I’m looking for a cheap and portable tablet that I can use for writing. Microsoft Surface Pro tablets, at least around the gen 4 models, are rather cheap to buy used, and they seem decently well made. Naturally, were I to buy one, I would have to install Linux onto it.

I’ve been peripherally aware of the Linux Surface project for some time now. I looked at it recently, after having not for some time, and it seems that they have really made good progress compared to what I remember, and it’s making me much more interested in trying to install Linux on a Surface Pro.

Having never owned a Surface Pro, I’m not sure which models are the most reliable and sturdy. I’m not looking for something that’s the flashiest; I want something that works well. I want something pragmatic — something akin to the idea of an older era of Thinkpad (eg T460). I want a pen with low input delay and good accuracy, reliable and responsive touch controls, and a decent display. I was thinking the Surface Pro 4 might be a good choice, but it’s hard to know as there aren’t many videos out there of people installing Linux on them, so I’m wondering what your experience has been with Microsoft Surface Pro’s and installing Linux on one.

Cross-posts:

  • antrosapien
    2·
    4 months ago

    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

      • antrosapien
        1·
        4 months ago

        Thank you. I will try these. Have you tried PostmarketOS or have any idea how it works on surface?