I worked on getting Fedora 39 running on my Microsoft Surface Pro 3 on Friday. I published a quick success post with links to the Fedora Discussion threads that helped me resolve issues when booting with Secure Boot and TPM enabled.
I've compiled those steps and added thoughts of using KDE Plasma on the Surface in tablet mode.
Blog Post: Installing Fedora on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3
With a little of spare time this morning, I was able to (finally) install Fedora 39 on my Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with Secure Boot enabled using a bootable USB stick with an older version of BOOTX64.EFI. [1]
I had to temporarily disable TPM in order for the system to boot after the install. Resetting the Secure Boot keys to Microsoft and Third-Party keys and re-enabling TPM [2] after installing the latest updates allowed me to boot back into Fedora with both TPM and Secure Boot enabled.
Since I still wanted a computer that ran KDE Plasma, I went with the KDE spin.
The Surface is definitely a bit tired and slow, but still very usable for browsing the web and editing documents.
I own a #SurfacePro 7 and a #SurfaceGo. Both don't support #Windows11 and therefore will be trash in October 2025 if you ask Microsoft.
Anybody has tried #ArchLinux or any other #Linux distro on these devices? What hardware is supported and which isn't (I can go w/o the touch screen, but Wifi/Bluetooth/Touchpad/etc should be usable)?
My Acer Aspire One 722 from around 2012 runs current #Arch just fine...
I also learned that #NixOS has distributed build.
You just add some lines of config, et voila, any Nix machine can use any other Nix machine to do package builds, via SSH.
Like how can such functionality be so simple?
It seems to be mostly used for building for low power ARM machines, but why have my T480 build packages locally, when it can use an i5 13500 in the cloud to do the work for it?
@jonatan stumbling across that functionality was the most perfect thing ever when I was trying to build a custom kernel module on my #surfacepro . Using #nixos on my beasty desktop to do the build and push to the Surface using SSH not only saved a boat load of time...it was absolutely magnificent to watch happen! 🙌😎💯
Another "mind blown" moment with #NixOS : I'm using an old Netbook as a "server", and rebuilding the OS has always been a bit ... slowish.
But now I can remotely build the whole thing on a beefier laptop, and deploy it via ssh. All that with vanilla nixos-rebuild, no bells and whistles needed. Using --flake--use-remote-sudo and --target-host switches. The only hiccup was that I had to add a missing -t flag to the ssh command via NIX_SSHOPTS="-t", otherwise I couldn't enter the root pw.
It can be probably a lot smoother with one of those fancy deploy tools out there, but I prefer to learn the basics first.
@kupac It was legit a mind blown moment for me as well just a few weeks ago when I deployed #nixos on my #surfacepro!
My monster tower PC built it within a couple minutes and pushed it like magic, definitely an EXTREMELY powerful feature of the nix package manager that more people should know about! 🙌🤘 :nixos:
So, I've got a question for all my fellow #nix and #nixos users out there:
I've continued to migrate various configs and building up some useful flake templates to use with the awesomeness that is #direnv ...however, since my #surfacepro has limited storage, I use it's SD slot for storing Project files...and direnv fails to fully load! 😭
I just get nix-store permission errors (even though I've made sure permissions are right for SD card). Yet env spawns on main drive no problem.. :nixos:
@bolapara@JackMcCrack So, good news! After noticing the remaining permissions errors I was experiencing with dir-env revolved around symlink issues, I decided to backup the card and format it fresh using a different format type.
Turns out formatting the SD card to ext4 (instead of exFAT) was all I needed to resolve the symlink issues.
Now I can take advantage of external storage for project code and still use #direnv to enjoy my #nixos on #surfacepro experience! :blobcatcool: :nixos: 🤘
And who says you can't fit in some #nix#programming during work breaks? Not this guy! Still really impressed with the overall experience with #nixos on my #surfacepro! Oh, and shoutout to @Raspberry_Pi for what are some clearly simple yet stylish coffee mugs ☕️ :nixos: :raspberrypi: :zsh:
Been meaning to post for a while, but have been occupied with lots of #programming projects 🙃
After finally being fed up with the absolute drag Windows 11 had on my #surfacepro 's resources, I wiped it clean and started running a fav of mine, #archlinux . But what I REALLY ended up wanting to do was spin up a clone of my #nixos setup! Of course, doing so was trivial, and I'm stoked! Runs sooo damn good, too (duh)...even built surface patch to get touch functionality 😎🤘 :nixos:
Been using #Fedora Silverblue on my Surface Pro 4 now for about a week so. Really enjoy it. A bit of a learning curve but overall a nice experience. My only complaint is that using rpm-ostree for packages does require a reboot. Which I understand why, but it does take some extra time. However, that is very minor and once you're set up with all the packages you need that doesn't become an issue. It's a good way to force you to stop and think "do I really need to install this package?"