I understand that there needs to be specific maintenance for surface laptops specifically at the kernel level, I was curious exactly what makes the surface laptop so difficult to use? I’ve tried running bluefin and bazzite on it and every updates something tends to brick, additionally now they flat out don’t even boot from any USB, ventoy or otherwise under any configuration (GPT/MBR or GRUB2 etc.)
Not asking for solutions to any of these issues, if they’re not officially supported I’m just going to sell my laptop. But curious as to what particularly makes it such a difficult thing to use.
My experience from mainline Fedora (which has similar issues) is that at some point in 2023, Microsoft made a change to the firmware on more recent Surface devices that leads to the kernel not booting on certain distros. It’s described here on the linux-surface project.
Some distros include a workaround for this in their kernels, but some don’t. If they don’t, then you have two options: 1) install a patched kernel from the linux-surface project, or 2) downgrade your firmware to before the bad update. The former is more involved to accomplish on Bluefin, Bazzite, etc. than on other distros for a variety of reasons.
Personally, I have a Surface device running custom Bluefin DX images built with blue-build. The blue-build CLI has a utility for creating an ISO installer which I successfully used to install Silverblue to this device. For booting from USB, I installed Ventoy without secure boot and set to use GPT, launched with grub2 compatibility mode, and if I have secure boot turned off on my device then this seems to work properly. Otherwise you need to copy over some stuff into Ventoy that you can get from a Fedora system to make it work with secure boot.
You’re welcome to check out the GitHub repo I use to build my images as a reference for how to do make your own custom images. Note that my approach doesn’t include all the extra kernel modules Bluefin normally does.
Having run Linux on surface devices for a couple years though, it won’t be totally smooth since kernel updates are more likely to break something every now and then. If you want something that “just works”, I would get a different laptop.
I’ve looked through and as far as it comes to the ublue builds I’m not really looking to run a custom image with blue-build. I’ve been looking to get a framework laptop anyway, so this is as good an excuse as any.
They are! But I have the laptop varient not the pro, so its just a bog standard laptop configuration. So I won’t be missing out on anything by switching.