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_another_person@lemmy.world
    9·
    2 months ago

    This isn’t a distro thing, it’s generally the Desktop Environment, though with the Surface devices, there is a custom kernel lots of people use that has some extra drivers for the rest of the hardware, so look for that. You can use it with any distro.

    As far as the DE, Gnome has better general touch support over others right now, so it’s probably going to give you the experience you’re expecting. Every art app I’ve tried with a pen has great pressure support.

    • Autisti4@sopuli.xyzOP
      2·
      2 months ago

      I tried with the kernel, but it just makes the touch work barely with Zorin, so I’m trying to figure out would something else run it any better. And yeah, it seems people agree that gnome is the way to go

  • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.org
    2·
    2 months ago

    In my experience, Gnome is a lot better with touchscreens and pens than KDE Plasma (or any other desktop).
    The Surface Pro 7 is old enough that it should be supported by any common distro.
    The first one I’d try is Fedora, since they generally offer the “reference” implementation of Gnome.
    But I don’t have any personal experience with the Surface Pro 7.

  • AndrewZabar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I have used Pop! which is basically Ubuntu but very polished and customized to enhance what’s already there. But as others said it’s not strictly a distro thing it’s Desktop Environment and also the graphics system I’m probably not using the right terminology. But Wayland is very good with touchscreen and I’ve read that X11 has some support as well (?).

  • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 months ago

    Your exact surface pro isn’t there yet.

    Switch to win 10 21h2 iot ltsc using massgrave and you can wait for linux support to get right till 2032.