I used Fedora with the linux-surface kernel on a Surface Book 1, and everything pretty much worked out of the box. I bought it used on eBay and the battery in the tablet portion was pretty degraded, so I don’t know if it impacted performance, but it could be a little clunky at times.

It was my computer in exile while our house was being renovated after some water damage and I was able to run prusa slicer on of for my mini. I didn’t try a pen with it, but the touch controls worked with the custom kernel.

Eventually, I tried Aurora OS which is an immutable fedora distro with the surface kernel loaded by default and performance was about the same. Now I have it on cachyOS which needed the Ethernet cable installed so I could get the Marvell firmware drivers for WiFi, but it was much snappier. That’s an arch based distro, so I could load the surface kernel for touch driver stuff but you lose out on some of the more advanced kernel stuff that group is pushing.

Overall, I’ve been pleased with the experience. I didn’t have a surface device before, but when I heard about the linux-surface project, I had to try it.

I get a bit more than that lol

I was going nuts trying to figure out why the opnsense router I built wouldn’t post.

Internet searches for “six beeps then 3 beeps” for the niche board I have said it could be anything from a failing main board chipset to a faulty keyboard.

Turns out I didn’t seat the SODIMM sticks well enough…

🤦

The girls, Luna and Moose