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”

  • GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I use Mint, and a drawing tablet.

    I know this can be a problem with Huion tablets, since their drivers are closed source. I bought a Wacom tablet for this exact reason, their firmware is open-source, and so it’s bundled into Ubuntu’s software and all of its forks.

    I’m sorry that there isn’t more I can tell you. I could only afford to buy a high quality drawing tablet once, so I wanted to make sure the firmware was compatible with Linux. If you get very frustrated, you can likely find a secondhand Wacom on eBay.