I don’t have enough experience with either x11 (or whatever else is used) or Wayland to have a well thought out opinion, but Wayland seems promising to me because of waydroid.
KEEP BACKUPS, ALWAYS. Systems can be reinstalled in short order and you can set /home/ on a different partition to make it easier, but keep backups of the important stuff still.
Youtube “bash tutorial beginners” and find one to follow along with, it’ll come in handy if you haven’t yet.
Linux Mint and Pop!_OS are the most recommended beginner friendly distros that “just work” in my experience. That being said, before you install, you can try out the look and feel here: distrosea.com
I have an OG Surface Pro. The first one. It’s running Windows 10 at the moment and it’s doing fine except for the occasional wifi/Bluetooth bugs. I’m using it exclusively in tablet mode with the pen. No keyboard.
When Windows 10 is going to reach its end of life, I’d like to install Linux on it. But I need it to have a tablet style interface with gestures if possible.
Do I need any special distro or drivers on that hardware? And what would you recommend as the desktop environment?
I had one of those too! Sturdy little guy, reminds me a bit of the first eeepc 701 :-) But I was worried about the replacement of the charger once it would die. Besides, I have had a bad experience of Surface-line longevity, they always seem to die suddenly after a while, so I sold it.
That is so awesome. Do you still have one lying around? Those things have an awesome form factor, but the I/O ports are a little bit dated by todays standard 😅
Nah. The hardware wasn’t very good and it was very slow. I had a 7" and a 9" one. I replaced them with the surface pro.
The company was going to make custom Linux based OSes for other smart devices like TVs and monitors but Android came out and was backed by Google, so of course it became wildly popular. Our company went bankrupt pretty quickly after that because it had no the contracts coming in. Asus was the only client keeping them afloat and the contract was ending.
To add another comment to your reply, have you tried it personally?
I’d like to back up my system before doing the switch. What do you recommend I use? Clonezilla with an external USB drive all plugged in using a USB hub?
I haven’t tried the Surface images due to not having one, but I am using their Silverblue images to make the whole NVIDIA drivers thing a bit easier on my system.
Also I haven’t needed to backup my system in over a year now (I stopped hopping with Silverblue) so I don’t remember the solution I used, but this seems good.
I like Garuda. I use the dragonized theme and it makes it look similar to mac OS. IMO it’s as easy to use as any other justworks distro but is far prettier
I just switched from windows to Linux a few months ago. I just picked opensuse tumbleweed KDE at random and it just works. Idk anything about Linux so maybe give that a try and see if it works for you as well.
Way back at the dawn of time, there was a regular issue with low quality applications that would run XGrabKeyboard() (or XGrabPointer()), and then get stuck without releasing it again. If you can, try to log in over the network from another machine and kill application processes one by one until it releases? It’s most likely the video game (or library used by it) that has gotten stuck.
Are you sure its a similar issue? Because usually closing the window actually doesn’t solve it, as then reopening another X11/XWayland window will still not register keyboard presses. I am adding some more info to the post right now.
I’m not sure, there can always be other issues. But note that closing the window is not the same as terminating the application. When you close the window, the application gets a signal that it usually handles as cleaning up and shutting down. But if it is hanging, that task is not performed and resources are still held.
How I interpret OP’s message is that it isn’t specific to Linux, but seeing as we are the Linux community, we might be more inclined to advocate for Linux features? 🤷♂️
In my experience, any HDMI’s or Display Ports plugged into my GPU have terrible performance on Wayland while working perfectly on X11, so it seems there are still problems. Though tbf X11 doesn’t work at all with HDMI’s plugged into my motherboard so it could be a hardware issue? I have a 11 year old motherboard so idk.
If you’re mixing a dedicated GPU and onboard graphics you need to set the dedicated GPU as primary somewhere, otherwise all screens get rendered on the onboard and “reverse PRIME’d” to the dedi GPU outputs.
I’ll see if I can find the snippet that fixed this for me.
I swapped last summer and landed on Pop!_OS after trying a few different options. If you game, Nobara is a great choice too. Other ones I considered were Mint, Ubuntu and SUSE Tumbleweed.
I would highly recommend trying them all with the live disk thingy. Mint didn’t even work at all on my computer for some unknown reason, which was rather surprising considering how often it’s recommended. It kept freezing right when the GUI logged in. So yeah, try em out for a little bit just to make sure there aren’t any weird incompatibilities.
Stick with Fedora, but give a shot to the Atomic variants (Silverblue, Kinoite, etc.) You can always switch DEs back and forth with one command. Even if you don’t stay with Fedora, it will help a lot for you to find the desktop environment that fits your workflow best (although I do recommend sticking with Fedora)
The patches are from CodeWeavers, and some of their work is cooperation with Valve, so hopefully proton gets those changes quickly. It usually takes a while before proton is based on a new wine release.
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