I have a couple of Surface tablets that I’d like to put Linux on if possible. The one I want to try first is a 5th gen Surface Pro. If all goes well I would then try it on a Surface Go 2 and hopefully could keep the cellular access.
What resources are available for doing this? The little I’ve read so far makes me think that it is a buggy process and maybe not worth the effort involved.
I have an OG surface 1. I recently installed Ubuntu on it and it’s fucking awesome. I had to make a few tweaks to get a better on screen keyboard but that’s it. Everything worked out of the box.
And the Gnome desktop works perfectly for a tablet.
This is good to hear! Do you have the surface keyboard and pen? I’m guessing the keyboard is probably straightforward, and there probably aren’t many uses for the pen other than precision touching the screen, which is fine.
I do not have the keyboard, but I do have the pen.
The pen doesn’t work like it does in Windows. It’s effectively a mouse. When you click the side button it immediately does a right click without even touching the screen.
Does the pen work probably in drawing or journal software (like Krita and Xournal++)?
I’m running Fedora 40 on a Surface Pro 5. The problem is that you need a custom kernel for the Pro 5 and later. You can get the kernel from the Linux Surface GitHub page. Arch, Debian, Fedora, Opensuse Tumbleweed, Gentoo, and NixOS I think all have repos set up for it, so I’d recommend one of them. Fedora works for me, noting that there was a problem installing 39, so I had to install 38 and then upgrade. On 40 now, and it’s absolutely stable.
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup
May not be your goal, but I specifically wanted to get more life out of a Windows 8 tablet sans keyboard. I had a good time experimenting with the x86 port of Android, and it was a surprisingly smooth process.
At the end of the day, it was indeed quick enough for some basic browsing, but anything with video was horrendous despite the drivers working fine (this was a system with Intel Atom and 2GB RAM).
I haven’t looked in a long time, but I remember there being a pretty active community over on https://old.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux