What’s up, it’s me, a guy that was here celebrating my transition to Linux about a month ago. And I’ve got bad news. I ended up removing my Linux partition and going back to Windows full time again :(

It’s because I daily drive a Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio, so I had to use a custom kernel, and there were just some compatibility issues with my hardware, mostly around the GPU and touch support. I tried a lot of things, made sure everything was up to date and followed many different guides, but nothing I was trying could work. So, for the time being, I think I just have to stick with Windows. I’m super disappointed with this, because for the most part I vastly preferred my time with Fedora, and once I got used to it, I vastly preferred it to Windows. But because of the work that I do and the things I depend on my laptop for, it just wasn’t really an option.

So, I’m looking for laptop recommendations. Something with similar or improved specs to what I’m currently using, potentially something with touch and pen support which I do really enjoy and often use but isn’t necessarily a must, and most importantly something that will support Linux well without issue. I’m not super concerned about a budget (although I do expect it to be somewhere around the $1500-ish range), I’m not really in a place to be purchasing a new laptop at the moment, so this is definitely like a long term thing I’d be saving up for.

I’ve done some looking myself, mostly at the Dell XPS line and some MSI machines, but since I’m not super knowledgeable in the Linux world especially when it comes to compatibility and stuff like that, I figured getting some recommendations directly from the community would be the best call.

My laptop is a first generation Surface Laptop Studio with an 11th gen i7, an RTX 3050 Ti, and 32 gigs of ram, but I’m not too picky I’d be willing to downgrade and tradeoff on some things. Battery life isn’t a huge factor, 90% of my time working at my laptop is at my desk or on the couch, or somewhere else where it’s plugged in anyways. When I do take it with me somewhere, it’s usually for something like taking notes during a dnd session, or just browsing the internet, and random little tasks like that.

If anyone here has experience with running Linux on Surface devices and just has suggestions for making it run better on my current laptop, then I’m all ears as well, I’d be willing to give it another shot.

Thank you in advance :)