Hey everyone!

As described in the title, I have a Surface Go 1 happily running Fedora 39. The only downsides are that the cameras aren’t working and that my mouse (Modern Mobile from Microsoft) sometimes doesn’t connect or disconnects.

I don’t really care about the cameras, as I can use my phone for anything requiring it, but I get really irritated when my Surface Modern mouse doesn’t connect for a 30 seconds when I launch the OS and then connects after moving it a few times unsuccesfuly. Also, sometime without any reason or sometimes after 5 minutes of inactivity, it disconnects.

I’ve used the same mouse on my wife’s MacBook Pro running Fedora and I don’t remember having these problems.

I was looking at installing the Surface Kernel but I’m not so experienced I would be scared to damage my installation. I have a Clonezilla backup just in case but I’d want to avoid the useless hassle.

Has anyone experienced that issue and do you think the Surface Kernel could help?

  • throwawayish@lemmy.ml
    0·
    10 months ago

    My two cents; install uBlue’s Microsoft Surface Images. Here you can find the (WIP) documentation on how it differs from other uBlue images. I’m sure the following lines should pique your interest:

    For installation, either refer to the dedicated page on installation (from ISO) or follow instructions on how to rebase (from an existing Fedora Atomic installation).

    My personal take on what uBlue is, would be that it’s how Fedora would love to ship their Atomic variants if they could ship everything without worrying about those things they can’t (like hardware acceleration, codecs etc). Furthermore, uBlue even has device-specific images; which is just fantastic if you happen to own such a device.

    Last, but definitely not least; it’s the best platform in which the transition to Ostree Native Container has been realized. As such, this allows some very unique ways to maintain a distro. For example; if something broke (for whatever reason) on vanilla Fedora Atomic, then… well, you (the uBlue-user) wouldn’t even have noticed it. Because that breakage simply never hit your device. Instead, uBlue’s maintainers noticed the issue -> somehow applied changes to the image so that the image doesn’t ship the issue (by either not shipping the breakage inducing update of the specific package or by shipping the workaround/fix with the image) -> the very next time you update your system (which happens automatically in the background by default) you just go on with your life as if nothing had happened in the first place 😅. So, in a sense, your system is managed such that breaking changes/updates don’t hit you; while they do hit non-uBlue users.

    And I haven’t even touched upon how uBlue enhances tinkering or how it allows one to manage (a fleet of) self-customized images etc.

    In case you’re still not sure if you’d like to use a derivative rather than the original, then it’s at least worth noting that uBlue is mentioned in Fedora’s documentation.

      • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de
        0·
        10 months ago

        +1 for Universal Blue. I installed the surface-image on a Surface Pro 5 and it worked ootb. At first, I installed Silverblue and then executed the install script for the kernel, but it broke the OS.

        Using the uBlue image was just plug and play and it worked instantly, without ever worrying it breaking.

        Yesterday, on my normal PC, somehow an installation was corrupted and I couldn’t even enter the rescue mode terminal. On another distro, this would have been a death sentence. Here, I just selected the image from the day before, booted into it and everything was like before.
        It isn’t like the snapper rollback from Suse, but more like many installations of the same OS.

        I would strongly consider following the advice with UniversalBlue, since the custom Surface kernel might break more often than you want, and on Fedora Atomic this isn’t an issue.