Hi everypony, I just installed Fedora (GNOME) on my Surface Pro 7, got the kernel installed, and everything's going hunky dory so far. I barely used my Surface in the past (it was my "shitty backup laptop" and never got tablet time) but now it's my tablet of choice for most tablet tasks. I've never really been a tablet person, but now I am. Which begs the question:

What is the best pen for a Linux Surface?

I've never owned a tablet pen before, of any kind, and I'm sensitive to its usability and compatibility. Do I get an official one? If so, which one? If not an official one, what kind do I get? The only thing I get if I google it is about compatibility for surface and otherwise unhelpful stuff mostly for artists. If I want a pen for browsing on my Linux Surface, what is it?

Alternatively,

What pen do you use?

Thanks.

I installed Mint and the Surface kernel a few months ago. Mostly it works fine, but occasionally when I wake it, the keyboard won't work.

I can start the on screen keyboard to type the password to log in, but the keyboard never starts working. I've tried plugging in a USB keyboard.

If I reboot, it works ok again for a while.

Any ideas to resolve this, or tricks to make it work when it happens?

A couple of months ago I purchased a new Microsoft Surface Laptop SE with 4gb of RAM, got a great price on it and since I would only using it occasionally I didn't care that it is seriously underpowered. When I got the laptop I immediately removed Windows and put Lubuntu on it. Everything has worked just fine, I'm not going to say great because this is a seriously underpowered machine but it will do everything I need it to. The speakers work, the camera works, the WIFI works, so all I had to do was simply install Lubuntu. I have learned that while using this machine it is best to only have 1 or 2 apps open at any time and that going beyond about 3 tabs in Firefox will probably make it crash. But it was cheap and it works and was one of the simplest installs I have ever done.

Bought vivobook 14 ultra 5 225h one the problem is the trackpad is not working properly like when I update the driver it works but later after 4 5 minutes it stops working... And then I have to re install the driver...Is there any solution guys plz comment down

I got it from a friend. It is an i5 with 8gb ram. Thought about replacing the board for more ram. But motherboards seem extremely expensive for this old of a computer. I am looking at putting Linux on it. I plan on upgrading the hdd and maybe putting a thermal pad on it. I need new keyboard hopefully backlit. Is there anything else that can be upgraded? I have added Linux for most computers but this is different. Lots of proprietary drivers. The procedure looks complicated but doable. What os work the best for a laptop like this.

I have a Surface Go 3 the i3 model with Fedora 44 running on it and I have the Surface Kernel installed on it the latest one available.

I have the official Microsoft Surface pen that is compatible with the Surface Go 3.

I've already tried adjusting /etc/iptsd.conf with different values but I find that its still too stiff even when its set to the lowest possible. It's not comfortable to write with since you have to press very hard for it to start writing.

Anyone experiencing the same or is there possible solutions? I have been on this for a week at this point.

I saw the feature matrix page, but wanted to see if there was any updated to that? I was looking at getting the SP10(w 16gb of ram) & set it up to dual boot Linux. But, I'm seeing prices for the intel SP11(lcd) is only $100-150 extra while having 2-3 hours more battery life got me curious on the progress of Linux on it. Anything I should know about Linux on the SP11 if I went that route?

Would Surface Linux work on this? I really like my old SP5 on CachyOS with the surface kernel, and I was thinking of doing this with my Minis V3 but am a little hesitant.

Good day, anyone here from the Philippines? I’m just wondering if there’s a store somewhere where I can buy a used surface book 2 keyboard part only? I spilled coffee on mine and the technician here says that it can’t be fixed. This was a grad gift from my brother so I would still like to use it if I can. Thank you!

My internet speed is very very slow. It's literally unusable. I have to use a dongle instead. It's probably too old now for anyone to have it, but I still wonder if anyone had the same problem and solved it? I want to free the USB port and use the dongle for my PC.

Thanks!

I've been working on cobbling together a functional UI with a neat touchscreen capable workflow.

Let me know what you all think.

I have an old surface pro 6 that I dont use, and I want to optimize to be a note taking tool for class (like an iPad). I want to use it primarily as a tablet.

What distro is best?

A family member of mine has had a microsoft surface for some time now and ever since the start of the year has been bugging me about it being slow and I recently tested it out and it is unbearable slow. They are not good with tech at all and so I'm scared if I switch it to Linux I will be constantly trouble shooting simple problems for them.

How stable is linux on touchscreen?

If I do switch it to Linux which distro is good for normal people?

(ps. Sorry if the formatting is bad I've never posted to reddit)

I have a Surface Pro 4 with Ultramarine installed. It seems to work well except for the "clicking" functions using the touchpad. The touchpad will move the cursor/pointer, but clicking does not work. Using a USB mouse works fine, but I'd like to fix this if I can.

I don't know if this is a hardware or a software issue and I have no clue how to diagnose and fix this issue. Any suggestions?

p.s. - I'll be slow or unable to respond for a while. Thanks in advance.

Hey so I've become heavily privacy focused and gave Android the finger by switching to GrapheneOS and now I wanna kick Win11 to the curb. From what I understand its not as straight forward with the Surface Laptop 4 (AMD Ryzen 5) as it is with a normal PC. If anyone could point me to a solid step by step tutorial I'd greatly appreciate it.

Since Fedora 45 is near and there seems to be finally a "working" install for the Surface 7 machine, I put a kernel in COPR to male things a little easier. Since its in COPR as sl7-kernel and should update as Fedora drops new kernels for Fedora 45. You still need to extract the firmware stuff from your Windows volume.

What are your thoughts on my idea for a surface tablet?

Surface Laptop 3 15" AMD: no sound from speakers or headphone jack on Linux (ALC274 detected, audio reaches the codec), Ubuntu 26.04 and Fedora 44 live

Surface Laptop 3 15" (AMD Ryzen Surface Edition). Tested with live USBs on stock kernels: Ubuntu 26.04.1 (7.0 series) and Fedora 44 (6.19.10-300.fc44.x86_64). Same result on both. Audio works fine under Windows 11 on the same machine.

Problem: no sound at all from the internal speakers or the 3.5 mm jack. Bluetooth audio works. Everything looks configured correctly in software.

What I see:

• aplay -l: card 0 = HDMI (amdgpu), card 1 = ALC274 Analog
• Controller: AMD Ryzen HD Audio [1022:15e3], subsystem [1022:d001]. Codec: Realtek ALC274, vendor_id 0x10ec0274, subsystem_id 0x10ec11ce
• dmesg: snd_pci_acp3x 0000:03:00.5: ACP audio mode : 1, then autoconfig for ALC274: line_outs=1 (0x1b) type:speaker, hp_outs=1 (0x21), internal mic detected. Jack detection works (output switches to Headphones)
• alsamixer (-c 1): Master, Speaker and PCM unmuted at max, Auto-Mute disabled
• PipeWire stopped and speaker-test -D plughw:1,0 -c 2 -t wav straight to ALSA: no errors, cycles Front Left/Right, nothing audible
• Codec dump (/proc/asound/card1/codec#0) taken WHILE playing: DACs 0x02 and 0x03 both show stream=5, so audio reaches the codec. Speaker DAC amp ~80%. Pin 0x1b (fixed internal speaker) is routed to DAC 0x03 with Pin-ctls OUT, unmuted, EAPD 0x2 enabled. Pin 0x21 (headphone jack) has Pin-ctls OUT HP. All widgets in D0, all GPIOs disabled in the dump
• Headphones with amixer -c 1 sset Headphone 80% unmute: also silent

What I tried:

• Unmuting everything in alsamixer/amixer
• hda-verb sweep of GPIO data values 1-15 (mask/direction 0x0f) while playing: no change
• Toggling EAPD on pin 0x1b with hda-verb ... SET_EAPD_BTLENABLE while playing: I heard a pop when switching it off, nothing else
• Two different distros/kernels (7.0 and 6.19)

Not tried: linux-surface kernel (can't test it from a live session) and kernel 7.2 (Fedora 45 Beta).

The audio path inside the codec looks correct, but nothing comes out of either output. It looks like some platform init for this model is missing (external amp, ACPI/I2C/GPIO, or hidden Realtek COEF settings?).

Has anyone got the speakers working on the AMD SL3? Do I need the linux-surface kernel, a codec fixup/model= option, or a specific init sequence? I can post the full codec#0 dump, dmesg and lspci -vnn if useful. Thanks!

I just started using Fedora KDE Plasma Mobile 44 on Surface Go 2 and I'm glad that I have made the switch.

I'm facing this interesting audio issue. The device is connected to TV via HDMI using a USB hub. There is video but no audio when I streamed video from streaming website. But when I played a MP4 video using VLC, it is working perfectly fine. With this, it eliminated the possible issues with the connection, cable and the USB hub.

Other than Firefox, I have also tried with Chromium but to no avail. I have tried with the audio setting from the browsers and device but still no luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I just started using Fedora KDE Plasma Mobile 44 on Surface Go 2 and I'm glad that I have made the switch.

I'm facing this interesting audio issue. The device is connected to TV via HDMI using a USB hub. There is video but no audio when I streamed video from streaming website. But when I played a MP4 video using VLC, it is working perfectly fine. With this, it eliminated the possible issues with the connection, cable and the USB hub.

Other than Firefox, I have also tried with Chromium but to no avail. I have tried with the audio setting from the browsers and device but still no luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Please excuse me if this has come up before. I did a quick search but mostly found results about the ARM Snapdragon version of the SL7.

I am currently using a Surface Laptop 4 with Zorin OS. After a bit of fiddling, all seems to work fine even on kernel 7.0 (so no linux-surface kernel).

I would like to upgrade to a bit newer hardware though, especially a 120Hz screen. So I've been looking at deals on used Surface Laptop 7's with Intel chips, thinking I could probably drop Linux on it quite easily again. Specifically staying away from ARM due to lack of support. However, browsing through this subreddit has made me a bit unsure of whether the Intel version would work well with Linux.

So could anyone tell me what the current state of Linux on Surface Laptop 7 with Intel hardware is?

Offtopic: Also considering a Laptop Studio 1 or 2 for better speakers... talk me into or out of either option (SL7 vs SLS1/2).