Recently Microsoft told me that my Surface Book 1 was garbage and I should throw it in the trash. Even though it is old and only a dual core and only has 8 GB of RAM, I resent being told what to do.

Anyway, this Windows installation had been around since 2017 and had decayed a lot as Windows tends to do. Plus, this laptop got me through college, and I’m not done with it yet, so time to be an anarchist linux hacker I guess.

Why keep using this thing in 2025?

A beautiful 3:2 3000x2000 HighDPI display. Seriously one of my favorite things about this laptop
When it was new, it had excellent battery life since it has one in the tablet as well as the base. Since it is old and degraded now, it is simply acceptable battery life (about 4-5 hours)
I already own it, and don’t use a laptop much
Defiance disorder, M$SFT can’t tell me what to do!!!!1

Debian

Anyway, to Linux it was. I’ve had Debian on machines before, and tried that out first. I’ve since learned though that “debian stable” means “you’re going to deal with the same bugs for 3 years”. I ended up switching it away because:

I couldn’t get sleep to work right (this ended up not being debian’s fault)
I wanted to encrypt the entire disk, including /boot
I have a bad case of versionitis and want the latest version of everything all the time

Arch Linux

I’ve heard it said that Arch linux is for a very particular kind of computer user. I have discovered that I am, in fact, that exact type of user. If there are good instructions, like the Arch wiki, I have no problem doing it myself. And the best instructions I could find for encrypted /boot were the arch wiki.

So, after getting it set up and using it for a while, I think it works well enough, espcially with the linux-surface filling some gaps.

The Good

Arch installed just fine
Feels much lighter weight and snappier than Windows did
KDE looks fantastic on the high DPI display
Battery life is about the same as Windows.
Touchpad feels great to use, guestures work
Touchscreen works
Was able to have a large swapfile (only 8 GB RAM) and get hibernation to work

The Bad

1. No S0ix states

Apparently the Surface Book 1 series has some ACPI weirdness that makes S0ix (“modern standby”) sleep states not work.

This means when you shut the lid, the battery will drain at about 5% an hour, which is a problem for me since the usage pattern for this laptop these days is “once a week at best but it needs to be charged when I need it”.

The workaround was to enable systemd’s suspend-then-hibernate from KDE’s power applet. There were some issues with a linux-surface driver blocking sleep, see my other blog post.

This has worked well enough, I can confidently shut the lid and open it a week later and I haven’t lost any work. It is pretty slow to resume from sleep though

2. No Dedicated GPU

The linux-surface feature matrix says the nvidia GPU in the performance base is supported, but after installing the nvidia linux drivers nothing shows up.

I didn’t really try too hard to get this working since I never found that GPU very useful anyway.

3. Janky camera support

You can get the cameras to work, but you have to fiddle with linux kernel modules and run a loopback script to enable it. Not great.

4. No power states

This laptop under Windows has “power states” that let you choose performance vs battery saver. These aren’t supported in Linux, more ACPI weirdness I suppose.

Whatever power state it defaults to is fine though, the fans rarely spin up (much less than they did on Windows)

The Ugly

I made it about a week before completely borking my arch install and needing the rescue ISO.

There was some bug in the KDE crash reporter that would fill up /tmp with a crash dump. While this was happening, I ran pacman -Syu, and something didn’t handle there being 0 free bytes in /tmp well (I think mkinitcpio), and it wouldn’t boot after.

I converted to BTRFS to use snapshots after this debacle.

Also, I still don’t think I’ve set up locales right somehow.

Conclusion

I like it. I think the KDE folks have done a great job making a sharp, snappy looking desktop. I get a little more what all the people on hacker news complain about when they say the Windows desktop is so consistent.

I love having the latest version of everything on Arch. I’ve got most of the software I want to work. Hopefully I’ll never have to reinstall or upgrade the os on this computer ever again.