Comment by starkparker
13 days ago
Notably, it looks like it came down to the Surface Pro and Dell XPS 15, and part of the reason why the Surface won was "significantly more particulate and quantities of toxic gases" emitted by the XPS's larger battery in the worst-case scenario of a battery fire: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210013869/downloads/20...
> The six key test configurations are shown in Table D-2. A ¼-scale OSEF was used in place of a full-scale unit. Performance results were assessed accordingly. The Orion Program is considering flying one of two different laptop models, a Surface Pro or a Dell XPS 15. Both were tested during this test series. Sealed and unsealed OFC prefilters also were tested.
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> Testing revealed that the rise in temperature is directly related to the number of cells ignited. Maximum temperature rise inside the CBA during a Dell XPS 15 fire was 22 °F. The maximum temperature rise inside the CBA during a Surface Pro fire was 7 °F. Figure D-13 shows the relative temperature rises for several tests.
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> - When larger numbers of laptop cells were ignited, higher concentrations of toxic gases, increased particulate densities, and greater production of thermal energy were observed.
> - The larger the number of laptop battery cells ignited, the more likely the ammonia concentration was to reach levels capable of potentially poisoning the OSEF CO oxidation catalyst.
You don't need installing windows on surface pro -- do you?
I’ve tried Linux on an older surface pro. It sucks, pen/touch is not reliable, the device wouldn’t shut off properly which drained the battery. But I guess NASA would have the budget to resolve that.
Kinda curious what model/when you tried it. I recently picked up a dirt-cheap Surface Go 2 and everything I've tried works great ootb including pen/touch, at least with Gnome, which was very surprising. Runs way smoother than the Win11 it came with too.
From my limited understanding it seems like a few years ago you needed a separate kernel for at least that model but nowadays everything's upstreamed seemingly.
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