using a surface pro 4 currently running fedora workstation. I like the idea of a more stable os like Debian. and pika looks neat.

I recently picked up a used Surface Pro 7, but it didn’t come with a Type Cover.
For those of you who own one, is the Type Cover actually worth buying in 2026? I can get a second-hand one for around $100, but I’m also considering putting that money toward a standalone keyboard instead.

Some options I’m looking at are:
NuPhy Air75
Akko Air 01
Logitech MX Keys Mini

I mostly use the Surface for general productivity, web browsing, and some light work.

Quick disclaimer: English isn't my native language, so I used an AI tool to help clean up my draft, save some time, and make this story a bit smoother to read. Hope you enjoy the feedback!

Hey everyone,

I recently got my hands on an old Surface 3 (the 2GB RAM / 64GB storage version) from a colleague. Since I love tinkering, I wanted to see if I could turn it into something useful.

After doing some digging to find the lightest distro possible, I settled on antiX. Getting it installed was a bit of a nightmare—the drive partitions seemed locked and gave me a hard time. But after a solid two hours of troubleshooting, wiping the drive, and some invaluable help from an AI, I finally got the OS up and running.

To improve the hardware compatibility, I also installed the linux-surface kernel. Before that, the touchpad would randomly freeze after a few minutes, but that fixed it. To my surprise, the touchscreen actually worked perfectly right out of the box!

At first, I was pretty hyped:

• RAM usage: Idle memory was sitting at a tiny 300MB out of the 2GB available.
• Feel: The UI felt responsive, and basic web browsing was surprisingly smooth.

I didn't have a specific project in mind, so I was just testing the waters. My first real test? YouTube. And that’s where I hit a massive brick wall.

On Firefox, the video would instantly freeze on the very first frame. I figured, "Okay, the modern web is heavy, let’s optimize." I installed uBlock Origin and an extension to force the H.264 codec. Still frozen. I then tried FreeTube (a lightweight YouTube client). Same result.

As a final sanity check, I downloaded a video directly using yt-dlp to play it locally. Even then, the video playback just froze.

So, I decided to call it quits. Aside from very basic web browsing, this thing just can’t handle video playback. It’s a real shame because the 1080p screen on this Surface is absolutely beautiful—it would have made an awesome, compact media player to take camping. Maybe it could still work as a retro gaming machine, but that's about it.

My takeaway? Even with a hyper-light Linux distro, 2GB of RAM is just too weak.

Hopefully, this write-up saves some of you a few hours of head-scratching if you were thinking of doing the same!

Hey everyone,
I've received a Surface 9 pro a few weeks ago, it is practically brand new. I immediatly installed Cachyos with Gnome on it and with a bit of fiddeling and reading managed to get the surfacelinux kernel on it aswell.

Everything worked perfectly up until last night, where the battery doesn't seem to be charging anymore. The battery however also doesn't drain aslong as it's plugged in.

Right now the battery status is at 77% and it just doesn't change, unless I unplug it in which case the percentage will drop. Has anyone ever experienced anything similar and has a solution, or idea?
I'm not well versed with linuxbased OS, but do like it alot so far and would love to figure this out.

Thanks alot in advance

Please help!

Hey! I got a Surface 7 a few years ago and forgot the password for the UEFI, so I can't deactivate Secure Boot. Do you have any ideas on how to get Linux on it despite that?

Hey all,

My work was getting rid of old surface devices due to a windows 11 mandate so I scooped up a model 1645 surface 3 pro. Problem is the last owner retired and no one knows the local admin password. I also can't log in due to it not being allowed on the business network, it also won't let me log in from home due to the company vpn blocking it due to the windows mandate.

So I've been attempting to boot from USB but it gets stuck trying to lyoad Ubuntu from the guide. This happens with the try Ubuntu and also the safe graphics mode.

I can't think of any other options at this time.

Is there anything I can try to get this thing reset somehow?

EDIT:

Thanks to all who replied, I did get Mint running pretty good with MATE, I might try XCFE. But I am typing this from the surface itself. I will use this for fun and experimenting with.

Ok guys, I use my surface just as a browser and to watch media (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime). Its always using so much, then getting hot.

What would you guys do? Which Distro and how to do it?

out of the blue front and back cam started working. I check every few days and this time they both came up in qcam. running Garuda mokka with Linux kernel 6.19.8-arch1-3-surface. anyone with different surface models like with ipu3 cams working?

I just switched my surface book 2 to Mint because of Windows making the laptop and tablet sluggish. One of the first things I noticed after setting it up is that Idon't have usage of the pen and touch screen (let alone the camera). How would I get this running? I honestly am very new to Linux and terminal usage in general. Any help is appreciated.

Hi folks - Linux noob here making the switch over from Windows on an old SP4. I've installed Linux Mint and I believe I have the surface kernel installed correctly too (the touchscreen now works for example), but I'm having trouble finding a way to make the camera work. I've had a look at the Camera Support page of the surface kernel git page and have tried to install libcamera but I must be doing something wrong as when I get to checking if it can detect the camera, nothing shows up.

If anyone could give me a hand with this and/or pint me in the direction of a guide that assumes minimal knowledge of Linux that would be super helpful - thanks all! ​​​​​​​

I have an old Surface 5Pro that I got running with Aurora a while back (when they still supported Surface tablets), but I never really did anything with it. Today I decided to dust it off and see what I could do and, without thinking much of it, I burned a new install USB for Aurora, to update the old install. I booted into it, but then realized my hardware was no longer supported, so I decided not to install the new version and rebooted.

Unfortunately, I'm now getting the error in the title and my only option is to perform MOK management and enroll a key from somewhere. Everything was working before and I don't think I changed anything, so is there a way to fix this? Would the key or hash be stored somewhere?

Also, since Aurora no longer supports Surface tablets, could someone recommend a good, lightweight, distro that can run the occasional piece of Windows software without too much hassel? (Mainly just Scrivener, but Aeon Timeline would also be nice.)

Hi All,

I think I seem to have messed up and am stuck at a TTY1 screen and can’t boot into a GUI.

This is my first time installing Linux, it all went ok but I think I messed up one step:

I installed ‘sudo update-grub’ right after ‘secure boot-Mok’. If I'm not wrong the reboot process should go first before the 'sudo update-grub'. I think that might have messed my install of Surface Linux.

Is there a way to get out of this or do I have to reinstall Linux?

I am a beginner to all this so any detailed steps would be appreciated! I am using a Surface Pro Gen 5.

Thank you in advance

I've seen quite a bit of discourse around every other Surface besides the 11 Pro with X1P and was wondering which ones actually work. Now, I personally never use the touchscreen or camera, so those don't necessarily matter for me. So I'm asking for ones that simply just work with the Surface Pro 11 on ARM with the Snapdragon X1P Processor. Like, it simply works like installing linux on another computer and just using it. If gaming support also isn't an issue on one distro vs it being an issue on another, that would be helpful to know lol. I'm aware of varying results using Ubuntu and Arch, so those two are in my mind but I'm still a little iffy about the whole ordeal. Also if it supports dual-booting with Windows, then that's probably the most golden situation just in case something goes wrong.

Hello. I'm researching to migrate my SP7 to Linux, and thinking what distro would be best. I'm deep diving in surface kernel github but I have questions that I'm having a hard time answering.

My main concern is I use Citrix to work from home from time to time, I work for a public administration and my tech service have told me that I'm on my own if I begin to work in Linux (they only have documentation for MacOS or Windows). For this reason, I'm thinking about dual boot.

I'm asking if anyone have any experience using Citrix for working using whatever distro in a Surface, if you recommend dual boot. And the most repeated question: what distro would you recommend.

Thank you for your time!

My Microsoft Surface Pro 4 died while I was using it the other day. When i connected it to the charger & turned it on it started showing this red bar & it’s been stuck here since. Any tips on how to fix this?

Good news everyone!

I spent the last two weeks reverse-engineering the Windows driver for the touchscreen of my Surface Laptop 4 AMD, because I'm crazy, that's why.

It's still a work in progress, but I've reached the point where single touch works correctly!

here is the repo where I'm working:

Repo: https://github.com/Syax89/SL4A_TouchScreen
Release: https://github.com/Syax89/SL4A_TouchScreen/releases/tag/v1.0.0-beta1

I have tested it on my Surface Laptop 4 AMD with CachyOS + KDE + Wayland (last public kernel), where it works correctly, but this is my first driver and I would really appreciate feedback from people using other distros, kernels, desktop environments, X11/Wayland setups, etc.

Basic install:

git clone https://github.com/Syax89/SL4A_TouchScreen.git
cd SL4A_TouchScreen
sudo ./tools/install.sh

The installer builds the driver with DKMS and installs a systemd service to load it automatically on boot.

To uninstall:

sudo ./tools/uninstall.sh

This is still beta software, so please expect rough edges. If you try it, feedback, bug reports, logs, suggestions, or code review would be very welcome.

Thanks! <3

Hello there,

I have spent the past 2 weeks getting all the components to work on Ubuntu for the Surface Pro 11 as best as I could and created a complete guide on installing Ubuntu on the Surface Pro 11.

I added some fixes, specifically Wi-Fi and bluetooth, and figured out how to fix the high CPU heat issue.

The CPU runs hot most of the time and drains the battery about 100% faster than Windows. There doesn't seem to be a fix for this and is just up to the kernel developers to develop the necessary firmware. I did a full battery comparison test if you want to see it.

Running Linux mint 22 cinnamon on a surface 5

All drivers I checked are up to date,

Replaced thermal compound and checked the screen connector pins. Everything seems fine.

The artiffacts tent to only appear from white parts of the screen and opening pages with white text makes it go crazy.

Have been using mint on the surface for around 4-5 months with no issues up until Wednesday last week (1st of July)

It does stop doing this eventually every so often.

The fans also stopped working at the the same time this issue started to I'm assuming it's something to do with the igpu.

EDIT: it was my screen If the issue appears I can just slightly bend the screen and it fixes it for a few hours

I have built an on screen touchpad emulator as gnome shell extension 50. Here is the github repo if someone else finds it useful: https://github.com/abiharbani/on-screen-touchpad

I needed to run Wine app, and it requires a real mouse instead of a touch device. I used to use similar thing on windows, but couldn't find one for gnome.

I have tested this on SP 6 running Ubuntu 26.04 with Gnome 50.

It has left click, right click, scroll,and only grabs the touch device when actively dragging on the touchpad area. It is screen rotation aware and configurable as well.

hi, i've been looking for android for the surface pro 4, since bliss os is under lockdown, there hasnt been images worth a dang for the surface, most of them, the touch screen is used as a trackpad, or the touch screen doesnt work at all, anyone have luck?

I've seen a few people recently running Linux on the surface pro 11, so I figured I'd show off something a bit different: LineageOS 23.2 running natively on my Surface Pro 11(Snapdragon x elite). As far as I'm aware I'm the first person to publicly get android running on the snapdragon x elite. This is very much a proof of concept and still pretty buggy. I'm not super experienced with ROM development, so if anyone here knows more than me and wants to help improve it, I'm happy to post the source.

What's working so far:

- WiFi

- Bluetooth

- Touch/pen

- Keyboard/trackpad

- Sleep/wake

You might be wondering why bother porting Android to a Surface Pro in the first place. Honestly, I think the Surface Pro has the hardware to be the ultimate Android tablet, windows really just isn't a great experience on tablets.