Fedora (or other Distro) on Surface Pro 3

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Hey Guys,

Microsoft has finally upset me enough to either throw my surface pro 3 out of the window or switch to another OS.

My experience with windows and microsoft so far (even reinstalled the OS a few times):
Power-Button rarely works on first try, sometimes it needs around 50 (!) presses to work, keyboard needs 3-5 reconnects a day to work and the battery-life is sometimes terrible without any reason. RMA is not an option, although the device (its already an replacement) is still under warranty, since I can't access my MS-Account. Correct password, yeah, still need to "recover the account", which isn't possible, if your mail-address AND credit card changed. Funny.

So, I tried fedora. First half an hour of using it, I was blown away how well it works. But then, I noticed some dealbreaking bugs:
1. Suspend doesn't really work. It instantly wakes up again, sometimes instantly goes back to sleep etc.
2. WiFi crashes frequently. Only full reboot helps.

Does somebody know a fix for that? I don't really want to run an unofficial kernel, although I know that there is one, that seem to run pretty well. One thing to note is, that I've done all my testing on the live-version running from USB so far. Maybe a full install helps resolving some of the problems...

Thanks for any reply!

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A full install would probably help, there's been a few updates since the release. Just make sure you've backed everything up. WiFi should be fine, problems seem to have been fixed in Fedora 20: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1185804
This guy: https://cd-rw.org/t/running-linux-on-the-surface-pro-3/175 claims everything should work out of the box including sleep in Fedora 24. Just make sure you're running the latest Fedora release (26)

1 Like
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Have a look at this link which gives the current state of the various models in Linux.

Newer distros will likely work better as newer kernels will have better drivers (if they have been worked on)

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Thank you both!

I'm using fedora 26, so I would disagree, that everything works out of the box. But most things do, except what I mentioned. Reddit was in fact helpful there:
Using hibernate instead of s3-standby and installing the Marvell driver might be the solution!

Funny, I remember daily crashes on windows caused by the connected standby and frequent reboots because the Marvell-driver crashed.