I would like to share with you a very cool project that develops drivers for correct operation of Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. I myself use Surface Pro 6 with these drivers and everything works like a charm (battery life is good, cameras work, stylus, keyboard, touchscreen, screen). The developers are gods. From myself, I would recommend using Fedora Linux distribution, as I got the best battery life on it and didn’t experience any additional bugs. If you don’t like GNOME, you can try spins.
Links to project resources:
- Home Page.
- Table of supported features.
- Installation Guide.
- Page with known bugs and their solutions.
- Wiki.
Awesome additional resources:
- User experience from Michael Horn.
- Installation instructions (non-official): Link. Link.
As of my experience, Plasma is better (funny) with handling touchscreen than GNOME. Maybe you should try to use it. Generally it is really good experience. Yup, some caviots here and there but meh, small thing 🙂
I have tried Plasma. Imo, it’s not even close. X11 style touch works OK in Plasma, but the multi touch gestures for navigation isn’t anywhere near as good as Gnome with Wayland. In Gnome, I’m just missing a few quality of life gestures, like being able to swipe from an edge to un-hide the auto-hide dock.
I also tried Plasma Mobile (which was amazing for tablet like navigation), but the hi-DPI scaling was all broken.
Latest Plasma Wayland is really stable. You should try it 😏
I’m typing this on my desktop that is running Plasma wayland right now. The touch gestures don’t give as much of a tablet experience. It’s not that plasma doesn’t work. If I want to use it as a “pure tablet” without normal computer interactions with the keyboard at all, then it’s not a great fit. Gnome is miles ahead for that use case.
Okey 🙂