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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to add to what others already said, the work from linux-surface is being adopted in the mainline, so it is possible that your hardware is already supported in a modern distro, like Fedora. boot it off a live USB image and poke around, you’ll get a better feel for it.
pro tip, at the GRUB menu press ‘e’ to edit the first item and then add
rd.live.ramand that should load the image to RAM. you can then remove the USB and it’ll be way faster to navigate and it won’t touch your existing SSD install.Dude. I’ve been using Linux since 1995, and I never knew about
rd.live.ram.I don’t use grub much anymore with UEFI around, but for those bootable USBs that’s gold.
MVP
that’s for Fedora, for Ubuntu it’s
toramI think? or was that for older versions… Esc during boot to verify, if it goes “loading to RAM” then you know it’s working.It’s not a grub function? Bummer. My rescue images are either Arch or Alpine.
Use the surface-linux custom kernel https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supported-Devices-and-Features#feature-matrix
It seems from the feature matrix that all features are supported except your builtin camera. I personally use this kernel (arch with hyprland) and it works perfectly. The nvidia dgpu is sometimes a pain tho
Thanks so muchh!
I’ve a Pro 7 with Fedora. Best decision ever. I don’t miss anything from Windows. And better yet, PRIVATE!!!
To get you started, check this: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
Thanks so muchh!
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.
Ill check out the arch!! Ive heard ubuntu was easier but if arch is easier ill check it out. Thanks for the info!
Arch isnt that hard to use, just more maintenance, you have to update often and you can break things easier. It is defiantly harder to install. Thats why I recommend Garuda as it has a nice gui installer. It comes fully riced too. KDE dragonized is what i went with. The non gaming edition.
You will have to maintain your new system with fresh updates very regularly. You will have to get used to going through
.pacnewfiles. Luckily there are easy ways to do this usingmeldto view pacnew files side by side with their corresponding config file that helps you migrate data easily.Being an arch based distro your on the bleeding edge of linux and this means sometimes you will get cut! But an update will come along fairly quickly to heal those wounds. For instance the screen rotation broke a few months back. Easy fix in udev config though.
Debian based distros are pretty bullet proof, takes a but more to fuck one up. You’ll have to wait a lot longer for the things arch users get every day.
Personally i don’t find garuda to be that hard to maintain but Im used to arch already so I know what to expect and more of how to fix things. One of the best things about garuda is it uses
brtfsby default and sets upsnapperfor you so when things go wrong you have an easier time fixing things.You can always try it out and if it’s not for you you can move on to the next distro. And hop until you find what your looking for.
Best of luck!
Definitely!
I suck at updating things, so definitely not for me. 🤣🤣 i have windows now, as soon as i see an update, i put it off for 2 months. Same with my phone.
I gotta get better at linux!!
Definitely doable! I’ve run several Linux distributions on Surface devices. I had good experiences out of the box with Ubuntu and Mint, and not-great experiences with Debian Bookworm (even with the Nvidia driver, it could never seem to work out that the external monitor on my machine was a primary. I did not try the Surface-specific kernel, however. Good luck!
Thanks❤️ you can do it with mint? Good to know!
Your first Linux install? Definitely Mint.
I’ve been using Linux since the days of Slackware on floppies, and I still like Mint. It seems to just work – I’m not at all averse to “more hardcore” distributions, but would rather get on with my work. That being said, the Surface kernel is a nice piece of software and worth considering for an optimal experience on Surface.
Best thing to do is just to try it. Backup up your data and install Linux. Use Linux Mint.
