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installing linux on my surface pro 8

Hi everyone! I know im not good with technology. I brought a surface pro 8, 3 years ago. I obviously understand that was a mistake and i should have listened to programmer cousin. Its gonna be slighty difficult to install linux on it.

I've researched several youtube videos, but i was wondering if anyone had any tips?Obviously the attachable keyboard has to work and i want the touch screen to work. The surface appealed to me when i brought for those features.

With all the privacy concerns of windows, i want to commit to switching my operating system! Thank you everyone for their help with all my privacy questions. Ive been getting into foss and learning kotlin.

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  • So I installed Fedora on my surface. It was a huge pain in the ass. Then I went the with easy arch install of Garuda and everything has been pretty painless. I'm not really suggesting you follow suit as arch distros do require a bit of maintenance others don't. But you can research garuda and see if it's a fit for your needs and see if the maintenance is worth it. One benefit of the arch install is almost everything worked right out of the box. Didn't even need a usb heyboard for installation. Full disk encryption was easy to use because the keyboard just works. That wasn't the case in fedora, i has installed with full disk encryption and would have to pull out the USB keyboard every boot just to unlock and boot then I could plug the surface keyboard back in to use. Just a heads up if you are wanting to use full disk encryption. You can also set up the encryption to unlock via USB and while not that hard to setup that might be more work than you want to be doing.

    Whatever distro you pick you should install the linux-surface kernel and drivers for the stylus. They can be found here, along with specific instructions.

    https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

26 comments