Gnome on surface pro 4.
Finally have a fantastic setup for my surface to act as a tablet. the extension Touchup is doing some heavy lifting for usability. apps are: files, Riff, Librewolf, Voyager. Heres more screenshots.
Edit: i forgot to show some portrait screenshots! Ill grab some when i get a min!
i tried to post a video of my osk but it wouldnt work. here is the link to imgur.
gnome osk the osk was acting crazy while was recording. it doesnt act like that normally.
53 replies
What's the OS?
Also, good work finding the one place I think gnome fits
Ultramarine Linux. It has a surface OS variant and its built on fedora. Its pretty good.
Thanks for sharing .
You gotta show off the onscreen keyboard and a *fetch to make the show complete
Edit: and post to one of the unixporn Comms. [email protected]
Oh man i forgot about Fetch!
Super cool goal they're achieving, installing this on my OG Surface Laptop. Thanks for making me aware of this.
You can also use most any distro you want using Linux-surface kernel
Ok you've inspired me to get off my butt and set this up on my old S Laptop. Looks like it is in the supported list.
Woooooo! YEAR OF THE LINUX TABLET!
Wow this looks really nice!
I’ve tried KDE and Cosmic, but Gnome+extensions is my favorite DE by far. It’s 99% of the time perfect😅
What extensions do you recommend? Aside from tray icons
This is what I use. I don’t remember what does what, bit I wouldn’t enjoy Gnome as much without them.
Beautiful thank you, I'll check them all out
Legit the only one i HAVE to have is Touchup. It makes the tablet re hing so much easier. Plus it added the functionality oh HOLDING THE BACKSPACE BUTTON to delete multiple letters .
I'm generally a KDE guy but this is clean af
Very nice!! I haven't looked at Surface support in a while. How well does the pen work?
Perfectly! I havent looked into customizing the button functions yet but pen works and writes.
I ran Debian on one of the surface pros a few years ago. It took a bit of hardware hacking, but it was great.
I use a TWM and spend most of my time in the shell, so I didn't get to utilize a lot of the OS features. But things like reading comics, and surfing the web were pretty cool.
I always wondered if Gnome would be a better interface for it. It seems like they've been leaning that direction for a while.
Are you using linux-surface or have their patches been upstreamed to mainline now? I have a surface pro 6 I was running fedora on & haven't touched in a few years. Curious as to the current status
The OS variant i use uses the Linux-surfacekernel. I dont think they are upstream yet.
so .. which distro are you using? I've been using a Surface Pro 9 with Fedora 44 and the linux-surface kernel and supporting packages installed on top. I've been annoyed with sleep/wake overall (it often doesn't wake and I have to hold the power button and force a reboot).
I hear that sleep/wake has been an issue for a lot of surface devices. Mine is fine at wake/sleep but think its draining the battery while suspended.
yeah, honestly it makes no sense for this to be an issue. Like I can kinda get it if I'm doing things like unplugging the dock quick connect cable and attaching the type cover keyboard and then trying to wake and it freaks out and needs a reboot. But to be totally unresponsive until a hard power reset even without doing those things is just crazy.
Mine is ,like i said, fine. Def had a hiccup or two while playing with this.
https://vger.to/lemmy.world/comment/25591079
Ultramarine
This isn't helping my desire to pick up a Surface for Linux-noodling...
My bad.
...do it.
yovday
Looks nice though, and it's cool how well Linux works for touchscreens these days.
Very cool. I opted for this over a new ipad.
Very nice!
Damn, this looks clean.
Do your cameras work? Partially? Completely? I have a ThinkPad X1 Tablet Gen 2 that has similar hardware to some Surface devices but I just can't get the cameras to work. I tried all of the libcamera stuff and no dice.
I know there is a surface specific kernel. I wonder if that would work for you.
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
I highly doubt it though.
Also if it's that similar to the surface, maybe something related to the Intel ISP module? Only thing I can think of. All my Intel stuff is ancient and/or properly supported.
Edit: best I can tell, if it's truly based on surface hardware, the camera issues are due to the intel image processing unit (IPU3). So whatever you're missing lies here. It's not a true camera issue. Basically your camera isn't really USB, It goes into the blackbox that is the intel processing thing. Since there's a skycam driver on the Lenovo driver page for your tablet, it's probably along those lines.
Most cameras on windows are just USB. My 7th/8th gen Intel laptop is USB.
This is just me googling.
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/discussions/1352
This is the discussion for it on that same GitHub. Good luck with this.
Thank you!
Did you get anywhere with this?
I did not.
my front facing camera works but my rear camera does not! 🤷♂️
some things only work with The linux-surface kernel so it's worth it to use.
Thank you!
like a tablet
I basically don't use my keyboard anymore. Its a tablet all the way.
What are you using the put the window title in the top panel?
I'll give it a look when i get back. Its JUST below the sa ted extensions above 😂
ITs called window title is back
What is that spotify client
Its called Riff.
I like the look and usability for a tablet but hate everything behind the surface in Gnome. Any standalone launcher that works like Gnomes?
🤷♂️
How's the battery health on that bad boy? It's like 7ish years old and you can't change batteries without basically destroying the screen which is the most expensive part.
Im at like 80% battery health. So it runs for 2 maybe 3 hours. The reparability of the surface line is the biggest factor to NOT get them. In the future i'll definitely look for different hybrid laptop.
What's the home page you are using on librewolf and can you share the CSS you used to make buttons bigger?
Its Bonjour.fr and i will upload my css to my codeberg and post it.
i posted the css file in my dotfiles
tysm, I have an old surface that I've just been using as a display for monitoring my homelab but I'm gonna try out something like your setup and see how it goes.
BEST OF LUCK AND GODSPEED!