Surface Pro 3 owners: Tell me your Linux experiences! (Please...)
So I bought my SP3 in '17 as an old-ass student attempting to graduate. It was amazing as I was able to disable most cloudy things (nothing like today with 365 and the general cloud storage), but still use it as a laptop, and finish up my degree. Since then, I've swapped to Linux and wanted to do it too (did it briefly with Ubuntu, but it was still pretty rudimentary back around '19... no touch screen, not even bloaty, was a bit too small of a UI -- can't remember which DM I used, though I know it wasn't xfce which I prefer when I use a DM, though I use i3 on my desktop).
That being said, it seems like there are great options for the Surfaces now, but for newer options. So I wanted to ping y'all and see... have you used Linux on any Surface, and preferably, would like to know for the older version.
I hear Manjaro has gotten a decent option, as I know they have the PinePhone (which I own one but... I haven't had time to mess around with, sadly). I'm not really looking for the touch screen but as it seems the blutooth is dying on the Surface (possibly unrelated or due to the latest Windows update that has borked so much - I have a firewall that prevents/shuts down a lot of Windows "protections" so I may be the culprit but I prefer to think that if I can't do what I want with what I own, the software is the problem), whatever will make it rejuvenate would be appreciated.
Honestly, it's had an awesome battery life (it can be in standby for a week and lose about 1/3 of the battery), and overall, I feel it's the last best thing Windows ever did. That being said... does anyone have a Surface and would you have recommendations (for any Surface)? If so, why, what distro, and what might you want to share?
Thanks in advance!
In lieu of a better answer, maybe the arch wiki could be a good starting point?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Microsoft_Surface_Pro_3
Dang, I hadn't even realized there was a SP3 section. Thanks!
A couple of years ago I bought a surface pro and installed Linux in it with this special kernel:
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
This enables multi touch and a few other features. In the end I didn't end up using it as much as I expected cause I got a contract working for a bank and they provided all the hardware with some MDM software installed so now the device is mostly collecting dust. I just ran it with a vanilla Gnome DE and configured it a bit to make the UI a bit bigger (mainly just theough scaling IIRC).
I wanted to train a NN to recognize my handwriting (but I never really go around to it) so I could use a stylus as the main input device like a keyboard with some gestures for some input sequences... Would be a fun project to pick up again at some point.
This is what I remember the main go-to being when I first put Linux on it (I ended up just doing Ubuntu though, but it didn't support the touch screen at the time and had a lot of other buggy issues). Still not comfortable with it, so maybe I'll kick it around and see.
I have a SP3 and I was tired of how slow it was just browsing the web. Also the marvell chip was flaky as hell constantly causing issues. So I tried Pop OS and it worked right out of the box without the need for the surface linux kernel. I should be clear this SP3 is busted up pretty bad so no touchscreen, camera or mic usage for me. I noticed right away websites loaded much faster. I think this mainly is from whatever driver is being used. All the flakiness was gone. It could be a combination of that and performance was a bit better too. The fan isn't too obnoxious, I keep it on battery saver to try to reduce the cpu usage.
I also tried out a decent number of other distros and none of them worked as well for me as Pop OS. That is to say many needed more configuration and/or the surface linux kernel to get things working correctly. So I don't mean to say those won't work at all. Pop OS was just the easiest solution for me despite preferring KDE over Gnome which Pop OS uses.
I'm just glad to know that there are OOB options that just work (though, my touch screen and cameras work, but Windows has delightfully disabled bluetooth somehow). Thanks!