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”

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    2 hours ago

    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.

    • Autisti4@sopuli.xyzOP
      1·
      2 hours ago

      This is just i5, but I don’t really do much stuff that requires anything better. As long as SAI 2 and some basic stuff runs, it’s been enough for me. And yeah, the overheating really is a big issue if you try to do anything outside some very light usage. I do play minecraft with this sometimes, and that’s about the upper limit this thing can handle… it does still work well enough though, even if after some hours coretemp shows the temperatures get a bit high.

      I definitely would not recommend this thing without an added fan. Well, I honestly wouldn’t really recommend any SPs with it either, unless you really need this specific combination of small/artsy enough/yet still computer.