I'm a longtime Linux user, and I haven't used Windows in a while aside from just launching games from Steam on my living room computer, but my new work laptop is Microsoft's flagship Surface Pro 4 so I figured it'd be the best experience you can have on a Windows machine.

I got the laptop in yesterday, and here's the summary of my experience:

• I am required by IT to use Chrome. To install Chrome, I had to click through no fewer than three "Are you sure you don't want to use Microsoft's more secure, faster browser?" banners to do so.

• When I plug in my external monitor, by default, the two monitors were mirrored; when I went into display settings, it didn't show the external monitor until I closed and reopened the settings menu.

• I have an Apple Magic Touchpad 2, and I had some issues getting it set up on Ubuntu 20.04 when I initially got it. These problems are now solved on the latest version of Ubuntu, but I was expecting a nice contrast in a good plug-and-play experience on Windows. Instead, I had to install sketchy drivers from some random GitHub page to get it to work properly.

• I've had some minor annoyances with my audio interface (a Zoom R-22) not being set as the default when I want it to be on Ubuntu, and I was really looking forward to getting a smooth video calling experience with my nice mic and interface on Windows. Lo and behold, the R-22 audio input - the whole reason I have it - doesn't work at all, at least in the Zoom video calling app.

• On Ubuntu, I use QV4L2 to configure the framing, zoom, exposure, etc of my camera. It's a bit clunky, and I was looking forward to having a smooth experience with this on the premier business OS. Unfortunately, the camera on this laptop has extremely aggressive aperture priority mode enabled, and there is no first-party app to configure it! The documentation tells me to go to Settings -> Devices -> Camera but there is no such menu item. So, I just look either washed-out or ultra-dark in every video call.

• After running Windows Update and rebooting, I was greeted with a full-screen and quite annoying to exit tutorial for Microsoft Teams - an app I did not install, because my company uses Slack.

This in addition to some setup papercuts, but I think those were probably due to my corporate IT's process rather than Windows itself.

Is this common? Do people who use Windows just... put up with this kind of thing? Or am I having an exceptionally bad experience for some reason?

I couldn’t find a good roundup that covered both of these and didn’t want to add clutter to the front page with two posts.

From The Verge:

• Microsoft’s new $549 Surface Laptop Go aims to compete with Chromebooks

• Microsoft’s updated Surface Pro X has a faster processor and new platinum color option

The Surface Pro X seems like just a spec bump, so there isn’t too much interesting there. But the Surface Laptop Go is interesting. The base model is absolute garbage (4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of EMMC storage) but the other models are somewhat decent.

The overall design of the Surface products is really striking. I honestly think they look much more modern and clean than Apple’s laptops. I also really love that they are offering colors. I wish Apple would offer more colors than just gray, silver and pink/gold on their laptops.