I haven’t had a great time with Linux on a tablet without a keyboard and mouse but PostmarketOS is 100% usable IMO. Even the on screen keyboard on the login screen works.
Did you use the linux-surface kernel? It has additional community maintained patches for surface devices and detailed installation instructions for the best linux experience. From their feature matrix they seem to have full support for sgo2.
Not sure if its available on pmOS though.
I also tested Linux on the Surface 2 Go once, I think Fedora, but it just wasn’t smooth and stable enough. Constantly some kind of misbehavior. So I went back to Windows after all.
First mistake was using a microsoft device.
Daily driving a Surface Go 1 with Fedora since 2022.
It works really well except for cameras, sometimes bluetooth and being laggy 1 time out of maybe 30 startups.
The last problem can be solved just by plugging and unplugging the usb-c cable connecting it to a screen.
I’m really happy with it even if it’s not what I’d bought if I had gotten back to Linux already when I got it.
x86, ARM, are intended to be multipurpose, right? So why tf does the OS running on it need multiple layers of abstraction and have the right drivers to support common features? Wouldn’t it be possible to standardize the interfaces for audio, hw video acceleration, etc. so that you just need one audio driver for all x86 CPUs, another for ARM and be done?
The CPU might be the same, but the audio chip, trackpad, etc. might be different and require a new driver.
Yeah, but why isn’t that handled in hardware or microcode?
I’m not sure how you’d handle hardware in hardware.
Microcode is usually only run on the CPU, so in that case the implementation would be called “drivers”. If you ran it on the device it would be called “firmware” and the OS still has to know how it address its interfaces somehow, and implementation is again called a “driver”.
I mean some kind of unified interface spec and the hardware conforms to it?
Because when there’s a new hardware function, the driver has to add support for it.
How’s the battery life compared to Windows?
So far it seems really good. I haven’t tested it to much though.
