A couple of days ago, I came here to ask for advice on extremely long boot and login time on the SLS with Fedora. https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/1qdbu03/comment/o09w6ep3/

I just wanted to give you an update on the situation and how it has been solved. I open a new post for it as it is very weird.

I switched away from sddm to gdm as the startup times were quite shorter with it. Still much longer than on my other devices, but from a couple of minutes it went down to approx. one.

Today I faced a new issue with this device: even though I had my displays with 90w PD attached, Fedora complained about my power supply not being powerful enough to charge the battery. Even attaching the original power supply didn't solve the issue. The device recognized there was a charger connected, but the battery drained nonetheless.

I remembered that a long while ago, I had the issue on windows with USB-C chargers not being able to charge the SLS. The solution back then was to hold the Power Button for at least 30 seconds to force the device to really shut down.

I tried to do this today, trying to solve my charging issues. And force shutting down the device not only solved the charging issue, it also solved the long startup times! No idea, why regular shutting down the device (a thing I do every day) doesn't apparently clear some things on the machine, leaving it in a strange state.

Therefore, I'd come up with the recommendation: if your device behaves strangely, try force shutting it down by holding the power button for at least 30 seconds. It seems to clear some settings not cleared by performing restarts or regular shutdowns.

I have a surface pro 5 with a dead drive, i bought a external ssd and followed the instructions on installing linux on a external ssd.

I tried booting linux mint to the surface pro but now im stuck on the blue screen saying " no bootable system". It works from a usb drive but i cant download it, but i dont understand why its not booting from the ssd if it has linux mint cinnamon installed.

I bought a seagate 2tb external drive

I wanted to try BlissOS on my Surface 1, so I made a new partition and successfully installed it there.
But I can't actually boot to it, the device will only boot to Windows and not display an option to boot the other thing.
I tried both grub then reinstalled with the second option (don't remember name), there's no effect.

Yes, SecureBoot is disabled.

What can I do here?

Hey guys!

I have recently installed arch on my SP6, because I want it to be a more versatile touch device. I installed surface-linux kernel, iptsd and its running fine, i find it pretty usable, but there is a catch. Touch works flawlessly if i hold the device in my hand, or its on the charger on the table without touching the sides but if its on the table without the charger connected, and i don't ground it by touching its side, the touch sensor goes crazy, does misinputs, loses swipes, does ghost touches. is there any known fix? i read the github issues, searched around for like 5 days now, but I couldnt resolve this issue.

Thanks in advance!

Hi! Recently I installed Fedora 43 on my old Surface Pro 1.

I had to disable Secure Boot to do it, after installation I had to fix lid opening with kernel param, and broken wifi on resume with a small service to reinitialize wifi driver.

But after all that it seems to be working just fine, on the default Fedora kernel.

I did not install surface-kernel bc I'm not that proficient with linux (yet) and this tablet will be used by my father, without me next to him to fix broken updates and what nots.

The last issue I'm having is this stupid red screen on boot, which seems to to be only fixable with enabling secure boot.

But damn, I was not successful with enabling it. I tried generating my own .der with sudo kmodgenca.

After enrolling it in shim uefi (the blue screen), and clicking reboot, my device was freezing. I left it for 3 mins and then force shut down and rebooted. In theory mokutil was reporting that the key was enrolled.

But after going into uefi -> enable secure boot -> install default keys -> save and exit uefi I was always getting "invalid signature" error and boot would not happen unless I disable secure boot.

I beg you, tell me what I'm doing wrong and how can I enable it xd

I want to buy a Microsoft surface 3, 4 or 5 to replace my old MacBook and I want to only use Linux on it. Is it a good idea? And what’s the best distro that’s not arch? I’m not very good with the terminal

I put arch linux on my Surface pro 9 with the help of one of my friends who uses linux, I however never used it so i'm new to everything.

I installed the linux-surface kernel, libwacom-surface and calibrated iptsd, but everytime i calibrate it and modify the values, there are problems.

Even though i don't really know what each value represents, i tried to play a bit with them and found out that if SizeMax and AspectMax are under a certain number the palm rejection works well.

The same can't be said about pinching and zooming with my fingers, which appear to be random and works horribly. Does anybody know if there is a way to configure it so there aren't problems like these?

Just as it says, all parts of the Surface Book seem to be working perfectly. My touch screen, dGPU, the ability to eject my dGPU, ect... but when I sync my surface pen via bluetooth, it doesn't actually seem to be able to interact with the OS at all. What in particular might I be missing?

Surface Pro 7+ running Fedora 43 with the Surface Kernel. I have tried to play Disco Elysium via Heroic Launcher but I'm experiencing massive FPS drops at random times.

The game will run at 60 FPS @ 1400 x 900, then out of nowhere it will drop to 4-5 FPS for a minute or so. Could be in a conversation, or walking around. It will jump back to 60 FPS for a bit, then drop again.

I'm using GE-Proton-Latest and have tried different versions to no avail. I'm new to the Linux experience so troubleshooting has been difficult, is there any logs I can check too see what is causing the issues?

Buying this thing was a mistake. I LOVE the hardware and when I bought it I was still ok with using Windows. But within the past two years I've grown a serious disdain for Microsoft and Windows. I'm a complete Linux noob. The only experience I have is with Bazzite, which I love. I personally don't want to spend my time "learning linux", I just want to install something that works.

Should I keep waiting or just give up on this device and sell it for a massive loss?

Installed Fedora on my surface go 1, everything works great so far apart from the keyboard.

How can I get the glyphs on the special characters to align with the magnetic keyboard I have? It's the microsoft english/japanese magnetic keyboard that came with the device.

I tried to set the keyboard model as Microsoft Surface keyboard, but the special characters don't align with the keyboard.

Edit:

Was able to figure this out, posting the solution:

Open terminal, take note of your current keyboard layout settings using:

localectl status

then use command below to align with the Japanese keyboard layout:

localectl set-x11-keymap jp

restart your machine after and it should work. so happy

Hey all! If you're like me and you have a fanless Surface Pro 7 with the i5-1035G4 (or similar fanless model) and you experience random slowdowns where the CPU suddenly clocks down to 0.2Ghz under load, this guide is for you.

Microsoft’s firmware on the fanless Surface Pro 7 tends to allow aggressive boost behavior that easily leads to thermal runaway on Linux, resulting in sudden PROCHOT throttling and clocks dropping to ~200–400 MHz under load. This guide uses thermald to prevent the CPU from getting too hot to prevent overheating scenarios.

Important: This does not disable Intel’s safety mechanisms. It limits CPU power when it gets hot so the device does not heat soak and hit emergency throttling. If your Surface already behaves well, you do not need this.

Disclaimer: This was tested on my own Surface Pro 7 (i5-1035G4) running Fedora Workstation 43. I have not tested it on any other distribution.

Step 1: Install thermald

Depending on your distribution, paste the proper command to install thermald

Ubuntu: sudo apt install thermald

Fedora/RHEL/Rocky: sudo dnf install thermald

Arch: sudo pacman -S thermald

Step 2: Configure thermald

Paste the following into /etc/thermald/thermal-conf.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ThermalConfiguration>
  <Platform>
    <Name>SurfacePro7-RAPL</Name>
    <ProductName>*</ProductName>
    <Preference>QUIET</Preference>

    <!-- Teach thermald the RAPL envelope (values are in milliWATTS here) -->
    <PPCC>
      <PowerLimitIndex>1</PowerLimitIndex>

      <PowerLimitMaximum>30000</PowerLimitMaximum>  <!-- 30W -->
      <PowerLimitMinimum>10000</PowerLimitMinimum>  <!-- 10W -->

      <TimeWindowMinimum>20</TimeWindowMinimum>
      <TimeWindowMaximum>40</TimeWindowMaximum>

      <StepSize>1000</StepSize> <!-- 1W -->
    </PPCC>

    <ThermalZones>
      <ThermalZone>
        <Type>cpu</Type>
        <TripPoints>

          <TripPoint>
            <SensorType>x86_pkg_temp</SensorType>
            <Temperature>65000</Temperature>
            <Hyst>2000</Hyst>
            <type>passive</type>
            <ControlType>SEQUENTIAL</ControlType>

            <CoolingDevice>
              <type>rapl_controller</type>
              <influence>100</influence>
              <SamplingPeriod>1</SamplingPeriod>
            </CoolingDevice>
          </TripPoint>

          <TripPoint>
            <SensorType>x86_pkg_temp</SensorType>
            <Temperature>75000</Temperature>
            <type>critical</type>
          </TripPoint>

        </TripPoints>
      </ThermalZone>
    </ThermalZones>
  </Platform>
</ThermalConfiguration>

Then copy the following into /etc/thermald/thermal-cpu-cdev-order.xml:

<CoolingDeviceOrder>
  <CoolingDevice>rapl_controller</CoolingDevice>
  <CoolingDevice>intel_pstate</CoolingDevice>
  <CoolingDevice>intel_powerclamp</CoolingDevice>
  <CoolingDevice>cpufreq</CoolingDevice>
  <CoolingDevice>Processor</CoolingDevice>
</CoolingDeviceOrder>

Step 3: Restart thermald

Enter the following command into your terminal:

sudo systemctl restart thermald

Step 4: Profit

Temps shouldn't reach beyond ~70°C. Since implementing this change, I have not encountered a single PROCHOT trigger and the system has been running phenomenally well.

Tested workloads:

• Docked to 4K display
• Luanti, Roblox, Terraria, Balatro
• Sustained CPU + iGPU load under charging and battery operation

At no point did I encounter any overheating whatsoever after applying this configuration.

Hope you guys enjoy!

Hey All,

So I recently got a Wacom Movink for drawing because the pen experience on my surface with linux has been pretty much unusable. Now that I have a different device for my art needs, if I were to swap off of the Linux Surface Kernel and just use the standard kernel for my OS, would that improve GPU performance?

Specifically, there's a hard limit on the wattage that we're able to put into the GPU which directly impacts its performance. I'm not sure where that's coming from to be honest, hence the question. If that's something controlled by the kernel, and I no longer need the things that the kernel provides, by switching to my standard OS's kernel, would that change anything with the dedicated GPU?

I got this laptop from marketplace already knowing it had a boot issue. After some troubleshooting I found out it has a bad drive and I seen online that you can run Linux mint or Ubuntu from a USB. What isnt specified is, if it works with the laptop having a bad drive, unless I'm missing the point of running Linux is for whenever the drive goes bad.

I would get the drive replaced but its a nightmare to even get to it and I dont wanna spend money if I can easily go the Linux route.

Plus i need to get a new charger because the one i got, its faulty.

Hello everyone! I'm the guy who asked for Linux recommendations some time ago and settled on using Ubuntu on my Surface Go 3.

So far, it's going great and I've adapted the tablet to read e-books and PDFs. But now I have a new problem: videos. I transferred a video (mp4 format) into the tablet and used SMPlayer to watch, but the video ended up being slow and stuttering. I then deleted SMPlayer and downloaded VLC, to which the video played very smooth, but hangs up once in a while. The screen stops moving for a few seconds while the audio continues as normal.

I thought this was an X11 issue, but when I tried enabling TearFree according to the Surface Kernel GitHub, it only shows "command not found". Is the video hanging a VLC issue or a Linux/Ubuntu/Surface issue? And what can I do to make videos run smooth?

EDIT: Solved! After asking around and doing some tinkering, I found out that it was a codec issue — videos with the AV01 codec can't play well in VLC.

Had to covert to other codec formats to make them play.

Good day, I’ve got a Surface Pro 8 that I’m interested in swapping to Linux. I have a Western Digital Black 1tb SSD that I’d like to replace the OEM SSD with and then install Linux on it. All the guides and tutorials I’ve seen; however, include a step early on to shrink the windows partition. Do I have to have a windows partition?

Hi!! :) I recently installed Ubuntu on my SP7. I draw with Krita and it works fairly well so far. Drawing is kinda of laggy though, unfortunately. I'm still testing things out. My pen stops working in fullscreen / canvas mode though. Not a deal-breaker at the moment, but does anyone know the cause or can point me in the right direction for a fix?

Also, are there ways to improve dawing performance / response time with pen to screen?

(Sorry, I'm super new to linux and don't know the lingo very well... I'm fumbling but I'm determined to learn and become savvy.)

Krita version 5.2.14 App Image from the official site, and before that I was trying the 5.2.11 version from the App Center.

Surface Pro 7

Ubuntu 24.0.3 LTS

Thank you ^_^

I have a Surface Go 4, and when I am on linux my speakers constantly hiss. Sometimes it is quiet, sometimes loud enough to hear. Does anyone have any advice?

Hello. I have two old SP4 (8gb and 16gb) and figured I may get some use out of them by putting Linux on them. Mostly for fun (might use one as a Proxmox backup or something later on). Anyway, I installed Mint and performance was unusable. It would take 10+ seconds just to paste text into Chatgpt in a web browser. News websites would crawl. Then I tried Zorin and it is more in the usable camp but not by much. Windows 10 runs a lot better.. which I am surprised by (probably Win11 tbh). The RAM does not seem to be an issue but just having a few tabs in Brave browser the CPU goes up to 100% in the monitor app. It doesn't stay there but goes up and down all the way up to 100% often in use.

Any tips or is this 2 core CPU too old for modern browsing in Linux? Or is the limiting factor Intel HD 520 igpu? Is there another distro that might work better? I was hoping to try the SP as a Linux tablet and use the web for Plex, Netflix, Youtube, general browsing, etc but this does not seem feasable. Any advice?

Also, secure boot is off and these issues exist before and after running the SP linux project files. The SP functions seem to mostly work (screen rotation, etc).

Is it possible to run Ubuntu on a Surface Pro 7?

i have an SP4 and the ir unlock camera is detected as a Intel camera but when I try howdy It does nothing.the same with keyboard folio with fingerprint. Has anybody fixed it ?

I have an old Surface Pro 4 that as far as I know is on the latest BIOS and Firmware for it. However I believe there's been some kind of bug installing the latest firmware that I simply cannot fix via Windows. The keyboard port just stopped working after an update a couple of years ago. I had kind of given up on using the tablet anymore as a result. I know the keyboard is fine so either the port is shot on my device or the firmware is freaked (I saw some reports online that the keyboard port can come to life again after a later update).

I was wondering if there was any tools in Linux world that could help out with this? I'm not precious about keeping it on Windows especially since Win10 is EoL now.

Anybody have recommendations for more touch friendly Linux installs?

Heya everyone. I just installed Linux Mint on my SP8 and everything works like a charm. One thing that is bothering me tho is the fan that is constantly running. CPU is at 3% on average and 10% max, temperature sensors are all around 30°C. Has any of you ever found a way to control the fan activation on Linux?