A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4

I run Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 without any issues as far as I can tell. I've done almost no tweaking. I just do periodic software and firmware updates. I close the lid, throw it my bag, open it hours later, or the next day and I'm right back to where I was. The experience as close to Mac-like as I've ever experienced outside of Apple.

But I still do wish someone would make a Linux laptop that's as tightly integrated with the hardware as macOS is on a MacBook.

Disables Swap and Zram, gets OOM killed, surprised pikachu face

Joking aside, is there an actual legitimate reason to do this on a workstation? I understand why you would want to disable swap on something like a kubernetes cluster node but in my head, heaving at-least zram enabled is a good thing on a workstation so you *don't* get OOM killed... I call on thee, Linux wizards of HN, to help me understand the reasoning behind this.

I know this doesn't fit the author's goals but I still think the trick with the surface line is using WSL instead of trying to run native Linux. Things have improved over time but when I was using my Surface Pro 4, Linux support was still pretty lacking. Maybe things will get better now that they're practically EOL with Win10 ending next year and no support for Win11.

Unfortunately my SSD started to fail and battery life was poor enough that I ended up buying something else. The iFixit repair score reflects how much of a pain it would be to replace both of those. I do miss it sometimes, I really liked the 3:2 aspect ratio.

I never liked the Surface series that much. It looks very nice, until you actually start working with them. Then they feel like a weird tablet with slow Windows on it. You can optimize it a little, but not much. Quite expensive as well and sometimes support is horribly slow.

I gave my wife an old Lenovo Yoga 2 in 1. That thing works nice using it as a flipped tablet to watch Netflix, but here also the performance isn't great.

Maybe just don't expect that much from these weird computers pretending to be tablets.

Note this is the lowest spec Surface Pro 4, it had a low power Intel Core m3-6Y30 so that it could run without any active cooling, making it a 'true' tablet. Most of the 'proper' Surface Pro 4s had an i5 or i7 processor with active cooling (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Pro_4 ) and were roughly comparable in performance to other PC ultrabooks at the time. I've been using the Surface Pro line for about 10 years to do everything I need to do, they are pretty solid.

About the Fedora Gnome vs EndeuvourOS KDE... the issue here isn't Gnome. It's actually Fedora.

In my testing on a similar hardware (also Core M3 and 4gb RAM), Arch-based distros was the best with low RAM. And I tried like, probably 50 distros since last year...

Gnome on my HW with Arch, is as fast as KDE, and use less memory than KDE (in theory, I know RAM is a complicated subject).

Why fedora is problematic on low end hardware? Because well, Fedora uses packagekit, which is a ram hog, and this is pretty known. Is not the only reason though, I believe there's some other defaults that make it slower than arch on my HW, like zswap vs zram.

In my experience with weak CPU and low ram, was that zswap was actually the best choice. On such low RAM like 4gb, you'll really need a swap, you can't run from this. And zram won't be enough, in my experience.

Which I guess is one of the reasons why Arch go very well here, as is one of the few distros right now that does a nice default for zswap.

With Fedora, and most other distros, I get constant freezes when the RAM is full (which is pretty easy to do with 4gb), and this never happen on arch based distros.

I'm using a Surface Pro 7 to run Fedora, and my experience is mostly the same, although it runs a bit faster and without the ghost touches. The main annoyance I face is probably the fact that touch in Firefox occasionally breaks.

I like the hybrids/detachable form factor, as a mean to merge tablets and laptops in a single device, but the whole software/hardware stack was not yet ready then, especially for those attempting to use Linux.

List of problems:

1. x86(-64) power saving (sleep) capabilities are poor; tablets are expected to consume very little battery (ie. last weeks in standby mode), while x86 eats batteries for lunch (in S-whatever); this doesn't even take into account Windows arbitrarily deciding to wake up the machine while in a bag/backpack

2. Surface Pro's and Surface Book's (the latter was state of the art in terms of tablet hardware by the time of SB1 and SB2) had OK hardware support from Linux, but it took a long while, and it wasn't very stable (eg. wifi)

3. Hardware touch support itself is not enough; software needs to be good, and there was (likely, is) no document reader with good UX and annotation capabilities on Linux

The solution for my use case was to dual boot, but points 1 and 2 were still a serious issue overall.

Nowadays:

1. there are ARM tablets, with performant power saving (sleep) mode

2. WSL sidesteps Linux hardware compatibility issues (assuming one tolerates running Windows as underlying O/S), and avoids dual boot

3. WSL also allows using better document readers/annotators

I fear WSL, but as a matter of fact, it's changing the landscape for Linux users.

In theory, Ipad Pro's would be the best of both worlds, but they have a toy O/S by design. /shrug

Sounds like every experience of mine with desktop Linux. Excitement, initial success installing, days of esoteric troubleshooting, then disillusion and abandonment.

The Intel m3-6y30 used on this surface is just fantastically puny a core. 4.5W design spec, tdp down to 3.5 up to 7W. Tiny GPU. The 7200u on my Samsung Book 12 is a 15W configurable from 7-25W; so much more headroom. 0.8GHz vs 2.5GHz base clocks! Admittedly the 7200u is also a year newer but both are Sky Lake. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/88198/i...

One interesting thing happening in Linux now is bpf control over hid devices. Perhaps it might be possible to filter palm reads out at the kernel level with this, or eliminate ghost inputs. Hypothetically it should allow filtering the data arbitrarily. Classically I've used interception-tools in userland to do some light remapping, reading a device filtering and emitting as a virtual uhid, but this should be faster & slicker. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.11-More-HID-BPF

I really need to switch from my Samsung Book 12 to another copy (which I already own); mine's OLED is pretty cracked: remarkably invisible when looking straight on at it, but the touch went from sometimes not working to never working. I also want to try a pen with it.

The 4GB of ram can be obnoxious. I feel like with a better nvme not sata SSD it wouldn't be such an issue but paging stuff out or in really makes the whole system lag badly sometimes, which is terrible.

I also hella recommend hibernate. I didn't trust it for years, but one day ran low on power while suspended & watched systemd wake my system up, then hibernate it, and was shocked shocked shocked that it resumed latter & worked. It takes ~10s to boot up but being able to put a project aside, and come back weeks later & pickup where I left off is amazing. Use hibernate! I think you can configure it to hibernate after X amount of time sleeping.

Had one issued for work. Absolutely hated working on it. Though that was probably more a mismatch with work requirement (heavy excel use + teams = deathly slow). A lighter OS plus lighter use could be fine.

I’ve had had SP4 i5 8gb ram version since 2017. It’s unreliable when running Windows, let alone Linux. It had constant touch screen issues which never fully went away even after replacing the screen. When I tried installing Linux I decided to switch back to Windows after a couple of months as both wifi and bluetooth had constant issues. The battery life is 2 or 3 hours at best even if you replace the battery with a new one. I’ll be replacing it with an M2 Macbook as that’ll be way more productive than to keep using this Surface.

I’ve seriously been considering moving all my development to Linux. Microsoft is giving me the creeps lately.

I've been exclusively using linux on my tablets since 2007 with the thinkpad x61t and i've never had any of these problems. Although i use a completely different setup compared to the dude in the article. I would even say that on tablets gnu/linux actually provides a better experience.

Too bad that Linux support in laptops isn't the best. Especially for unique laptops like Asus zenbook 2024, the one with two screens.

I want to get away from windows completely but their support for laptops is much better.

I'm very seriously thinking about one of these (or really, its successor) when I need to replace my computer again in the next year or two - it's already optimized for several Linux distros: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite#

All I need now is a good replacement for OneNote that stores notes in an open format and supports pen input for sketching and handwritten note-taking...

One reason I don't use tablet is that they all have glossy screens.

And the new iPad with matte screen has a glossy frame around it. I tried it in a store and the glare around the otherwise nicely matte screen was uncomfortable.

Does anyone here have experience how well matte screen protectors for tablets work? I see them mostly discussed for they haptic feel when drawing on the tablet. I wonder how well they work to have a good experience when coding on the tablet.

He went back to windows and didn't mention to worst part of old windows PCs (and a surface4 is extremely ancient!)

The wifi stack is entirely handled by the shaddy driver, which is usually just the reference implementation from the chip manufacturer stuck in time.

That means your wifi stack will only support WPA2, and ancient cyphers with outdated parameters. No matter how up to date is your OS.

I ran nixos on a surface pro 5 for 3 years without issues. Even the stylus worked. It was one of my favourite "laptops" I had. The superbad thermals forced me of surface pro line.

It took a couple of attempts, but I'm really enjoying EndeavourOS and i3 on a Surface _Laptop_ 4.

It's the lightest, most portable and comfortable laptop I've had.

Why do we expect Microsoft to support Linux? They are selling a commercial operating system and are not interested in supporting a free one.

F40 works fine enough on my SP2. Only complaint is no deep sleep. I just shut down instead. Same with my framework 16.

I'm mostly impressed this person has an SP4 that still has a working battery and no screen issues.

Is battery life decent on these new PCs? Does sleep work properly?

Searching for a Linux tablet, I got a used Lenovo X1 Tablet Gen3. Linux works mostly fine, but as a tablet, it's mostly useless for reasons similar to the ones mentioned in TFA:

* Battery life. 5-6 hours for moderate use simply does not cut it, especially since sleep drains battery like crazy because s0ix is not working properly, and debugging why is almost impossible. It's absolutely crazy how something that used to work just fine was deliberately botched because MS/Intel decided everything has to be a phone.

* So because of this, you need to shut down the tablet if not used, which wouldn't be too bad, but as TFA says, you need a keyboard to enter the LUKS decryption password.

* As a pure reading device, it's too heavy.

Apart from that, Firefox is basically unusable because backspace does not work properly because of this bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1832876

So in the end, while it's working, there's still a lot of janky behavior, which makes the experience just frustrating.

Interesting that slapping Linux on a Windows computer doesn't work well. I wonder how OSX would fare.

Linux surface kernel is a meme.

it's the same sort of hacks from teenage Android community to port binary blobs. if you're not familiar with that, just be glad.

in summary, old unpatched kennels with weird binary code nobody cares to understand.