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”
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.
In recent tests that I’ve seen, KDE has better touchscreen and multitouch support. It’s long been thought that Gnome was gunning for the touchscreen market, but they got overtaken, because their release cycle is slower.
But I use a Wacom tablet with Gnome, and I agree that the pressure support is great.
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