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”
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.
I’ve not run those de-bloaters, but I checked one that scanned what could be done with 11, and I had managed to kill most of the bloat even without running it, but even that did not improve the performance. It even takes a lot of effort and needs to be repeated constantly, since the damn shit tries to install everything back with every update. Win10 is a bit more merciful in that regard as well, so despite “downgrading” it really feels like I upgraded this thing instead.
I’d really prefer something like Zorin, I got the memory consumption to 1,5 gb at it’s lowest when I tried intentionally, which is pretty impressive with the visuals I could still keep. I’d also rather not to have anything microslop-build, but sadly SP’s are still pretty much the only option available that’s small enough to really work as a tablet, has good enough pen sensitivity for drawing, but still works as a proper computer… I would never buy anything after SP9 though, it’s all some copilot infested shit.
Is yours an i5 model or an i7? Mine is an i5 and it’s worthless as soon as it gets hot. But my friend got an i7 model and it’s amazing what a fan can do. Just having any cooling makes a huge difference.
There’s 3D models for clips to strap a fan to the back of the machine and let me tell ya, it does wonders. They should have never shipped one of these without a fan. They thankfully fixed that on the SP8 and up, but that doesn’t help us much.