Stats:
Processor Intel® Core™ i5-7300U CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.71 GHz
Installed RAM 8.00 GB
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Hardrive 117 GB
Pen and touch Pen and touch support with 10 touch points
If the system looks good, any install tips would be welcome.
That depends entirely on how well the firmware is supported on Linux.
Your name should imply that you work for System 76 so people would realize you’re doing the best customer support in the whole IT-world.
Definitely running into UEFI issues and need to update certs. I’ll look for a list of supported WiFi chips!
I’ve been running Pop!OS on my Surface Pro 6 (i7-8650U) for a while now (with the linux-surface kernel!), and touch/pen support is relatively good; only weird thing is the limitation around what the pen can do; e.g. you can touch-scroll with your fingers (and other gestures) but you can’t use the pen to scroll; the pen behaves more like a mouse, e.g. it will highlight text instead of moving the page (which makes sense)
You shouldn’t have any issues with installing the base OS; the keyboard cover should just work; but pen/touch doesn’t work out of the box, so to get that you will need the
linux-surfacekernel. I use theDebianpackage repository (as Pop!OS is a Debian or Ubuntu derivative - they use the same packaging system). Note that you will also likely want to tell the package manager to “hold” the installation of the non-surface kernel, usingapt-mark hold. You’ll probably want to holdlinux-headers-genericandlinux-generic. (I think I have particular versions held as well.)I quite like to use the “Xournal++” app for touch/pen friendly writing/drawing, and have also used it for signing PDFs (though only the visual type of signature, not the digital type like Adobe does).
It will run just fine. Almost every and any linux distro will work more than fine on a PC with these specs.
I would follow the instructions here: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface, using the Ubuntu specific options for Pop_OS.
You certainly need the surface kernel, so check on github’s linux-surface project for more.
I recently installed Pop_OS 22.04 on a surface pro 4 (i5-6300U w/ 8G Ram). It runs well but I haven’t tested the pen or put any effort into getting the touchscreen working. I just really needed it to not be windows because I was stuck using it for a week.
LinuxOSs, in general, are really power friendly. You will be fine.
if you want a little extra measure of performance, you can switch to another desktop environment (you’ll just be losing out on all that Cosmic goodness)
It’ll run pretty damn well. I’ve got pop on my min spec 2013 Macbook Pro, and, while it is slow at times, that’s mainly because I’ve been too lazy to open it up and swap drives.
