So I have an older Surface Pro with a 7th Gen i5 cpu, 240bg SSD, and 8bg RAM. Microsoft is a jerk and won’t let me update to Win11 so I am installing Linux instead. Going to be a challenge as I understand touchscreen does not work out of the box and may require a custom kernel! That will be fun, I guess. I am so used to modern Linux just running out of the box on regular PC hardware that is surprises me the community has not been able to release a distro with touchscreen support baked in.
Anyways, I used to use this as my measurement PC but bought a laptop last year that is able to run Win11 so rendered this poor old girl moot. If I get all features working on this, it may well end up my travel PC instead of my regular laptop.
Just a fun little project while I rebuild flexibility and strength in my left hand.
Installed a few pieces of software to make life using this thing a little better, such as Audacity and Chrome. Wine is also installed so I can install some basic Windows software as well. Linux Mint using Cinnamon interface is my go-to, and recommend for people new to Linux and who might have older hardware that is not capable of running modern Windows. Easy to use and a great support community for the rare times a guy needs help.
Windows 10 support ends just a little over a month from now, guys.
I tried running Mint on an old Acer laptop from a flash stick just to mess around and see how I liked it before I tried partitioning or anything. Got it up and running but it Mint wouldn’t recognize my network card so it wouldn’t connect to WiFi/internet. Some Googling several months ago when I messed with it suggested I’d need to replace a kernel to get it to identify the network card, but I have no idea how to do that. Do you have any suggestions or can you point me in the right direction on that?
Mint is derived from Ubuntu, which uses the apt package manager. If you have the root password you can do: sudo apt install on the command line.
The issue will be knowing which kernel package you need to install. If you want to post details in here or you can DM/message me and I’m happy to see what we can figure out. I am a bit of an Ubuntu/Debian guru at this point, it is the software this site runs on so I have to maintain that for example.
There is a whole project around Linux on Surface just to address some of the hardware. It isn’t up streamed yet so requires manually installing a different kernel.
I can wait and see how that project evolves, the device as-is works pretty nice.
Some information in there about why Linux isn’t quite ready to play nice with the Surface and some of its hardware. As a small laptop, it works great out of the box, but if you want to be able to use it as a tablet then it takes this additional package. Will be awhile before I attempt that.
I tried doing the 2nd version of the Win11 install and of course Dell left the Win10 license sticker off of the Laptop so I used the service tag number and logged into my account but they have removed all license data records for this bought in 2016 PC.
Turns out to be more trouble than its worth when I can get a refurbed Dell Precision Win11-Pro Laptop for $400.
It’s an indispensable tool - do you buy sh*t tools all your life and just keep regretting it?
As I age and gain additional life-experience while being stubborn I am finding it far less stressful/expensive to just go with the flow of technology.
My design PC I bought for around $350. Ryzen 7 processor, 16gb RAM and 2tb SSD. It is however, not upgradeable on the RAM side of things so someday will become unusable for Internet use. It’s a Lenovo. Runs all of my design software just great, and holds my extensive collection of music.
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