holgersson

Im running Ubuntu on a Surface Pro 5 (i5 7300u, 8GB) with the linux-surface-kernel.

Generally, things pretty much worked out of the box, the only tinkering I had to do was to optimize battery life / cpu power usage when not plugged in. Theres packages that will limit your CPU frequency depending on the status of your battery. I dont remember the exact name, but it was pretty much the first hit I googled “linux limit cpu power” or something like that. Without that, the battery life wasnt great, especially when watching YouTube, but with some tweaking and the proper h264/h265 drivers, my surface achieves some 3-4 hours of video playback right now.

Other than that it’s smooth sailing all the way.

Just go the last step and call it Jesus OS

Even if Fedora has a spin with the same DE, from my experience, Mint/Ubuntu still has a higher chance just work on a given system.

I love Fedora and use it pretty much exclusively, but the out of the box experience of Mint and Ubuntu is still a bit better for the average user imho.

I mean, FF is the default browser and this also might rub some people the wrong way - having the developer of the only relevant free and open, non-google browser bow to a dictatorship

Queue the “I’m still worthy” thor meme

I run Ubuntu with Gnome on my linuxed Surface. Ubuntu because I wanted something that works and since I mostly browse the web with it. I personally prefer Gnome for touch interfaces because a lot of it works intuitively with a touch screen.

Note that there’s the surface-linux kernel, with the default kernel, some things might not work out of the box.

You also have to consider that roots homedir is in /root and not home, so if you’d just assume it’s /home/$USER you’d get in trouble when your programm is run or compiled as root.