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I'm interested in buying the new surface pro 4. But 'm also a linux user therefore I would like to run linux (dual boot) on the sp4. There lots of tutorials about the surface pro 3 but until now I only found these links about the sp4:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2997244/laptop-computers/11-secrets-you-didnt-know-about-your-new-surface-book-or-surface-pro-4.html

and

https://askubuntu.com/questions/694137/ubuntu-for-surface-pro-4

The first one give's a tip about how to set the UEFI to boot linux but also that you have to look for drivers. And the second one ran a Live distro , but apparently no input devices work. ( maybe an USB hub would allow one to attach at least a keyboard and mouse, but his question still stands what to do next)

Does any one already tried running linux on sp 4 , if so can you tell me how you did it, what works and what not.

Or can you use the sp 3 tutorials and drivers also for the sp4?

Thanks.

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  • Check my answer in the second link you give.
    – user560124
    Feb 17, 2016 at 9:13

4 Answers 4

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I just tried the sp4 with the linuxmint-17.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso image.

What did NOT work was all input attached Keypad and touch pad, screen input and Bluetooth.

But wlan DOES work, attached USB-keyboard/mouse work as expected and screen shine in full resolution out of the box.

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I can really recommend to activate hyper-V on your SP4 and run Linux in a VM without any impact (know to me). It's lightening fast and works very fine with even 4 GB machines.

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  • ... but video resolution is quite limited, and a 4GB box will a win10 host will limit the Linux VM to 2GB or less.
    – fche
    Feb 11, 2016 at 20:44
  • of course it is limited, but regarding the limits as given, Win10Pro as VM host is probably the least hurting solution.
    – Falco Alexander
    Feb 12, 2016 at 12:32
  • i used this for a while, using an X server on the windows desktop and x11 forwarding into the VM. In the beginning it was fine, but windows uses more and more RAM with each update. Now, even starting a browser along with the VM is impossible with 4G despite closing all unnecessary apps.
    – Stefan Paul Noack
    Jan 26, 2017 at 18:56
  • you should rather check your backgroud apps :) but there is a small disadvantage when having a hypervisor active: power saving modes suffer...
    – Falco Alexander
    Jan 26, 2017 at 20:40
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I've installed Lubuntu 16.04 LTS on Surface Pro 4, and was able to make the type cover work. I suspect this would work for other Ubuntu variants as well.

Out of the box after installing Lubuntu,

  • What worked : WLAN, USB keyboards and Mouse connected via the Dock

  • What did not work: Type cover, touch screen

After some search, I found the following PPA providing kernels for SP, and used to following steps to install the patched kernels therein:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:tigerite/kernel
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install linux-surface

After a reboot,

  • What work: the type cover and the mouse pad on it
  • What didn't work: touch screen on the tablet.

I haven't tried to configure bluebooth for the SP pen. But this is what I got without compiling kernels or changing a lot of things.

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  • 's , I'll try your solution , thanks . I've tried the linuxmint-17.3-cinnamon-64bit Iso however it was very unstable and my surface became very hot. ) there was a problem with RC6 with the graphics card ,but disabling, according to a Reddit post did not make my system stable.(Anyone notice this behavior also.) hopefully lubuntu distro is more stable.
    – CodeRogier
    May 14, 2016 at 10:09
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this guy here seems to have madre some progress:

https://github.com/jimdigriz/debian-mssp4/blob/master/README.md

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