I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it’s one of the worst laptops I ever used.
Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn’t connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.
The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the “supported” lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.
It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.
And it uses “special” locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.
I don’t think surface would make for a good work laptop, but I have amazing experience so far with using it for the ocassional traveling, or just as a carry-on.
I just Parsec into my desktop at home, and can comfortably work without having to deal with performance, and Surface is amazing for that.
I also really like the pen support, so I can make notes or draw bascially anywhere.
And I also use it for DJing, where it works pretty well and is compact enough to not be a bother carrying it around.
Is KDE good for touch? I always though gnome would be the way to go for touch.
With Wayland it’s pretty good
Is there a tablet mode?
Yup. I think I needed to manually install the touch keyboard. But once installed, it works as expected. Touch the screen or remove the physical keyboard, and touch mode gets activated. Whenever touching a text field, the soft keyboard pops out. It’s massive, though (well, about the same size as the one for Windows).
Nice!
Which one did you choose? The ones I found feeled pretty clunky to use…
Seems the one I use is Maliit. It’s on the chunky side, but for the few times I type without the real keyboard, it does the job just fine I guess.
I have an OG Surface Pro. The first one. It’s running Windows 10 at the moment and it’s doing fine except for the occasional wifi/Bluetooth bugs. I’m using it exclusively in tablet mode with the pen. No keyboard.
When Windows 10 is going to reach its end of life, I’d like to install Linux on it. But I need it to have a tablet style interface with gestures if possible.
Do I need any special distro or drivers on that hardware? And what would you recommend as the desktop environment?
You’ll definitely need this: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
Gnome is probably the best with touchscreens. I had issues with Ubuntu though so you probably want something more up to date, like fedora or arch.
Yeah, Fedora runs with wayland by default, which is really nice for touchscreens.
Also, highly recommend checking out Universal Blue’s Surface images! It’s pretty much everything you need out of the box! https://universal-blue.org/images/surface/?h=surface
That’s even better! Thank you!
To add another comment to your reply, have you tried it personally?
I’d like to back up my system before doing the switch. What do you recommend I use? Clonezilla with an external USB drive all plugged in using a USB hub?
I haven’t tried the Surface images due to not having one, but I am using their Silverblue images to make the whole NVIDIA drivers thing a bit easier on my system.
Also I haven’t needed to backup my system in over a year now (I stopped hopping with Silverblue) so I don’t remember the solution I used, but this seems good.
Very cool. Thank you for this.
I had one of those too! Sturdy little guy, reminds me a bit of the first eeepc 701 :-) But I was worried about the replacement of the charger once it would die. Besides, I have had a bad experience of Surface-line longevity, they always seem to die suddenly after a while, so I sold it.
Hey, you wanna know something about the EeePC?
I was the build engineer that automated the process that put together the Linux OS for those things back in the day.
That is so awesome. Do you still have one lying around? Those things have an awesome form factor, but the I/O ports are a little bit dated by todays standard 😅
Nah. The hardware wasn’t very good and it was very slow. I had a 7" and a 9" one. I replaced them with the surface pro.
The company was going to make custom Linux based OSes for other smart devices like TVs and monitors but Android came out and was backed by Google, so of course it became wildly popular. Our company went bankrupt pretty quickly after that because it had no the contracts coming in. Asus was the only client keeping them afloat and the contract was ending.
deleted by creator
I bought my wife an HP Stream 13 some years back. It came with Windows 8 installed. Which worked just fine until updates bloated it so much it literally took up the entire (paltry) SSD. Windows 10 came out and it offered a free upgrade, which would have been smaller. Unfortunately, every time I tried to do that, it just complained it didn’t have the space to make the switch. I rolled it back to an older Windows 8 and disabled updates to try and keep using it. It complained constantly. I finally deleted the shit out of Windows and installed Lubuntu. It’s worked since then without issue.
Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was “designed” for.
I’m sure it is an improvement until… you’ve to use Wine to run something Windows only or a VM and end up on the exact same spot as initially but with extra steps and less performance. 😂 😂 😂
I don’t need it for windows applications, its basically something I can use for light photo and video editing and uploading to my server, all the heavy lifting is done on my PC which has windows because of adobe and better support for X264 and X265 when video editing.
Okay that’s fair. So this this the solution, fallback to a second machine running Windows? :P
Well in that case; My windows PC falls back to a server running Linux as that’s where all my files are, where my docker containers and VMs all run off… I can spin up a new PC in minutes (windows or Linux) as everything is done off the server, including staging my devices.
If every day is 1 min faster and 1 day a week is 5 min slower, that’s still a net gain. And that’s assuming that they need to run a windows-only app which a surprising amount of people don’t.
Everyone does run into a Windows-only app eventually. It’s sad, it hurts but it is what it is.
You’re in a Linux community here man, you’re going to be outnumbered. I think people here genuinely don’t rely on Windows stuff as much as you think.
Last time I needed Windows was a few years ago when I wanted to do a firmware upgrade to my guitar processor. In the meantime I upgraded to one that itself runs Linux :)
I think lots of people exaggerate their need for certain apps. I understand if you need Photoshop for work because it may be the best tool for the job and an industry standard, but some people swear they “need” it when all they do is apply blur or red eye reduction to a picture once every 3 years. Nowadays you can probably do that in dozens of other ways.
I’ve been Linux only since late 2015 and in this time I “needed” a Windows VM ~ 2 times, but ofc personal experiences can vary greatly.
Sure, but like I said, better to suffer once a week or month than every day
Windows only app… Name one that is actually useful and I bet there is an alternative.
Unless you have to collaborate with others who use said Windows only apps and you can’t afford compatibility issues.
Like what, what format would this be? Regardless every company I have ever worked for issue me a laptop with windows anyway, so why would the OS I choose to use on hardware I own be a factor for work? Even then, if they didn’t I don’t know of any format that I would need that would be an issue.
Okay that’s fair, you don’t try to do any work in your Linux box and things work out. Great.
Not sure about your life, but I don’t count things I enjoy as “work” especially when its not work. I enjoy using Linux, I enjoy my home lab why should I need to justify it when it brings me joy? Linux works for me and my workflow, just because it doesn’t work for yours, don’t try to shit on other people.
Except battery lasts more on Linux. Not to mention suspend ACTUALLY works, and won’t wake at random times while in your backpack and kill your battery before you can actually use it when you need it. Which Windows does. And yeah, most people do NOT need anything specific from Microsoft to be productive.
Considering most proprietary software companies are moving to web technologies, I call bs on your take, sounds like you’re still mentally stuck in 2015.
Wrong. Autodesk, Adobe, Office (the real one, not the limited web experience), NI Circuit Design, Solidworks, want more examples? Sounds like you’re mentally stuck on a lifestyle that doesn’t include working at all.
There are alternatives to these so it depends on the user. If your workflow requires these, then that’s in you.
:bootlicker:
Once the drivers got into the mainline kernel, running Linux on surface has been a dream. Except for using the pen, IR-cameras, booting from USB…
I think there’s enough of us to have a SurfaceLinux community here :-)
I’ve got a Surface Pro 5 with the dogshit m3 processor and 4GB of Ram, anyone have any concept of how it’d run under linux? It basically folds at any real task in Windows
It would be smooth as butter with a lightweight desktop (probably not KDE). I suggest Linux Mint XFCE edition
“KDE is heavy” is so 2000s. It’s been quite a while since KDE is very tight on resources usage. Unless you’re running a raspberry or similar, there’s no point on constraining yourself with one of those desktops for an everyday use device.
Everything’s about perspective… maybe GNOME became SO bloated that KDE now seems very light. :P
ooh, I just snagged an old Pro X. Tempted to see how it runs with Linux on ARM before even messing with Win11 that’s installed.
