I absolutely loathe win11, so I turned to linux and have been trying to find a distro that would allow my surface pro 7 to work properly. I use this thing as a portable art station, so getting the pen and touch screen work perfectly is my first priority, and getting paint tool SAI 2 run properly the second (Krita works I know, but it’s like telling water colorist to switch to oil paints).

I run Mint on my extra laptop, but I can’t get SAI working properly so it’s out of the question. I tried Zorin OS since it’s said to work well with surface pro’s, and I really liked it and even got SAI running perfectly basically out of the box, but I could get both the touch screen and pen to work only barely even with the linux-surface-kernel.

I now have win10 back so I can keep drawing, but I’m searching for a distro that could work for what I need - and would be easy enough for a mint-level noob like me.

So, has anyone gotten surface pro’s touch stuff work perfectly with some distro or am I stuck with win10 until ESU runs out? Even the best answers I find searching online are basically “the touch works somewhat but I don’t need it anyway”

    • Autisti4@sopuli.xyzOP
      2·
      6 hours ago

      Yeah tried and failed, I get them working but not even close on the level good enough for art

      • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        6 hours ago

        Ah sorry, I see you mentioned the linux surface kernel in your Zorin OS text.
        You could always keep using Windows 10 even after EOL and allow LAN access but forbid internet access for the Surface in your router. That would require you to save your art to some sort of network storage before using another device to upload it to the net though.

        • Autisti4@sopuli.xyzOP
          3·
          6 hours ago

          Yeah… I might have to. Win11 is only the absolute last resort, since it’s such a garbage fire. It installed itself on the SP7 without my consent, and just kept getting worse and worse every update, until the machine barely worked without lagging. Insane that an os hogs something like 6GB ram just for being on, and even on a damn machine microslop made themselves

          • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            33 minutes ago

            Just like 10, windows 11 reserves a lot of ram, but it’s not really using it. When you need more ram it will unload a lot of things. It’s just sometimes too damn slow at it, especially on a device like a surface which has pretty pokey hardware. (Despite on paper it supposedly being much better)

            You can try those de bloat scripts. Instead of waiting for windows to unload the shit you can just stop it from loading in the first place. On a VM of mine it made a pretty big difference, but on my SP7 it seemed to not work(?) it didn’t seem to do much. I’m generally not a fan of those though because they tend to break a lot of things. Like one of them turns off hibernation which is a huge no no on modern standby devices.