First a Surface Kernel to get the most out of it. Then a gesture/touch optimized DE like Gnome.
Bluefin makes it easy to get a stable and reliable GNOME experience while offering a special image for Surface devices.
I have a Surface Pro 4, was running Nobara, but I'm trying to troubleshoot a weird issue with it. When I was talking about Nobara in a different post a month or so ago, a neckbeard essentially called me an idiot for using Nobara, and said I should use a UBlue variant. I've not used it, but it comes highly recommended by the guy who thought it was weird that I'd buy an old not entirely reliable piece of hardware to just have as essentially a toy....so there's that.
Surface kernel can be added onto most distros. So if the offerings with it preinstalled don't suit your fancy there's instructions on the Surface kernel site.
I wasn't bashing it. I actually honestly believe that the person ripping me for using Nobara and having the SP4 as a toy meant what they said about uBlue based distros were better than Nobara, especially since Nobara is built and maintained by one guy.
Again not casting shade. If I can figure out the issue I'm having with it, or give up, I'll be putting one of the ones you just mentioned on mine and taking it for a spin.
I used linux mint Cinnamon on my surface pro 5(?) (2017). It worked well enough, and I'd recommend it. Its It's probably easiest if you're not a dumbass like me.
Aurora offers a special version for Microsoft Surface devices. Just select Surface in the download section.
Fedora works pretty well. Any fork with Gnome should work.
Bluefin is based on uBlue, which is based on Fedora Silverblue. It's really cool because there's a special version of it that's optimized for the Surface.
I can vouch for nobara. WiFi and touchscreen worked flawlessly OOTB.
If you don't want to mess with the surface kernel, I've had 100 percent compatibility with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. No different kernel required on all 5 of my surface devices.
I run Ubuntu with Gnome on my linuxed Surface. Ubuntu because I wanted something that works and since I mostly browse the web with it. I personally prefer Gnome for touch interfaces because a lot of it works intuitively with a touch screen.
Note that there's the surface-linux kernel, with the default kernel, some things might not work out of the box.
Thank you to everyone for your response/s!
It seems like I've got quite a few options. I might just distro hop and try all of them, lol.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0