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Thinking about buying a Surface Pro 4/5

Just putting out feelers, anyone here run Linux on a surface pro 4 or 5? What distro did you use, and how did it go?

Edit: I've pulled the trigger on a Surface Pro 4. I'll make a new post in a week with my early impressions, which distro I've gone with, etc etc etc.

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27 comments

  • A thread made just for me.

    I have a i5 256gb Surface Pro 5 running Pop_OS. Prior to that, I ran Ubuntu and prior to that I ran Fedora for a year or so.

    Battery life is much worse than with Windows thanks to Windows keeping secrets about suspended sleep or something. I’m not a wizard I just follow guides and fart so that’s the most technical explanation you’ll get on that.

    Webcam doesn’t work on any of the distros, you’ll want to install the Linux Surface kernel after installation to enable touchscreen and pen support. Not an issue for me but could be if you use it a lot.

    After all that though, Linux of most flavours works very well. I fully removed Windows as I was getting issues with GRUB bootloader forgetting that Windows was installed. Fedora never had that issue but Ubuntu and it’s flavours were mean n rude on me.

    Pen support is really good but Linux treats it as a mouse. That said, booting up Krita and drawing is a pretty good experience. Not as flawless as on Windows but very similar.

    Fedora installation worked pretty flawlessly with a dualboot into Windows so I’d recommend that if you still want to keep Windows.

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    • Nobara, a Fedora-based distro, has the Surface patches in its kernel, iirc. Said kernel also has an AUR package.

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    • Sweeeeet! Yeah, I've found a good deal on a pro 4, just negotiating with the seller.
      Thanks for your input my dude!

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  • You should read this page: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup

    It's very detailed about what to do to get stuff working (on lots of distros), and what currently isn't working (see camera support etc)

    I took a look in the past but deemed it too much of a compromise at the time for what wasn't working.

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    • I actually just read it about 25mins ago. And yeah, there's a lot missing for it to be considered feature complete. That said, it might still be worth it.
      Gonna wait and see if anyone chimes in with hands on experience. Might still buy one, and just hope the surface kernel matures a bit more in the coming months.

      Edit: I've just had a second(proper) look at the feature matrix, and for the Pro 4 and 5, everything actually seems to be working. So maybe I'll just pull the trigger while my wife's out of town!

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      • I ran archlinux using the software and kernel in that repo for my surface pro 4. It worked great. Additionally I found GNOME desktop to work well, particularly with some extensions like toggles for rotation, on-screen-keyboard and other stuff you'd find on a phone. I also setup pop shell and cosmic for tiling window management, but paperWM might be better for this these days.

        I should not that I had some troubles with the stylus. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not and if I used configuration tools it would sometimes help or sometimes make it worse. That said, I think my stylus is a little screwed up. There is a lot of good info in getting the stylus working and troubleshooting it, you should be able to get it working, for me it was always just a matter of time before I had to fuss with it.

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  • I dislike it. And it's got nothing to do with Linux, or even Windows for that matter.

    I dislike it because the BIOS sucks. It's literally one of the most barebones, locked down BIOSes I've ever seen. You basically get just three categories, boot device selection, turn some hw components on/off, and set the date and time. That's about it. You can't choose enable CSM/Legacy mode, you can't set MAC Address Passthru options, no option to edit existing or add new UEFI boot order entries, and so many more options missing, compared to say what you'd find on other devices. Classic example of corporations unnecessarily locking down devices and abstracting things away from the user.

    This may not be a big deal for you however, but as a power user who likes to tweak things and have finer control, having such a gimped BIOS is a deal breaker for me.

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    • Yeah, the gimped BIOS is certainly not a selling point. But for my use case, I don't feel like it's a deal breaker. I'll be using it for light emulation gaming, and for tracking my self hosted bits. Maybe scrolling lemmy. Possibly distro hopping for the first week or two.
      It's essentially going to be a toy.

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  • I've had Surfaces up to the Pro 3, which all worked wonderfully on Linux. Also had a Surface Book which required some non-mainline kernel additions in order to use all the hardware (camera, touchscreen).

    The Pro's lasted like champs. The book eventually ran into issues with the digitizer (non-OS related), was repaired, and got the same issue 8mo later after the warranty had run out.

    I was looking at a current generation SPro when I came across the Lenovo X12 on sale (+Rakuten). For half the price of a Pro6 I got more storage, RAM, and a more powerful CPU. The only thing it lacked versus the SPro was a microSD slot and dedicated video out (though USB-C hubs work for the latter).

    There were some initial issues with the soundcard and weirdness with storage going into RO mode periodically, but the sound has been fine in current Ubuntu/etc versions and a firmware update seems to have fixed the storage issues

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    • I had looked at getting an X12, but at the end of the day, I found a good deal on a SP4 i5 8gb/128gb.

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  • SP4 owner here, you should avoid the pro 4, one of its revision (with the samsung display) is very prone to touch screen defects, see this issue.

    I'm avoiding surface in general now, after using linux-surface for a year, I finally gave up and got myself a thinkpad x1 tablet. Even without the touchscreen issues, my experience with my SP4 was never good, the cameras needs libcamera and are awful, audio input randomly stopped working after sleep,I had blackscreen issues after login, and random freeze.

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  • If I wasn't interested in drawing and wanted a GNU/Linux tablet, I would buy Pinetab 2.

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