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A repost from r/linuxmemes - Because I saw the original comic
(thelemmy.club)
Luigi (with Linux Mint logo) and Mario (Ubuntu logo) come in
Mother: It's-a the Ubuntu Bros!
Linux Mint (Luigi): Mama why-a you never remember my name?
Mother: I'm-a sorry Green Ubuntu
Just installed Mint on my Surface Pro 4 that's been sitting in a drawer for years and guess what, it's now useable again! Praise be Linux.
Good to hear! My main computer is my desktop, running Mint. (I'm using it right now.) But I also have a Surface Pro 4 that I use for work. It has no problems and works fine on Windows... but I have been wondering if I can move that away from Windows as well. So its encouraging to hear that it has worked for you.
Does Mint have good support for the stylus and touch-screen on the Surface 4? (I imagine the Surface tech might be specialised to Windows a bit, so I wouldn't be confident those would work immediately in Linux.)
Nope, it does not. You can install a kernel made just for surface devices and you'll get mouse emulation via touch, but Mint doesn't have Wayland yet and it's my understanding that Wayland is where all the good things, like gestures, lives. So, I'm waiting for that but it honestly works fine without the touch. I'd use it if it was there, but it's fine honestly.
That said, I've been using Linux/osx as my primary at work for a lot of years now so I'm super unfamiliar with even basic sysadmin stuff on Windows, so I'm happy that the surface is now on Linux. Need to move my desktop to it one day, but I honestly almost never use it.
My surface pro 4 still works great with windows also and even though I ran mint on the laptop I used before it I have no intention of replacing windows on the SP4 at least until support for 10 is done.
Even though I don't use the touchscreen often, it's not a feature I'd be willing to sacrifice either.
It's not entirely impossible that a driver for the touchscreen actually exists.
I don't know about this specifically, but in my experience with Mint, it's very plug and play with this kind of stuff. I'm always really impressed by just how little setup Mint needs.