Linux for Microsoft Surface devices. It is reality!
Linux for Microsoft Surface devices. It is reality!
I would like to share with you a very cool project that develops drivers for correct operation of Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. I myself use Surface Pro 6 with these drivers and everything works like a charm (battery life is good, cameras work, stylus, keyboard, touchscreen, screen). The developers are gods. From myself, I would recommend using Fedora Linux distribution, as I got the best battery life on it and didn't experience any additional bugs. If you don't like GNOME, you can try spins.
Links to project resources:
- Home Page.
- Table of supported features.
- Installation Guide.
- Page with known bugs and their solutions.
- Wiki.
Awesome additional resources:
- User experience from Michael Horn.
- Installation instructions (non-official): Link. Link.
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I really like the Dell 5290 2-in-1. Not a surface but with 16 gigs of ram and an Intel i7-8650 CPU its a very capable tablet. It runs Linux well and everything just works. The downside is most DE's are not optimized for a tablet. I found KDE with the maliit-keyboard is the most usable combination.
Awesome configuration. Also use Plasma with Maliit keyboard. Also found it the best configuration!
Fedora has plasma-mobile available if you want to try a more traditional tablet interface. The downside is the settings for it conflict with the plasma desktop so you have to start with a clean config folder. Kinda interesting to play around with but found the desktop more to my liking.
I tried it on Arch Linux. But I mostly use my Surface as laptop so it is not needed, default Plasma is good enough tablet experience. And the config mess, oh goddddd... It was pain to restore default plasma settings.
do the cameras work?
Looks like they do not work. After doing some online searches I see people asking but no solutions. You would need a stand alone USB camera if you needed that functionality.