surface-pro-x

The Surface line is, HW-wise, very good IMHO. Too bad the software is awful. Thankfully the Linux Surface community is pretty strong. Proprietary Microsoft drivers don't make it easy, but we're getting there... https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x I'll buy another one if there's some commitment from Microsoft to be more open source friendly, but since this will never happen, they can keep their HW.

Surface Pro X here, the support is meh (see https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/7) but good enough to use it casually as a second computer. In my case the biggest drawback is not being able to use an external screen via HDMI and the sound support (although you can workaround that with BT). Let's not talk about widevine, I managed to eventually get it to work but it was very painful. If we get full audio support and solve some of the widevine issues, this can easily become a daily driver for when I'm traveling or giving presentations.

How's the peripherals support on Surface Linux? I've been wanting to switch to Linux on my Pro X SQ2 for a while due to the WSL2 support on it being terrible (might be fixed now [1]) but always thought that most stuff such as LTE, webcam and surface connector wouldn't work [2]. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274#issuecomment-2... [2] https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/1#issu...

> When the X13S Snapdragon released I seem to remember it shipping with first-party Linux drivers for almost everything Nope. 2 years on there's still no webcam support for this device [1], though it is in a lot better place than it was on launch (not being able to boot at all on mainline). The Surface Pro X still seems to be a long way off [2]. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/17tw6ag/anyo... [2]: https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/7

The sad part about all of this is that generally the contributions for these kind of things do not come from the vendor, but from "volunteers". See for example the kernel patches done to support the Surface Pro X: https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x Half of them are from Maximilian Luz (@qzed, student), the other half are from Bjorn Andersson (@andersson, Linaro). All of the hard work is done by them, instead of Qualcomm / Microsoft. The same applies for the rest of the ARM ecosystem :( Another great example is Asahi Linux: the port was only possible because someone decided to reverse engineer the work of Apple - not because Apple wanted it.

fyi https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/43

It looks like there's been some good progress on getting Linux running natively on the Windows Dev Kit 2023 hardware[0]. There was a previous discussion here about this hardware back in 2022-11[1]. [0]: https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/43 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33418044

The Microsoft Surface Pro X has a good Linux support now, and it's arm64 too: https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x Of course audio is not (yet) working (: