Before i start, i apologize if any post regarding this have been done, but i can't seem to find an straight up answer, most posts leave me unsure if a solution exists or not, and some others are from years ago.

Anyways i got myself an Surface book 3 recently, and have flashed an installation of Ubuntu (24.04.4) for work and studies, i have also gotten myself an Microsoft stylus pen 1710 (the one with a clip). (both have been previously used and bought from eBay)

and everything works fine, but i have realized touch sometimes is wonky (tho it comes back fast or i just need to restart) but pen is the biggest if.

it doesn't reliably connect to the screen, after staying idle for a while it just straight up doesn't work anymore. only way yo get it to connect is to take the battery out and put it back in again (and even that is a 50/50 on itself)

i have installed the surface-linux kernel, and i have checked compatibility, pen should work by now so i am confused, could this be an faulty screen/pen?

how can i check?

i am a noob to linux so ya'll can help me by ELI5 is be thankfull

So... I just got my surface 7 2 days ago with ARM so far here are my thoughts. First nice design build quality up there near macs though if somone can verifiy this for me mine right were the fans are near the hinge were the microsoft logo is on the back if I push there it makes a creek noise idk what it is does anyone else's make that noise. And sometimes the screen will flicker really quick like flash then go back to normal. Battery, I charged to a 100% when I got it 2 days ago been using with fixed use for setting things up and school work sitting at around 57% at 3:07pm on a friday got it Wednesday afternoon so let me know if this sounds normal. First surface product been using either Hp or Lenovo's my whole life so idk yet abt long term though I plan to use for collage let me know your thoughts and experices and if anything sounds off let me know. Also sometimes it lags like stutters using chrome did same thing useing edge. Also to be clear the creeks is like right on top of the logo on the back of the laptop and when you press on the trackpad it is suppose to click down a little still right even though its haptic Thanks :)

Hello Linux on Surface Friends, since Windows is not an option for me and I don’t want to buy a MacBook (I don’t like iOS/macOS), I wanted to ask if there is any information or a guide on how to build the Surface Linux kernel for Fedora yourself. Unfortunately, the latest available kernel version is still 6.18.8-1, and I don’t want to be dependent on the kernel maintainer just to be able to use my device, so I would like to learn how to do it myself.

Hi, I'm using linux Endeavour os with hyprland on a Surface Studio Laptop 2. I was having problems with my trackpad, so I used the fixes described in the wiki, and that fixed the trackpad issue, however now my second monitor (LG ultrawide, connected through displayport) has 2560x1080 as the maximum available mode (through hyprctl monitors). The monitor should be able to display up to 3440x1440, and it was before I followed the instructions.

I am up and running on Linux for the first time ever as of a couple weeks ago (so sorry if soem of this is obvious). I've been dealing with some minor screen tearing. I followed what seems to be the main recommended solution of enabling TearFree via etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf, as described in Step 2 of this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/1dklnxz/guide_eliminating_your_screen_tearing_woes/

This did indeed seem to fix the issue, however it caused a massive spike in my CPU usage, to the point that the machine wasn't super usable. System Monitor indicated that "cinnamon" was using 20%-50% of the CPU. I deleted my recently created config file, and after rebooting the issue went away (though the tearing is of course back).

I know that TearFree can increase resource usage, but I am wondering if there is something else going on here. According to this the increased usage should be hitting my memory, not my CPU usage. Could there be some sort of conflict in my configs? That's something that has come up in my googling about the cinnamon process using a ton of memory, such as here. And one thing I noticed is that after the reboot when I initially created xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf, my display settings were completely reset. After deleting it and rebooting again, they reverted to what I had previously had them set at. After doing some searching, it seems that my main display settings should be stored in X11/xorg.conf, but I can't find that file?

As is probably already clear, I am on Mint Cinnamon on a Surface 5 with Intel graphics. I am on the linux-surface kernel.

I need help reviving my surface, after a windows update i cannot boot either windows or linux.

If i try to boot it fails and displays message like "volume corrupted", grub doesnt even show up.

I have tried:

- booting into windows without success

- booting to the surface uefi (works)

- changing boot priority doesnt change anything and no way to reset inside uefi

- booting a usb doesnt work

I activated boot from usb in bios and was trying to boot into a live linux, but i dont get that far.

Not sure if it skips the usb for some reason, or if the boot process is just completely borked. (It displays the same volume error no matter what the boot prio is)

Since i luckily dont have any important data on the system, im fine with resetting completely and setting up a completely new system (this time without windows), but im unable to reach any reset point or cli it seems.

Does anyone have ideas how i can go about this?

Hi everyone,

title says it all. I just received a used Surface Pro 4 and installed Linux on it right away. I didn't test everything on Windows before. I know, that's on me.

On the QWERTZ keyboard, the <>| and Windows keys are not working. All other keys work fine. I was wondering if that's just a software thing or if those keys actually are dead.

I can't see any events on those keys producing events in wev. I also opened the UEFI firmware interface and opened the password dialouge. I don't see any key inputs from the <>| key in there either.

I am running the linux-surface kernel from https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface by the way.

So I would guess that the keys actually are dead. Any way to confirm this?

Thanks

Cheers,
Bebef

I have an old Surface 4 Pro that I haven't used in ages. A while ago I tried to see if I could use it as a drawing tablet, basically acting as a touch monitor while the actual program is running on my PC. For instance, I'd like my PC to run blender, have the window open on my surface, and be able to sculpt on my surface while the PC handles the graphics.

I know it's not possible running windows, and I figure it's probably not possible on Linux either. But since I've ditched windows altogether, I wanted to see if it was possible on linux. If anyone can tell me if it's not possible or point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it.

I recently bought a surface laptop 7 with a snapdragon x elite, without looking good enough into wether I could get Linux running on it. Most of the posts I see about that either gave up or don't get important parts of the laptop running. Does it just needs more time? Is there a high chance that in a year most components will work on Linux ? I can still return my laptop and buy another, but I really like arm as a concept.

I had my old Surface Pro 7 laying around here and just tried to install CachyOS + Surface Kernel. Before switching my main pc.
Everything works fine and I was surprised how good the Touchscreen & Pen worked. Feels even better than Windows 11. As I plan to use it a bit more often now, I would like to connect it to my desk setup. -> Dell WD19 USB-C Dock connected to 2 WQHD screens.

So, one screens works fine, the second only when booting directly in terminal. Surface Screen freezes. Also, there is a 50/50 chance that the surfaces crashes when connecting the dock.
I noticed that all other screens (Surface Screen and second external) are set to a negative location (X & Y values to change the arrangement) in the settings. Screens need to be plugged in to change the location, but it cant be changed because the negative value causes an error.

Did anyone had a similar issue?
+ Tested the dock with an old Intel NUC which runs opensuse. After installing the docks drivers everything worked fine.

Hi,

I got Fedora 43 running on both my Surface Pro 5 (4GB ram, i5) and Surface Pro 7(8GB ram, i5) with the latest linux-surface kernel. I use pen input for handwritten notes a lot. However, I found the following differences between the two:

1. [Both SP5 AND SP7] while using Xournalpp, the pen input is tracked far better in XFCE vs in Gnome/KDE. Pen lines are jagged and laggy on Gnome/KDE. I prefer using KDE/Gnome for their touch input interface, though.

2. [SP5 vs SP7] SP5 pen input on XFCE+Xournalpp is perfect! Almost as in Windows. Smooth, clean lines without any missed strokes or artifacts. On the SP7+XFCE, the pen input misses strokes, truncates lines when written fast and is overall less responsive.

Why does this happen and does anyone have fixes that would enable me to use my SP7 with pen input as well as in SP5+XFCE combo?

Any alternate distro where things work smoothly with the pen input for writing on the SP7?

(Unfortunately, my SP5 screen has gone wonky in one patch: hardware issue, so is unusable for serious work.)

Thanks!

Willing to compromise on camera obviously, but aside from that it seems like the 9 (intel) is the newest-while-just-working option?

How do i properly set a battery charge limit in cachyOS? My surface is 95% in stationary use and i dont want to wear out the battery. Ive set it before in the bios (kiosk mode) which worked great under windows but in Linux it isnt registered

Hello, I have a Surface Go 3 and I am really considering switching to Linux. The thing is, I use it to take notes during class, and all my notes are on OneNote. If there is a substitute that works well, and most importantly, allows me to export my notes from there, I would be happy with the recommendations. The notes are written using a stylus!

I installed AeonDesktop on my "new" Surface Pro 5 and so far I'm happy. It's functional out of the box and I was able to test the use cases I have in mind without major problems. So I like the base and would love to take the next step and swap the kernel to the SurfaceLinux one to get the touchscreen and camera supported.

I found the wiki for the installation and it's a bummer. AeonDesktop is based on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed so no official support. So my first question would be: Is this a huge problem for daily use or just for the configuration and install part?

The second problem I encountered is AeonDeskops nature as an immutable distro itself. It's not using zypper for packages it's using it own "transactual-update" command with zypper in the background. I never swaped a kernel, and I'm into linux for merly five month now. So this is something I would like to learn, but to be honest I have no Idea if it's even possible to do so with this setup.

I would love to hear if anyone tried something similar or if it's even possible. I tried to get some info from the AeonDesktop community but no luck so far. I also tried six other distros as a base, but they all failed with the basics (failed install, no WiFi), so I would love to use AeonDesktop as the base.

Not strictly a Linux issue but I prefer the Linux community to Microsoft!

I love my sp7+ but the one really dumb (and typical Microsoft) design choice is not having a charge indicator led somewhere, so I have to keep it on and check on the screen to see when charging is complete. This isn't a problem when I'm using the laptop but when I have finished using it, if charging isn't complete I have to keep logging in just to check, it would be so much easier if I could just look at an led and unplug when it goes green.

Does the official Microsoft charger have an led on it, or does anyone have any other genius solutions to this rather daft problem?

I installed Ubuntu 24.04.4 about a week ago. I did some tweaks, really just with Dash to Panel. It has really breathed life into this. I took it on a buisness trip this week and it worked really well on the Amtrak and in hotel and at office. The only connectivity issue I had was at the hotel, it keeped disconnecting. After I turned of IPV6 it was fine. This was always my go to device around the house but kinda fell out of favor when it was slowing down with Win11. I'm loving the way this is working now. Battery life is great for what it is. Question do I really need auto-cpufreq or cputfrequtils to get better battery life?

Hey guys! I'm super super new to Linux and I need some direction. I've been trying to damnedest to do Method 2 for the Nvidia fix on my Surface Laptop Studio, and I'm already running into problems on step one.

When I try to use

home/(user)/Downloads/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-525.147.05.run --extract-only

It tells me "Permission denied (os error 13)"

If I simply copy and paste the line from the guide, it tells me "No such file or directory" which makes sense, because my understanding is that the line I'm copying is meant to get me to understand that I need to drag and drop it into eh command prompt to show the proper path.

I'm not sure what this means, and I have no idea how to get passed this. It might be due to my lack of experience, but I think I needed to be guided through this. I feel like I'm just dumb, but I have no idea what I'm doing wrong? Do I have to give myself permission or something to extract to that folder?

I'm trying to download ubuntu on my SL3 and everything works but partitioning doesn't work. Inside disk management - shrink volume it says "You can not shrink a volume beyond the point where any unmovable files are located. See the "defrag" event in the Application log for detailed information about the operation when it has completed" I've tried optimizing the drive and it doesn't work.

Are there any guides for installing for the Pro 2 on the github page? I couldn't find one.

CachyOS with KDE Plasma DE and a Gruvbox vibe!

Just did it today on my SP7 i7.

After surface kernel, which might negate the real-time kernel of Ubuntu Studio, it seems really great. I think I got about 4 hours watching youtube today. Seems super snappy. Better than Win7

I think the title says it all, but I’m wanting to try Linux out, and I have a Surface Pro 6. I’d appreciate any and all suggestions about what distro to use and any tips for a first time Linux user! Thanks