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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone managed to get Linux booted on this thing and working well? I've been debating purchasing one, but I am afraid that I'll be stuck with Windows, which, for what I work on, makes hacking pretty difficult.

EDIT: Just as a note, I know about WSL (I use it at work), but I would greatly prefer to have Linux working on root. I have a lot of custom systemd setups, and I've become somewhat dependent on XMonad.

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I've been using Linux on my Surfacebook 2 13" since about January. Most of the hardware features work decently (including touchscreen), but overall it's still not great despite the excellent work put into a modified kernel for it, here [1].

IMO, the most notable items missing full support are:

- the battery[2][3], charge or capacity status

- "performance base" dedicated GPUs

1: https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface

2: https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface/issues/28

3: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198145

I haven't tried it myself, but over at /r/SurfaceLinux it says Surface Book 2 "dGPU: Working (both NVidia 1050 & NVidia 1060 models) - Using the NVidia driver, bumblebee can be used to change which GPU is being used"

https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/7kazwp/curren...

Ctrl+F("1050")

In fairness, Surface book 1 "dGPU: Not working – Not detected on any bus currently exposed to the Linux kernel, due to this, little to no research has been done"

Linux on SFB1 user here. Echo that it works ok but wifi drop out and no suspend sucks. Would you share your work setup at some point? Am curious.

Don't worry, these will all get resolved now because Microsoft loves open source.

There's a run-down of all the Surface devices here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/7kazwp/curren...

Yeah I daily drive Ubuntu on my SB2. I've owned it since launch and it works great for development.

I'm running JakeDays 4.17 kernel. There are still issues with battery status displaying and some ACPI issues, though it hasn't been so detrimental that I can't use Linux.

How is your experience with WSL? Do you get stuck in a lot of corner cases with it? Or does it work seamlessly most of the time? Guess not, considering you’d “greatly prefer Linux working on root.”

I don't have a big problem with it at work, but at home I tend to go kind of hardcore at home since it makes me feel validated as a geek.

I know you can install X on Windows, but I tend to prefer using XMonad with urxvt to navigate at home, so as to minimize my time using a mouse; AFAIK, you can't interop the Windows version of Firefox in my XMonad setup for WSL.

I'm not saying I couldn't make an equally productive setup in Windows, but I've come to prefer the setup I have on my personal laptop, which is sadly five years old and finally starting to show its age.

You can run window managers just fine with X on windows. I use i3 and bspwm on my surface almost anytime I turn that machine on (I have other Linux laptops I use as well and the config is one rsync away usually). Just be sure that whichever x server you run doesn't run its built in manager. With VcXsrv you can do this via XLaunch.

Yes, but won't that only work with apps compiled with X? If I wanted to use the Windows version of Firefox and Visual Studio or something in the panels of XMonad on Windows, would that work?

Right. You can't use xmonad to tile windows apps in this kind of setup. Generally firefox and visual studio are screen hogs so I tend to alt-tab for apps like that, which works fine in combination with the fullscreen X server.

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