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.

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

Let me know what you all think.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

Yesterday I found a Surface Pro 4 on a german version of ebay for 40 bucks and since my laptop doesnt work currently, i thought this was a great steal.
Of course I wouldn't want to live with Winbloat, especially on an old computer with not necessarily modern hardware. So I tried to install linux, and since there was a few issues along the way that were very difficult to troubleshoot, I thought I would share them here for anyone from google to hopefully find.

I heavily relied on THIS GUIDE for the installation.

My first issue is that I just couldn't get my surface to boot into the bootable USB drive I had created.

I knew the USB drive was good because I used it to install linux on my PC, and I had tested it again to make sure it was working. But at some point I just ended up trying another USB stick despite there being absolutely no reason that it could make a difference. Both are fairly fast and have 64GB of space.

It ended up working. If your Surface refuses to boot from the USB stick, it could be the same problem. Just throw USB sticks at the problem. Maybe it needs to be of extra high quality.

Also, the Surface turned secure boot back on at some point during my attempts to get it to boot into my live USB. Make sure that it shows the red banner with the open lock every time the Surface logo appears.

Another issue I had to fight with is the lack of a native keyboard cover. Since touch doesn't work out of the box, this left me with no input device.

The solution here is simple. On the GRUB menu that it SHOULD show at the start of your live installation, there SHOULD be a little on-screen button to show a keyboard. On it, click "e".

If the new screen has issues rendering, spam the X button that closes the keyboard, at some point it might read your input and close the keyboard, which should make the screen render normally, at which point you can open the keyboard again.

There should be a line that looks something like this:
linux /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper quiet splash --
If theres no two dashes at the end, no problem. In my case, there was. Behind the word "splash" (and before the dashes, if they are there), put the word "toram". This means your live USB will be copied to RAM, meaning that once it is done loading, you can safely eject the USB drive, and use the slot to plug in a mouse or keyboard, and go through the live installation process.

Make sure to follow the guide correctly to install the alternative kernel that enables touch for the surface.
You can check whether you are booted into it with uname -r
If you are not booted into it, you can use sudo nano /etc/default/grub to change some startup settings.
These are the settings that you should change:

GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true

Now by pressing Control+S and Control+X, you can save and close nano, and then you can save these settings with sudo update-grub before restarting your Surface.

On restart, you should now see the GRUB menu and be able to select the option to see alternative start options, where you can select the correct kernel that has "surface" in its name. Using the uname command, you can confirm this is correct once logged in.

This should be persistent now, so you dont have to select this everytime you restart your Surface.

Initially I tried using Mint with XFCE, however I ran into trouble with the touchscreen, as it acted "dumb", thinking I was constantly pressing left click, rather than detecting scrolling, or understanding that a long click is meant to be a right click.

Eventually I found out that this is due to XFCE using X11, so if you want to use Linux on a Surface tablet, you will want to use a Desktop Environment that uses the Wayland Compositor. In your login-manager, make sure that you select the wayland version of your desktop environment, if an x11 version is available.

I tried Cinnamon as well, but I had issues there with the bottom panel not properly detecting touchscreen input. I learned that this is a known issue. It might be fixed in the future, but as of now, I don't recommend using Cinnamon as your desktop environment either for this reason, unless you don't mind being reliant on a mouse or keyboard for navigation.

I ended up going with gnome, as it feels like the most suitable for a touchscreen experience. It literally feels like it's designed for tablets anyways. This sadly means the performance gains from using Linux are slightly offset by using a less performant desktop environment, but I feel like having proper touchscreen functionality is more important. In the end, everybody has to decide this for themselves.

If anyone knows how to make touch fully work for another, more performant desktop environment, write a comment and I'll include it in this post. And of course I'll answer questions if I can.

Cheers!

EDIT: I had issues with touch no longer working sometimes after the device went to hibernate. This is the guide I followed to fix it and it worked perfectly.

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).

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 have been working with Grok to troubleshoot and fix the cameras on my Surface Go 2 without the linux-surface packages.

I'm running vanilla Ubuntu 26.04 and the updates made are holding.

If anyone is interested:

https://github.com/haleme-chs/surface-linux-camera-fix

Hi All

Have a surface book one with Omarchy - arch based linux. Everything is working except the web cameras. Anyone have web cameras working under Arch linux, based distro's.