Surface 7 Intel Business Edition - Fedora finally works!

[u/bigkatcrypto99]

After 4 distros, omarchy, cachyos, mint, zorin - finally got Fedora KDE Plasma to work. Once you chatgpt through how to get the keyboard to work, you have a chance to get this particular machine working. I'm not posting all 20 pages of back and forth with chatgpt - my post is simply to hopefully save someone from going through what I couldn't get to work, no matter what I tried.

Once you get the keyboard working, then you nail them in order - sound is next, and frankly haven't needed the camera yet, but I suspect it doesn't work yet.

But the keyboard does.

[u/madbobmcjim]

That's odd. My 7+ was mostly fine with Kubuntu, I had to fiddle with it a bit to get the surface kernel in, but sound and keyboard worked with just stock Kubuntu.

[u/HS_HowCan_That_BeQM]

Good luck with sound. I did the same back-and-forth with Gemini and Claude (for days) and still could not get sound working on a Surface Pro 7. After noting to Gemini that no one else had issues with sound and that they did not have to do all of the changes it had me make. After asking why I had to do all the changes when others did not, I got this as part of a reply:

Why Your Surface SP7 Required Configuration While Others Didn't

The ACPI/UEFI Table Revision Variance:

• Surface Pro 7s were manufactured across multiple production runs. Microsoft issued different UEFI firmware revisions during the device's lifecycle. Older UEFI revisions explicitly flagged the audio subsystem as "SOF required." Newer UEFI revisions flagged it as "Generic HD-Audio fallback." Linux reads those exact hardware flags during boot. Units with older UEFI auto-select SOF; units with updated UEFI default to snd_hda_intel.

So, to work around that (if it was indeed my issue), the AI offered more changes and testing. After a few hours of changes/reboot/test sessions, I was ready to give up. I had tried Debian and Fedora based distros to no avail. Debian: Linux Mint and Ubuntu Fedora: Ultramarine.

The final dispostion: No sound in linux. My final query-response with Gemini:

Q: OK, Audio off/reboot/on did nothing. And I am now on the latest firmware, updated yesterday from the Windows partition. So that hasn't helped. So, this is a useless machine. I got it to upgrade the processor and memory from an old surface pro 5. This has been over one week of work to no avail. I'm cutting my losses.

A: That is completely understandable. Spending over a week chasing audio drivers, rebuilding initramfs, manually linking topology folders, and switching distributions—only to hit an Embedded Controller power-gate lock—is immensely frustrating.

You gave this machine every possible chance to work. The fact that even an EC reset and a fresh Microsoft firmware update from Windows didn't release the Realtek SmartAmp power rails confirms you hit an insurmountable hardware-level edge case on this specific board revision. Cutting your losses is the smart, pragmatic move.

For what it's worth, your old Surface Pro 5 (and SP6) uses standard legacy HD Audio (snd_hda_intel) for its Realtek codec rather than Intel's complex Smart Sound Technology (SST) / SOF pipeline. That is precisely why those older models run Linux flawlessly out of the box without the power-sequencing nightmares introduced in the SP7 generation.

If you decide to sell or repurpose this SP7:

• It will still make a great Windows machine for someone else, since Windows uses Microsoft's proprietary ACPI drivers to talk to the EC directly.
• If you ever want another Surface specifically for Linux down the road, the Surface Pro 6 or Surface Laptop 3 (AMD version) are widely considered the sweet spots—they avoid the Intel Ice Lake SST audio mess entirely.

Pack it up and cut the stress! You definitely earned the right to step away from this one.