I long ago gave up on waiting for the next version of anything. That being said, I love power savings and if I stick with this setup (SPro with a mechanical keyboard) I will eventually switch to a Broadwell Core M model when it comes out.
I can get about 6-7 hours of battery on the SP3 under Arch, maybe more if I worked at it. I'm happy enough with it for now. Coming from a MBP15" (circa 2011) that had fans like a jet engine, even the loudest fan noise from the SP3 doesn't really phase me.
What does bother me a bit is the outstanding bug on the hardware button support.
If you are on the fence, you could reasonably wait for broadwell and this button driver issue to get worked out. I'm comfortable with the setup as is, but it's certainly bleeding edge :)
I'm on the 34" external right now running about 60 tabs in chrome, some vim sessions, and a paused google music tab, and it's silent (no fan noise at all).
Not sure if you mean the microsoft surface keyboard or an onscreen keyboard. I don't use the ms keyboard covers at all, haven't even purchased one (mechanical usb keyboards instead). I know there have been issues running the surface pro keyboards under linux, but don't know the current status.
On screen keyboards seem to work fine but I haven't put much effort into configuring, just tested.
Thanks, I will talk to my employer about this. They're quite slow. But I will eventually reach you through the contact details in the Google Drive document in case I want to figure out something.
I can get about 6-7 hours of battery on the SP3 under Arch, maybe more if I worked at it. I'm happy enough with it for now. Coming from a MBP15" (circa 2011) that had fans like a jet engine, even the loudest fan noise from the SP3 doesn't really phase me.
What does bother me a bit is the outstanding bug on the hardware button support.
If you are on the fence, you could reasonably wait for broadwell and this button driver issue to get worked out. I'm comfortable with the setup as is, but it's certainly bleeding edge :)