Linux on Surface Laptop gen 1

[kevm14]

I thought I had a thread on this. With Win 10 at end of general support next month, this is more of a serious conversation.

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux- ... ce-laptops

I had no luck booting Mint from USB because I couldn't get past the various uEFI things blocking it from booting. Or maybe it was just secure boot - but turning that off makes me nervous that it will corrupt like Windows Bitlocker which would render a "safe live boot as a trial run" totally unsafe and pointless. Still need to figure that out. In theory I could disable Secure Boot, and as long as I never tried to boot Windows before turning it back on, maybe that would be ok? At long as it doesn't generate a new hash or something. And frankly I do NOT trust that I have control over whether it tries to boot Windows on any given restart. It's risky. I'd almost have to completely back up my data and be ready to blow away Windows just to TRY Linux. This does not sound reasonable to me.

EDIT: thinking about this one more, I should be able to save my Bitlocker recovery key and in theory that would solve any issue that I described above while experimenting with a Linux live boot environment. And done.

In other news, I have concerns about Precision Touchpad support, as well as the camera. Windows Hello with the camera just goes away which I use every single day. A special Surface kernel is required (for various things including I think the touch screen) and I don't know if Mint is smart enough to figure that out. Absurdly, it MAY also not support my glorious 3:2 screen resolution of 2256x1504.

So basically it is probably a little janky out of the box, and may still be janky after some annoying backflips/fights with Linux. I am leery about this and probably need more of a hand holding from someone who has gone through the full process and has a fully working machine with no stupid compromises.

Software wise, I think the impacts look like this:
- All desktop M365 apps go away. I don't use them too often but I do use them.
- Onedrive on Linux, in VERY typical Linux fashion, is "supported" but janky as hell. I have been using it on my Vaio. Windows syncs with Onedrive in a far more sophisticated manner. The single biggest impact seems to be that File Explorer integration can load thumbnails but not download the file until I load it. In Linux it just mass downloads stuff in view in the file explorer. It's very crude. To be fair I don't know if the Onedrive API that Onedriver is using supports thumbnail links or whatever, but whether it does or not, it means the Windows experience is superior. I was never in the camp of tolerating a worse experience to, what, show Microsoft? That's just spiting myself.
- As I said above I do use the touch screen sometimes. If it doesn't work or is janky, that's lame and not using the hardware capability that my laptop has.
- Same with the Precision Touchpad. It scrolls just like glass. This is required in Linux and I still don't know how good the Linux driver is. Fooling around with settings is usually the answer Linux people give - to me there is either a driver that supports the Precision Touchpad or there is not. You can't change settings to make the hardware respond at the driver level.
- Windows Hello. I use this daily. Obviously I would just have to use a pin or something and deal with it. Unless some Linux distro does support this. I doubt it.
- Camera in general. Honestly I don't use the camera but there is a random scenario where I might: using this for work. I won't explain further but it's an edge case. I would just use my phone in those cases, I suppose.
- CPU/battery optimization. This is more of a question and while the Linux kernel seems to promise annually that it has made vast improvements there always seems to be some asterisk and like clockwork, next time there are even more improvements. And it is never really right. If it was close (or better) I can probably deal.
- I just randomly came up with this - the speakers sound good. I hope any EQ required is in the hardware and not the Windows driver. Just adding this to the list because if the audio was bad, that would be really irritating, especially when you start to add many of these up.

Yes I understand my choices are:
- Continue with unsupported Win 10
- Do a backdoor install of Win 11
- Linux

There is no choice where everything continues as it is so I understand that some change is happening whether I want it or not. I guess the key is to minimize the downsides of the change (and maybe even find some upsides). I know the overall system will run faster/better on Linux. It will probably run worse on Win 11. But at what cost?

[Adam]

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

[Adam]

https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy

[kevm14]

If only the camera was supported.

[kevm14]

BIg update. I set the Secure Boot from "Microsoft only" to "Microsoft & 3rd party CA." Linux Mint supports secure boot so I thought maybe this would work. And it did!

Booted into Linux Mint off USB. I played with it for a while. Here are some quick thoughts:
- Audio is DEFINITELY worse. Thinner. Just sounds kinda cheap and bad. Aside from a generic EQ there is a more audio professional way to bring it back to mostly the same as Windows which involves recording the Windows response (using a calibrated external microphone), saving that to a data file, and applying it to the sound driver in Linux. So this is possible, but involved.
- It did support the native screen resolution, but only supports 100% or 200% scaling. It does have an experimental mode where I tried 150% but it basically acted like software rendering which seems bad. Could the Surface kernel improve this? Maybe? I wouldn't count on it. 200% was too big and 100% was too small.

20250914_144838.jpg

- No touchscreen as I expected
- Touchpad response was probably something I could get used to but the scrolling (in Firefox) was bad. I couldn't get Chromium to install to try it. I am still worried about this.
- It was definitely snappier than Windows even running from the USB drive. Unfortunately I don't think this makes up for everything else.
- It's hard to say what the Linux Surface kernel plus some system updates after a full install would do for the overall experience but probably not much.

I think I might have to try Windows 11 the backdoor way and I reserve the right to decide later if the experience sucks enough in some way to try Linux again.

Oh, and when I went to boot back into Windows, it asked me for the Bitlocker recovery key.

20250914_151834.jpg

Good thing I had that. That did work but if I booted off USB again, it seemed to lock the SSD again requiring me to unlock it again. I am certain this is by design, to prevent someone from just booting another OS and reading your data. Otherwise it's not really encrypted....

[Adam]

Have you tried wiping it and installing Linux?