Hi everyone! I know im not good with technology. I brought a surface pro 8, 3 years ago. I obviously understand that was a mistake and i should have listened to programmer cousin. Its gonna be slighty difficult to install linux on it.

I’ve researched several youtube videos, but i was wondering if anyone had any tips?Obviously the attachable keyboard has to work and i want the touch screen to work. The surface appealed to me when i brought for those features.

With all the privacy concerns of windows, i want to commit to switching my operating system! Thank you everyone for their help with all my privacy questions. Ive been getting into foss and learning kotlin.

  • glitching@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    2 months ago

    to add to what others already said, the work from linux-surface is being adopted in the mainline, so it is possible that your hardware is already supported in a modern distro, like Fedora. boot it off a live USB image and poke around, you’ll get a better feel for it.

    pro tip, at the GRUB menu press ‘e’ to edit the first item and then add rd.live.ram and that should load the image to RAM. you can then remove the USB and it’ll be way faster to navigate and it won’t touch your existing SSD install.

    • pandorabox@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      Thanks! i was thinking the same! I just backed up everything om a hard drive and think im gonna be done with windows in general. About to go full linux🤣

  • Blip6338@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    I have a surface 8 pro too and the easiest way to set it up was to use Aurora (or bluefin if you prefer Gnome). All the drivers were preloaded and if you want to use luks with the tpm it is a breeze to setup.

    https://universal-blue.org/

    You can achieve the same with other distros, I’ve done it with Arch and Nixos too but if you don’t have a solid Linux background I strongly suggest Aurora or Bluefin for an easy and solid installation.

  • Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    I run Kubuntu on my surface pro 8, with the surface linux kernal. Everything works except the webcam but I feel that will be fixed soon.

    • pandorabox@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      Thats what im concerned about! But i guess if you plug in a web cam you’ll have a camera? Thats what im hoping?

      • Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        I have never tried it myself, but as it seems to be a driver issue with the built in cam, I don’t see any reason why a USB one wouldn’t work

        • pandorabox@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 months ago

          Yeahh truu, sounds like a good idea! Honestly i hope someome figures that out because im not tech savvy enough for that🤣🤣

  • dparticiple@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 months ago

    Definitely doable! I’ve run several Linux distributions on Surface devices. I had good experiences out of the box with Ubuntu and Mint, and not-great experiences with Debian Bookworm (even with the Nvidia driver, it could never seem to work out that the external monitor on my machine was a primary. I did not try the Surface-specific kernel, however. Good luck!