Im running Ubuntu on a Surface Pro 5 (i5 7300u, 8GB) with the linux-surface-kernel.

Generally, things pretty much worked out of the box, the only tinkering I had to do was to optimize battery life / cpu power usage when not plugged in. Theres packages that will limit your CPU frequency depending on the status of your battery. I dont remember the exact name, but it was pretty much the first hit I googled “linux limit cpu power” or something like that. Without that, the battery life wasnt great, especially when watching YouTube, but with some tweaking and the proper h264/h265 drivers, my surface achieves some 3-4 hours of video playback right now.

Other than that it’s smooth sailing all the way.

I used Fedora with the linux-surface kernel on a Surface Book 1, and everything pretty much worked out of the box. I bought it used on eBay and the battery in the tablet portion was pretty degraded, so I don’t know if it impacted performance, but it could be a little clunky at times.

It was my computer in exile while our house was being renovated after some water damage and I was able to run prusa slicer on of for my mini. I didn’t try a pen with it, but the touch controls worked with the custom kernel.

Eventually, I tried Aurora OS which is an immutable fedora distro with the surface kernel loaded by default and performance was about the same. Now I have it on cachyOS which needed the Ethernet cable installed so I could get the Marvell firmware drivers for WiFi, but it was much snappier. That’s an arch based distro, so I could load the surface kernel for touch driver stuff but you lose out on some of the more advanced kernel stuff that group is pushing.

Overall, I’ve been pleased with the experience. I didn’t have a surface device before, but when I heard about the linux-surface project, I had to try it.

Watch for battery life when buying older Surface devices. Replacing batteries in the older Surface Pros is notoriously difficult, because apparently the whole assembly is glued together. Loss of battery life is what forced an early retirement of my 5th-gen (2015) Surface Pro, even though not was otherwise completely serviceable. Newer versions are apparently more repairable, but you’ll have to investigate where that cut-off line of repairability is.

I have a surface pro 6, bought used for cheap. With the surface Linux kernel, almost everything works.

I built support for the front and rear cameras using the surface Linux instructions and they work, however it’s not a working solution, since ms Teams pwa or discord can’t use libcamera devices.

One thing you should be aware of, though, is that the tablet experience is only really workable in Wayland, so you’ll have to forgo non-wayland apps and desktop environments. Gnome is… not great.

Also, there are several gotchas with wayland. I use flameshot for screenshots, which is broken on Wayland with scaling. Scaling also breaks default firefox on Wayland.

Sorry, didn’t mean to turn this into a Wayland comment.

The hard work the folks at surface Linux have done is amazing, and I’m happy to daily drive my surface.

Quote of the day:

“Naturally, were I to buy one, I would have to install Linux onto it.”

That really explains my first day.

I installed Arch on Surface Pro 6. And have GNOME and KDE installed. Pen and touch works perfectly (when it works), like it recognizes pressure, but sometimes need to restart the surface after putting it in standby because it fails to detect pen(and touch as well).

Camera is kinda wonky, it kinds works with cheese but not with other applications, and I couldn’t manage to make the back camera work.

WiFi and Bluetooth works fine (there are some issues with bluetooth when standby but haven’t looked much into that)

Downsides

Neither KDE nor Gnome is optimized to operate as a touch DE. Pen on KDE is detected as mouse(well its detected as pen but proxy as mouse input if a program doesn’t support pen; like if I try to scroll firefox using pen, it works like I have right clicked mouse and am dragging up, so selecting text instead of scrolling), but touch works as expected.

And UX for on-screen keyboard(OSK) is not on par with Windows. It kinda works with GNOME, like a program window slides up if it were to be overlayed by OSK but its still wonky. And I didn’t had good xp with OSK.

But overall, I like it. Its not really powerful enough to do any development, but I use it for multimedia and eBook reader

Dual booting is a nightmare, you’ll need a specially modified kernel, and getting the pen to work right can be tricky.

Once you’ve finally got the kinks worked out it’s pretty cool, but that might take longer than you’d like.

I was using a surface pro 7, for what it’s worth.

It’ll work fine, but there are still proprietary driver issues for certain things. It’s not a 1:1 comparison, but it’ll work just fine.

Edit: I just remembered what I had to do to get cameras working in most applications. I used v4l2loopback.

I don’t know about older Surfaces, but for me in a nutshell, H-E-Double hockey sticks on my 1st gen Surface Go. Only install Linux on a Surface if you already own one.

More in-depth, it was usable - it was my main personal on-the-go device for a couple of years. I’d had it since before I used Linux. On mainline, the main stuff worked. With the Linux-Surface kernel, I could get the cameras working. It was always very janky (you had to bridge stuff through GStreamer or some other weird crap rather than using it directly. Don’t remember the specifics), but it worked.

Another annoyance was a hardware issue with the keyboard when it was in your lap: since the keyboard wasn’t very rigid, it would bend a bit while typing or placing your hand on the palm rest, making unwanted mouse clicks

My big problem with the Surface Go, though, was I had chronic issues with power profiles. It never went to sleep quite right, so after closing it a few times, the system would begin to get unstable and I’d just have to do a reboot.

After my initramfs got borked on that during the time_t64 transition (my fault, not the hardware’s; I use Debian Testing and an apt update went awry), I didn’t feel like going back and fixing it, as I was planning on replacing this device with the Thinkpad I write this on anyway.

Ultimately, my opinion (again, just based on using the Go 1, which is a bit newer than the Pro 4) is that it isn’t the best idea. Considering Pro 4s are not expensive on eBay, trying it isn’t the worst idea, but I feel like it’s not worth it, an unfortunate truth considering Surfaces are such unique devices. This isn’t a cheap alternative (the CPU’s not the best from what I can tell), but the Surface fan in me finds the StarLabs StarFighter 12.5-inch enticing considering it’s both very Surface-like and Linux-friendly.

As you want cheap, you might be able to find something to throw LineageOS or postMarketOS on. Honestly, my question for you is how much do you need a tablet specifically? Could a small laptop do?

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