Surface Studio on Linux

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Hi all ,
I’ve been searching around ever to try to find someone who’s tried to put linux on a surface studio. Its sad and I would do it in a heartbeat if I had the necessary funds to buy one. There is barely any documentation out there for the surface studio linux issues(only people speculating and questions rising about it). I look on Surface Linux threads and couldn’t find anything so I’m curious if anyone in this community have a surface studio and has tried putting linux on it.
If you have then I have a lot of questions to ask like:

What works when you install Ubuntu?
Can it run Debian no issues? How about fedora?
Does the multi-touch input work? How about the puck and the pen?
How unstable is Linux on the surface studio?
Were you able to dual boot or do a fresh full install of linux?
Did anything change with the UEFI or EFI ?

I would like to say thank you for your time for the people responding to this thread.

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The surface studio is a regular computer with a touch screen. There is no reason for linux to not work on it.

The only thing that probably wouldn’t work is the dial thing. Other than that, it shouldn’t be different than a touch screen laptop.

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Not necessarily true, the digitiser isn’t a normal touch screen that’s had drivers for a while, it may likely not work, among other things.

The current state of surface devices you can find here

Unfortunately the studio hasn’t been tested by anyone who’s shared their results there, but I would guess that you may find similar issues to the ones listed on some of the newer surface devices they do have there.

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Thats the part and I wanted to see if anyone had already done it here.

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I would like to revive this before I make a new thread about the same questions. Because since I saw the trailer that December with my colleague and friend I’ve very much liked the concept of a large moveable touchscreen.

If anyone has any ideas, or any news. As I’m kinda looking at this a bit aging hardware, getting cheaper as Windows gets heavier. But even my almost 10 year old laptop can hold up, I would be interested to use the Surface studio, but my concerns still stand. I wouldn’t want to buy something that I don’t use.

And it is crazy to me that no-one has touched that hardware with Linux and talked about it…

If anyone in Europe want to collaborate on testing one.

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When I was doing some research about a Surface Pro with Linux I ran across the Linux Kernel for Surface Devices. They list some support for the Studio, some compatibility may vary depending on which version of the Studio you have. Check out their compatibility matrix on their GitHub.

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I can’t speak for the Studio, but Microsoft’s support for the Pro series is quite poor. From a hardware design perspective, they’re phenomenal, but the firmware is terrible.

On windows, you have an annoyance with the screen auto-dimming when displaying a black image, and auto-brightening when displaying white.

On linux, support is hit or miss. Most of the hardware features work, but the touchscreen and stylus take turns misbehaving. On my SP6 the stylus works pretty well with the patched kernel and driver, but the touch-cover reeks all sorts of havoc.

Sometimes the stylus will become unresponsive when resting my palm near the touchpad. Other times the keystrokes are constantly ignored when holding the stylus near the display.

Also if I close the lid while the unit is still on, there’s a 50% chance of the touch/stylus driver crashing, and needing a reboot.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on sleep functionality.
If you disable the touchscreen and stylus, it works just like any other laptop would. But if the touchscreen/stylus driver is enabled, either the driver will crash on wake-up, or the system will completely lock up and drain the battery in an hour.

As far as the pen itself, anything newer than the Surface Pro 3 uses intel precise touch, and has considerable pointer lag. Also the pen will drop out after ~90 seconds of holding it to the display. You have to either move the pen away from the screen or twist the barrel to make it wake up again.

Sorry for the wall of text, but my family has owned four of these things and I wanted to dissuade you from buying an even more expensive unit.

TL;DR: Hardware is good, poor firmware support from MS, linux is hit-or-miss on these devices.

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But what is the alternative, to a large somewhat colour accurate screen with touch and pen support?
I’ve thought about the Lenovo Yoga, but I talked to a repair technician and he showed me how awful they are these days, to repair and overall build quality.

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Not really large, but maybe the Lenovo m15t Travel display? I have one, it has a pen and touch. But it needs USB-C with DP-alt for output and touch. - might be a option for portables only, this way.
Reply with your distro, displaymanager and display system (wayland, x11) of choice and I can check it out.

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I’m not sure what kernel and DE I would end up on but I’m going Arch-Mate (should be WL) next, currently with Arch-XFCE (still runs x11)

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That kind of bug and driver crash is also found on the ASUS Vivotab(Wacom digitizer), quite possible its the battery(some devices ping battery status from pen/pen-touch sensor–seen this on external “tablets” so it doesn’t matter if its Wacom or MS NTrig pens.

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I paired my pen to check for a low battery, and it reported 71%. :confused:
But I experience the same issues whether or not the pen is paired to my machine. Does the controller still have a way to talk to the pen without BLE?

You also mentioned NTrig pens, and it makes me wonder if
there are any other laptops/tablets that also need the weird userspace tablet driver.

One thing the surface devices don’t suffer from is pen jitter. They seem to be pretty darn accurate in that regard.

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Don’t have a Surface anymore(had one during W8 era), pen enabled devices have OEM custom drivers to factor in “accuracy/calibration”. Pressure sensitivity seems to be less on Linux may it be Wacom or Microsoft’s Universal Input(formerly Ntrig). Before I converted a Lenovo Flex(Chrome) to Linux, their active stylus had performed lousy on Android yet “Linux” the drift ratio remained stable. Funny thing is using a Windows specific stylus the erase/alt button is usable so its the same stylus hardware as their Windows counterpart.

If a device monitors stylus battery in a non-BLE, its likely via the active input polling data.

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