I finally got around to giving my old Surface Laptop 2 a second life with Linux. I went with Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition, and I’m really glad I did.
I run fedora 42 gnome on a surface pro 7+ that needed a new home. Great tablet. I do not like the touch screen keyboard resizing when I type to suggest words, but I haven’t found a way to address that.
Other than that, it has been great.
How does the touch screen work with linux mint? Does it?
Works fine with this kernel installed
https://https//github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup#Debian--Ubuntu
Great job! I’ve always avoided Surfaces because the guides to running Linux on them are always like 30 pages long.
I adore Linux Mint, it’s my goto workhorse distro. If I need a general use computer that I want to #JustWork I throw Linux Mint on it.
… Linux Mint kept coming up as one of the best choices for people used to Windows …
i switched jobs recently and my new employer gave me a windows 11 workstation.
i learned the hard way that i can no longer effectively use the gui driven interface and i think it’s because i haven’t used windows in an real capacity for the last 15 years and my difficulty with it became clear to my management, so i ended up getting a mac.
ever since then, when i read statements like the one i took from the article above, it makes me wonder if i should do the same thing considering my difficulty w windows as it currently is.
I just did the same with mine! I’m loving it so far and previously on windows I had to disable 3D to use Godot but on mint 3D is kinda usable. It at least doesn’t crash lol
Cool! Next time, use Balena Etcher instead of Rufus
Edit: I remember for sure that there was a wiki page that said not to use these tools because they modify the image (I think Rufus extracts the image to a FAT FS?).
However, the Ubuntu wiki now reads:
Rufus
Rufus is the tool in Windows that is recommended officially by Ubuntu. A tutorial is available from here.
Belena Etcher has some issues with “telemetry” that’s turned on by default. Which is why I don’t recommend it.
I used Rufus quite a bit back on Windows and never had issues burning Windows or Linux ISOs to flash drives with it.
Wait wifi doesn’t work with the Surface Kernel?
if I’m understanding right it had stopped working for them on Windows too…
Correct
Sounds like it was an issue with their specific device. Never had a WiFi issue running Mint on my Surface for years.
Yes, was a hardware issue on my laptop. Works for other’s indeed
It didn’t work for me on my Surface Pro 7 with LMDE but i had an Ethernet adaptor and when i did an update it all worked.
To expand a little it worked on the initial LMDE install but I did the Surface Pro update from git hub
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
and it borked the wifi driver but it did give me touch support, better BT etc and an udate via the Ethernet adaptor then fixed the WiFi issue
