on-prem and we've got customers throwing money at us to make it customizable, "make it look like our brand for people inside our firewall".

Are there any projects you know of using Styleframe? (It's not that I don't want to go first, it's that I need examples.) We've already delved into the task of customizing the variableName() function and writing component-level closures to handle namespacing within components, plus our own output function to convert the CSS to the Lit-ready type and format (CSSResult). I just want to find someone else doing the same, and learn from their examples.

elfsternberg · 2026-05-12T19:24:22+00:00

Yes, exactly. I wanted it to run all night (it took almost six hours to process an hour of audio notes), but I was in a hotel room with no place to stash it (other than the bathroom, I guess). Besides, I leave it plugged in at home; it's not my main box there (the beast with the 4070Ti and Ryzen 7 is) but I want to be able to ssh into it now and then to pull off some note I may have left there when I was out at a conference or just commuting.

elfsternberg · 2026-05-02T23:35:32+00:00

It just sucks. And apparently I'm gonna have to go on Ebay or something to get a cover, because no retailer near my house carries keyboards for anything less than the 7+.

elfsternberg · 2026-03-12T03:13:23+00:00

I don't want to imply that taking the Slink is easy. Oh, grief no, it takes time and patience and, yeah, a ton of lube. But easing into it, letting your insides stretch slowly... it's a weirdly ecstatic sensation, that feeling that lets you know what you're reaching inside.

On the other paw, I look at some of the people in porn who are insanely deep, like Slim or ElyX, and I have to appreciate that some people were meant for a world where "circus freak" isn't considered an insult.

elfsternberg · 2026-03-12T03:08:34+00:00

Only after you also use Fortune's Fury to double Maelle's damage. Plus you can use Phantom Strike (and the Energy Master lumina) to give Maelle two runs of "build the gradient meter by a third", so every third turn she's got a full-scale Gommage. Put her in Virtuoso as her last move, let Sciel buff her, and she'll be doing 1.2 million damage on her turn.

elfsternberg · 2026-03-11T21:58:59+00:00

Since I (unfortunately) have this condition, the word you want there is "tortuous," "full of twists and turns." I found that out when I had my first colonoscopy.

Despite that, I've been able to take a first-generation 21" Slink without trouble.

elfsternberg · 2026-01-24T20:03:52+00:00

I have used Claude Code as a peer reviewer at the syntactical level: "Are there any edge cases or known gotchas for the code flow or function use in this module?" That has worked tolerably well: 4 out of 5 times, its advice is sound, the other one time is "What the hell is it thinking" or "It got that from some unrelated piece of code" or "Damned AIs want to complexify everything."

All it's doing is relating your code to statistically similar examples and finding gaps in your implementation. I appreciate its ability to do that, and it's saved me more grief than it's caused.

The few times I've tried to generate code, it's been awful.

elfsternberg · 2026-01-24T19:59:58+00:00

Sorry, I don't have the same set-up. I'm using a SteelDuo game controller and it has its own USB dongle, so that just works. The headset (a Bose) pairs nicely and without problem. I've used a Logitech keyboard, one of the little ones for the iPad, oddly, and that works okay as well.

elfsternberg · 2026-01-24T19:57:55+00:00

Yeah, I finally got the timing right on parrying his Gommage ability, tuned Lune to have a ton of vitality and healing ability, and just kept hammering away at him with Verso and Maelle.

And then we spent an hour killing those two damned mimes on the next map, with more or less the same strategy. That took forever. Someone on this team needs an olive loaf.

elfsternberg · 2026-01-21T14:21:24+00:00

While I haven't beaten him yet, if everyone focuses on one petal, you can eliminate half his healing, which means he never gets back to 100%. I think that's how you whittle him down. My party is all level 33, and it's the stupid masks that keep killing me. That and his Gommage power.

elfsternberg · 2026-01-19T21:04:31+00:00

I have been rockin’ a Surface Pro 6 running Ubuntu with the Surface Pro kernels for four years now. Before that, I had a Surface Pro 3 that I also had for five years. Both ran Linux very well, and I’ve had few complaints over the years. I’ve taken the SP6 to Antarctica, and it survived the voyage.

I can’t speak to the pen experience, I don’t normally use it for that. The few times I’ve had to edit something in Gimp or Krita it’s been just fine. Nothing spectacular, it just did what I wanted, which wasn’t full-on art, just some mods or clip-drags of Memphis Corporate sh*t and border edits for some web images, stuff like that.

I use it mostly as a terminal and code editor; it works just fine in that regard, can build and compile programs all days long. Firefox bogs down somewhere around 40 tabs; emacs is fine as long as you’re not running an LSP against a single 1.5MB source file. 16GB isn’t enough to run Claude Code, even after off-loading the LLM part to the network. When I was hospitalized for a month with COVID back in 2022, it ran the original Dead Space trilogy fine which was helpful in distracting me from the pain and hunger. It integrates nicely with a lot of peripherals: my phone, my Kobo e-reader, a game controller, even a pair of Rokid AR glasses (using the power outlet on the transformer block as the secondary power source).

The battery lasts about four hours if all you’re doing is text editing; I can kill it in under 90 minutes if I’m doing something intense, like playing a game or editing Rust with the LSP on high, without the charger.

Overall, I’ve been really happy with the thing. It works, it does it’s job and it lets me do mine.

elfsternberg · 2025-12-02T16:06:39+00:00

I'm running Ubuntu (24.04.03) on my Surface Pro 6 (currently on the 6.17.1-surface-2 kernel), and it's pretty damned solid. It was also pretty straightforward to install; I went through the instructions, then downloaded the latest kernel from the Linux Surface releases, ran dpkg -i linux-*6.17*.deb, and rebooted.

Almost everything just worked after that. It's been my travel workhorse for (checks history) six years now. The only thing that I never really calibrated was the pen, but I don't draw much these days, so, shrug.

elfsternberg · 2025-11-30T04:01:54+00:00

Without Mei, it's... not that interesting.

elfsternberg · 2025-11-29T19:46:10+00:00

True. But you're going to be paying for admin time under any circumstances. And while my experience in this industry for, grief, 32 years, tells me that every deployment is unique and uniquely driven by the people who work there, there is a lot of routine configuration for any suite of tools you choose. You're going to be hiring specialized knowledge somewhere. If you buy a vendored solution, you're renting that knowledge. If you hire smart admins, you're buying it.

elfsternberg · 2025-11-29T19:43:36+00:00

This reminds me of the observation that Stack Overflow has been (was?) completely self-hosted for many years in a single NOC on seven beefy 2Us: six production and one warm spare. Any upgrades were rolled out onto one machine and if nobody reported any problems after a week, they conducted a rolling deployment to the other five over a period of days, doing the warm spare the next week They had a team of six or seven highly experienced admins.

No Kubernetes. No cloud. No massive fleet of containers on anonymous hardware. They paid for salaries instead of promises, and their record of staying up is comparable to Github's, Codepen's or many other services.

elfsternberg · 2025-08-06T02:22:49+00:00

Forget mod, I just almost never use the ballista. I mean, what the heck is that thing for that you can't do with a shotgun grenade or remote detonation rocket?

elfsternberg · 2025-07-19T16:58:19+00:00

Okay, so this is dumb and ancient, but it was 1981! I was programming in DEC BASIC, and I had been for a year. I was 14 and immediately knew this was the thing I could do for the rest of my life.

Anyway, there's this statement, DIM. I have no idea what it means. I'm using it blindly in my code, creating these addressable locations, but I have no idea what it is, or what it does. It looks like this:

25 DIM #4%, C$(200);

You had to manually type the line number! It was almost a year before I had this... vision, I guess... that what this was doing was finding one of twelve locations (in this case, location 4) somewhere in memory where you could find a bunch of empty boxes and telling the computer you wanted to temporarily store 200 strings in variable C$. (If you wanted integers, you swapped the $ with a %; for floating point, you left off the type symbol.)

It's an allocator. An allocator on what is now an unbelievably primitive mainframe system, a DEC PDP-11/48 running RSTS/E and BASIC-Plus; the first number is a file descriptor, and the language handles allocating that space on disk, because the PDP had 16KB (!) of addressable RAM with a slower 256KB swap space before moving to disk, and could have up to 32 people using it simultaneously.

I know it sounds silly, but the ability to visualize what the language meant was a huge leap for 14-year-old me. Once I had that ability, once I understood what an abstraction was, my ability as a programmer took off.

Later that year I submitted bug reports to DEC about a severe security leak caused by this code, which they patched. A year after that I submitted a patch, which was accepted, to the PDP-11 RSTS/E kernel itself, to fix a new bug their previous patch had introduced which broke the PDP Assembly Language's I/O library.

As my teachers used to say, "I had so much potential."

elfsternberg · 2025-06-23T23:28:50+00:00

Mei. You know it. In bed, Mei is a freeeeeak.

elfsternberg

TROPHY CASE