I absolutely loathe win11, so I turned to linux and have been trying to find a distro that would allow my surface pro 7 to work properly. I use this thing as a portable art station, so getting the pen and touch screen work perfectly is my first priority, and getting paint tool SAI 2 run properly the second (Krita works I know, but it’s like telling water colorist to switch to oil paints).
I run Mint on my extra laptop, but I can’t get SAI working properly so it’s out of the question. I tried Zorin OS since it’s said to work well with surface pro’s, and I really liked it and even got SAI running perfectly basically out of the box, but I could get both the touch screen and pen to work only barely even with the linux-surface-kernel.
I now have win10 back so I can keep drawing, but I’m searching for a distro that could work for what I need - and would be easy enough for a mint-level noob like me.
So, has anyone gotten surface pro’s touch stuff work perfectly with some distro or am I stuck with win10 until ESU runs out? Even the best answers I find searching online are basically “the touch works somewhat but I don’t need it anyway”
This isn’t a distro thing, it’s generally the Desktop Environment, though with the Surface devices, there is a custom kernel lots of people use that has some extra drivers for the rest of the hardware, so look for that. You can use it with any distro.
As far as the DE, Gnome has better general touch support over others right now, so it’s probably going to give you the experience you’re expecting. Every art app I’ve tried with a pen has great pressure support.
In recent tests that I’ve seen, KDE has better touchscreen and multitouch support. It’s long been thought that Gnome was gunning for the touchscreen market, but they got overtaken, because their release cycle is slower.
But I use a Wacom tablet with Gnome, and I agree that the pressure support is great.
When it comes to Surface Pro tablets I find that going with this Kernel helps a lot:
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surfaceSeems that LTE and Camera isn’t working properly but that the rest works:
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supported-Devices-and-Features#surface-tabletsYeah tried and failed, I get them working but not even close on the level good enough for art
Ah sorry, I see you mentioned the linux surface kernel in your Zorin OS text.
You could always keep using Windows 10 even after EOL and allow LAN access but forbid internet access for the Surface in your router. That would require you to save your art to some sort of network storage before using another device to upload it to the net though.Yeah… I might have to. Win11 is only the absolute last resort, since it’s such a garbage fire. It installed itself on the SP7 without my consent, and just kept getting worse and worse every update, until the machine barely worked without lagging. Insane that an os hogs something like 6GB ram just for being on, and even on a damn machine microslop made themselves
Just like 10, windows 11 reserves a lot of ram, but it’s not really using it. When you need more ram it will unload a lot of things. It’s just sometimes too damn slow at it, especially on a device like a surface which has pretty pokey hardware. (Despite on paper it supposedly being much better)
You can try those de bloat scripts. Instead of waiting for windows to unload the shit you can just stop it from loading in the first place. On a VM of mine it made a pretty big difference, but on my SP7 it seemed to not work(?) it didn’t seem to do much. I’m generally not a fan of those though because they tend to break a lot of things. Like one of them turns off hibernation which is a huge no no on modern standby devices.
I’m coming at this from another angle, & your being stuck in an MS-Surface may break it, but please try UbuntuStudio, on something: it augments Ubuntu-family with an entire sea of fixes for creatives.
I’ve no idea how to get a kernel patched to work with such hardware, sorry.
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I use Mint, and a drawing tablet.
I know this can be a problem with Huion tablets, since their drivers are closed source. I bought a Wacom tablet for this exact reason, their firmware is open-source, and so it’s bundled into Ubuntu’s software and all of its forks.
I’m sorry that there isn’t more I can tell you. I could only afford to buy a high quality drawing tablet once, so I wanted to make sure the firmware was compatible with Linux. If you get very frustrated, you can likely find a secondhand Wacom on eBay.
I do have a cintiq as my main art station (wacom definitely is worth the money!), but sometimes I really need the portable one, and a separate computer + tablet doesn’t really work for that… And also sadly the portable wacom tablet machine things themselves (movinkpad, I think) don’t really cut it for other computer stuff either.
