Has anyone installed and used Linux on Microsoft Surface Tab? Which Surface model is most suited and which Linux diastro performs the best?

    • Dookie@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      do you even need a custom kernel anymore? i think most of the patches are upstream nowadays.

      • saba@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know. I was just curious about microsoft surface and if linux could run on it and found that in a search.

  • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I’m currently running Fedora 38 on a Surface Pro 6!

    I’ve installed Fedora on a Surface Pro 4 and a Surface Pro 7 as well.

    Super duper simple. Runs well and snappy. I prefer it to Windows.

    The only downside is the battery life on standby is very bad (like all Linux distros).

      • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        No camera functionality but otherwise everything works. You’ll find Windows is more optimized for the pen but Fedora treats it like a mouse. It’s recognized in drawing apps like Krita though.

  • silent_clash
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know exactly which distro, but GNOME has a lot of convenient touch screen gestures built in.

    Edit: Cinnamon 5.8 just introduced touch screen gestures as well!

  • TeaEarlGrayHot@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Related question: anyone have luck with GPU hotplug? I’ve got an eGPU that works perfectly with Windows, but I cannot for the life of me get it to run with Fedora or Ubuntu (xorg and/or wayland). That is the final think keeping me on Windows, which handles eGPU hotplug flawlessly

    Thank goodness for edits: I’m running it on a Surface Laptop Studio! Pop! OS was amazing (once I got the proper kernel loaded), but held back by the need to restart every time I wanted to hook up my external monitors.

  • gogozero@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    im running debian sid on a surface go (1), stock kernel. everything except the cameras work perfectly (use the surface-linux kernel if you want the cameras to work). love this little device, my daily driver.

  • -spam-@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Theoretically the older models are more likely to work better.

    I’ve got an sp3 that I want to throw something with gnome on to mess with. Haven’t tried it yet but from what I’ve seen it all works out of the box, including the pen and pressure support.

  • krash@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I have ubuntu on a surface go 1 and it’s running better than stock windows (except for IR camera). On the SP7 it was working decently on the latest ubuntu release - even the WiFi OOTB. However, touch screen wasn’t working (ootb - custom kernel can enable it) and that was a deal breaker for me. I still need windows to boot from USB (!) as the device was designed this way, so don’t count on being totally defenenestraded. You will need windows for firmware updates too.

    Check out the Linux surface repo mentioned earlier, it’s full of good resources for Linux on surface device’s.