I am looking at getting a tablet and aside from some light gaming and internet browsing, I want to do some hacking on it to test my systems at home and my friends systems with their permission. Which system would be better for this? Android? or Windows 8.1 on a tablet? Does anyone have a tablet recommendation? I am leaning towards the Nvidia Shield Tablet with that nice Tegra K1
If you have a gaming computer with an Nvidia GPU. Go for the Shield tablet.
I don't but i plan to upgrade to a Nvidia graphics card in the near future.
I've been happy with my Nexus 7 for a while now. But it's the first tablet I've ever bought for myself. It does video, photos, and browsing just fine and i've unlocked it to use Titanium Backup for all my data. It wasn't hard to do. It's not perfect but it's all i need in a tablet right now. :) Hope that helps.
Not exactly.. but thanks for the input.
I also have the Nexus 7, I just use it for web browsing and Skype.
Battery life, display and camera are pretty good (nothing to compare it to because I don't own any other tablets) but I don't do much with it.
I have been using a Dell Venue 8 Pro that runs windows 8.1 for a while now and for light gaming such as Halo Spartan Assault, Papers Please, Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, and managed to get Skyrim to run at 800x600 at my lowest settings. I have had it almost a year now and it runs just as fine as it did when I purchased it.
Honestly you don't have to consider the Dell tablet but there are many vendors that have tablets with the same specs running on the Intel Atom Bay-Trail SOC. Toshiba, Acer, and Levono have tablets with nearly the same price and performance.
If you plan to install a bit of games on it I would suggest getting a 64GB variant or purchase a 64GB MicroSD card to install games. (They load a little slower)
Supposedly 64bit versions of the tablets are going to be coming this year running off a similar SOC to Bay-Trail. If you don't want to wait you could still purchase one of the current tablets and wait for a team of developers creating what it called Console OS. Basically this allows users to dual boot their Windows 8.1 along side Android (Android at a native level not emulated or in a virtual machine) and get both Android. The website is Here
Be weary though most tablets do not have a full sized USB port if you wanted to attach a keyboard, mouse, etc. Though you can use an OTG cable to do so.
The Asus Transformer book T00TA -C1 seems like it will do all i need and it is running the new bay-trial processor. The dell venue 8 pro is one heck of a tablet and is second on my list. I wonder how well does League of Legends play on the Dell Venue 8 pro? that is about the only game i would play while traveling.
Really I would choose Android depending how heavy hour going to do what your going to do. But still Windows Is another very flexible type of os so it's your choice.
They both have their merits, I would.look up exactly what you want to do with it and see how well each does that exact thing. For.everything else.like web browsing and simple.stuff they will perform about the same.
So go for specifics and choose the one that does them best.
Maybe get a surface and use HyperV to run linux VM's
Hyper-V doesn't run linux well, it's a known problem. Virtualbox does work great with linux though, and it's free. VMWare is another option, but that's pretty old.
The best thing to do is to install linux on bare metal, and then run Windows in a kvm container on it. There is hardly any performance loss involved there, and you can set up virt-manager to start up the container at boot automatically, so that windows starts up immediately. At that point, the only noticeable difference between running Windows on bare metal and running Windows in the kvm container (apart from the security, stability, easy snapshot features to save Windows' arse, anti-malware safety far beyond anything possible in Windows, etc...), is that it takes about 6 seconds longer for Windows to start up.
Android is a modern operating system, Windows is a 30 year old operating system.
Everything in Android is optimized for touch screen and tablet use, Windows 8.1 is very badly optimized, and even MS-Office 2013 or 365 are not optimized for a touch screen interface at all. It's pretty bad to use Windows 8.1 on a touch screen in terms of user friendliness and efficiency in comparison to Android.
There is a reason why Android is the most popular operating system and linux distro in the world. Android offer a crazy good integration of modern services and softwares to get stuff done quickly and efficiently.
I can speak for using Wind8.1 in the tablet space. And yes It really is NOT that tablet friendly cause of how terrible the scaling is and because the Desktop is Not Optimized for Tablets at all.
In the Argument of Wind8.1 versus Android it's not even a Discussion. Android is just Better in every way shape and form. The App Store is better, it's optimization is definitely better for tablet use than Wind8.1. The only thing I sort of feel Android needs is some better productivity applications to get work done. If this were to happen Wind8.1 would make absolutely no sense for the Student at All. And there are more Much better Games on Android for Entertainment than On Wind8.1. Excluding the PC Gaming Market.
+1 for the VM suggestions. I have had Linux on Hyper-V and I had all sorts of issues.