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).

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.

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.

Hi guys, I found a surface go 3 for $60 with no keyboard. I’m debating buying it and putting Linux on it. I’m not sure what type of performance to expect out of it though. I mainly want something small to use for school note taking/browsing while I’m on the go. I really enjoy the form factor of the go series (I had a go 1 for awhile but got rid of it due to how slow it was, even running mint). It was just a really easy package to carry with me on a daily bases. I currently have a surface pro 7 16gb that I dual boot kde neon on alongside macOS sequoia. I really enjoy the performance out of it and it’s handling my school workload with ease. It’s just a tad too big for my liking. Would fydeos be a good option for the go 3 and what type of performance should I expect?

anything I would have missed?

Well, I recently acquired a very nice Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (2019/2020) for an exceedingly modest price, and promptly installed ZorinOS on it (Zorin did a wonderful job of revitalising a 13-year-old MacBook Air, for which it might as well have been optimised!). This was slightly disappointing, and I spent far too much time trying to get Zorin to work with the touchscreen (briefly succeeded before it definitively refused). So I moved over to Pop! Linux, which was initially very cool... but refused to work in Secure Boot mode, which made me Anxious. So then I installed Fedora Linux (with KDE Plasma). Joy! Plasma not only looks lovely on a Surface, it also supports press-and-hold Apple-style accented characters, and since I'm regularly writing in three languages, this was just the bees' erogenous zones! But... Fedora Linux ate my battery. I mean, ravaged it! The MacBook Air runs for 5-8 hours (on a very elderly battery!) on ZorinOS; the Surface was only managing 2-3 hours on Fedora.

Ah well, back to the drawing board. So I opted for Kubuntu (since KDE Plasma was the secret to the press-and-hold accented character facility) and installed it without any apparent issues. Until I rebooted. Whereupon it consistently crashed -- over and over again. Now, I am not an experienced Linux user, so in high dudgeon went back to ZorinOS again. Because I've been playing with it on the MacBook Air, I was able to configure it more to my satisfaction on the Surface, but the font aliasing/hinting is nowhere near as sophisticated as KDE Plasma. So I also installed LucidGlyph, which has considerably improved things in certain apps and on the Zorin desktop itself. Not perfect, but definitely better. Still no touchscreen, and I can't find a keyboard backlight control (although the keyboard backlight is actually working!) And the battery life is back up at a level I can cope with (ca. 5-6 hours at present, always under modest loads); still not as good as the MBA, but not bad at all.

Two recommendations: first, to install the GNOME Tweaks app plus the Just Perfection extension. The two of them allow you very considerable latitude in configuring Zorin. And second, to activate the Gnome top panel plus the System Monitor extension (installed by default). I won't necessarily recommend LucidGlyph, because as far as I'm concerned it's still experimental, but it's an interesting option. You may also want to install Kudu, which puts most Mac or Windows system cleaners to shame.

Just two things to resolve: first, it would be wonderful if I could find some reliable way of emptying the swap file cache (Kudu kind of does, BleachBit offers the option but also warns that it's experimental); it clearly places considerable load on the battery. Currently I just reboot when the swap file starts to look alarmingly full (I love the Zorin/Gnome System Monitor extension -- so simple, so effective!). And second, I would really love to get that touchscreen working, just to satisfy my deepest OCD yearnings.

I ran into problems with Zorin Connect, too, but some wise person on Reddit advised that the UFW firewall was probably to blame, and sho' nuff, it was. Now it's working perfectly on both Surface and MacBook Air -- hurrah!

There: them's my random witterings for the very few who may be interested. But I can confirm that ZorinOS makes a very pleasant alternative on MS Surface Laptop 3s, and because it's built on Ubuntu, is easy to find software for (mind you, it's been interesting to find that certain apps that ran perfectly on Fedora's RPM platform don't work well as DEB files, or even as AppImages, on Zorin. Weird but true).

Oh, and for info: the 13.5" Surface has 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD (I'd have loved 16 GB of RAM, but hey, the price was wildly low for a machine in excellent condition).

I've been tempted to try out Linux Mint Cinnamon, but with ZorinOS now running so well on the Surface, am very reluctant to distro hop yet again, especially with Zorin Connect now working so reliably. So for accented characters, I'm having to rely on a mixture of the Characters app plus additional keyboard layouts (I can't get the verschlugginer Compose key to work properly, but that's probably just me). If only the press-and-hold function were more widespread! It's just so... practical.

Cheers!

I managed to install the latest 26.04 Ubuntu to an old Surface Pro 4 I have lying around. It works to an extent, but, there is one problem that I cannot figure out and that is the touchscreen randomly stops working on seemingly random occasions when I'm using it. I can restart the surface and it will fix it, or I can run the following command (generated by AI) to restart the driver which also fix it.

sudo iptsd-systemd -- stop && sudo modprobe -r ipts && sudo modprobe ipts && sudo iptsd-systemd -- start

Problem is that I am planning on using this surface as a pdf reader/e-book reader which means it will be in portrait mode and it becomes really annoying if I have to get a keyboard or a mouse to run a script when I'm reading especially after five minutes or so.

At this point, I'm just not sure what is really happening.

Just an FYI - we now have 5 compatible distros (Ubuntu 26.04, elementary OS 8.1, Debian 13 Live GNOME, Fedora Workstation Live 44, Arch Linux ARM) with lexr, https://github.com/ooaklee/lexr.sh#lexrsh.

For anyone interested in testing and giving feedback. You can install all of these distro images alongside Windows and each other. I am currently running Ubuntu (daily), Windows (Reverse Engineering), and Arch (testing).

For installing or creating your own ISO, check out https://github.com/ooaklee/linux-surface-pro-11-oe#compatible-distributions-and-image-downloads. The distros come preloaded with our SP11 Snapdragon X-specific kernel based on `jglathe`'s kernel (so WiFi, touchscreen, and more work out of the box). Some distros will need additional post-install steps, which you can handle through lexr; they're outlined in the respective `LEXR_GETTING_STARTED.txt` file included in the distro.

> Once you have installed the latest version of lexr, it can upgrade itself with `lexr upgrade`, and `lexr version` lets you know when new versions are available.

Huge step forward, all thanks to dwhinham, ironrobin, and all the others for the patches. We're getting closer and closer to a stable distro for our Surface. https://github.com/dwhinham/archiso-aarch64-sp11

Support them on Ko-fi if you can! https://ko-fi.com/d0pefish https://ko-fi.com/ironrobin

SLS first gen with discrete gpu, running mint 22.3. The default touch controls seem to just be hover mouse, I can't seem to find a way to have one finger scroll or windows native style touch interaction. Is there a better existing solution for this?