sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Gerald Nunn <gnunn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As I noted in another thread, I'm considering purchasing a Z to replace my
current 15.6 laptop as I'd like more portability. I work as a software
consultant doing development work and I mostly work out of client offices
where I will not have access to an external monitor or keyboard. This means
that the majority of my time I will be working on the Z itself and while
the days of 8 hour continuous coding sessions rarely happen any more (damn
meetings!) I will still be spending a lot of time on the machine writing
code.

I'm wondering how others find working with the Z on a day to day basis, do
people find it comfortable or does it get exhausting after a while with the
smaller screen? I tried the Z for awhile at the Sony Store, using Windows
of course, and even with the font scaling set to 100% it was fine for
typing out some text in Notepad as it seemed the sharpness of the display
really offset the small size of the text. However that was a ten minute
test and not sitting at the laptop for three hours banging out some code.

The other question I had is with respect to font scaling in Linux. I use
the Ubuntu 12.10 Gnome Remix and I noticed that the gnome tweak tool has a
font scaling capability. I played around it with on my current laptop but
it seems like a mixed bag just like font scaling in Windows, it works well
in some applications and poorly in others (i.e. tabs in Chrome don't scale,
Eclipse text editor font doesn't scale, etc). Some of the issues can be
dealt with in other ways, such as manually setting the font size in Eclipse
while others are liveable such as the tabs in Chrome and overall a bit of
scaling doesn't seem disastrous.

Anyway, is anyone using text scaling in Gnome on the Z and if so what's
your experience with it, does it mostly work or are there more serious
issues my limited testing as missed?

As you can probably tell, I'm trying to convince myself that the Z is for
me, it's just so damn sexy and for other parts of my job such as the travel
on planes and trains, lugging it to meetings, etc it seems pretty perfect.
It's just the using it for coding I worry about and it's not something that
is easy to test at the store. I've asked this question on other forums and
not really gotten any good responses, I figure Linux users tend to be more
power users and developers so I might get some better responses on this
question here.

With the 30 day return policy I might just end up biting the bullet and
return it if it doesn't work out but I'd prefer avoiding this if possible.