I have a Microsoft Surface 7 laptop and reaaaally want to try Linux, but everywhere I’ve looked seems to say that Linux just isn’t there yet, with maybe the exception of Arch. I’ve also seen that Ubuntu is working on it but a ton of stuff still doesn’t work (keyboard, volume, Bluetooth).
Can someone tell me I’m wrong and that there is something out there that will work for my laptop? Im not a programmer and know pretty much nothing about coding so…I am terrified of Arch.
7·17 hours agoI’m very sorry, but as far as I can tell the answer is… Not yet.
The problem isn’t just the snapdragon processor, if that was all, most arm capable distros would work. But the surface is a bit special and needs custom stuff to work. The work is being done, but its hobby.
Ahhh drats. Just out of curiosity what’s special about it? Is everything just super new, or is it the touch screen tech or something?
The x86 / x86_64 platforms (not specifically the CPU architecture, but the surrounding infrastructure which comes with it, like BIOS/UEFI) come with a rather mature hardware discovery interface. ARM is still the wild west by comparison.
I presume it is the fault of mikkkro$oft
Have you tried Puppy and/or Linux Lite?
It’s got nothing to do with power, these devices have plenty of power. It’s hardware support. Those distros probably have even older kernels with even less support for new hardware (and I bet probably no ARM version anyhow)
it’s not about power, its about proactive hardware support by the devs.
Arch is great, but yeah i wouldn’t recommend it as a starting point, especially on “exotic” hardware
I wouldn’t recommend it as a starting point, but for exotic hardware, rolling release distros like Arch or Gentoo will be among the first to actually implement the updates / patches needed to make this hardware work. You typically will need to wait a bit longer for it to work on things like Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian. It is especially nice on Gentoo, because packages have multiple versions available and you can make very granular decisions about what runs on the bleeding edge and what runs on stable, while on most distros mixing versions is unsupported and you need to choose between “stable,” “testing,” or “unstable” across the board.
Oh for sure, i think the combination of new to Linux plus exotic hardware is a no go
I see linux-surface does not support The Surface Laptop (7th generation) (not to be confused with Pro7 as I did)
old comment
There is a linux-surface kernel, which makes some things work, and it has install instructions for Ubuntu and fedora, but its not a walk in the park.
(Also, arch might not be as hard as you think. Most of it is just following instructions on a wiki. But you might still need to install linux-surface on arch?)
