The included patches add a battery driver, support for lid status and backlight control, and improve the stability of the wireless driver. For full hardware support, install the latest Linux kernel with some proposed Surface 3 patches. The Linux kernel has improved its Surface 3 support incrementally over the last few years.

Boot into Linux (and Windows if you really have to) using systemd-boot EFI boot.

If you have issues connecting to the internet, use a USB Ethernet adapter.

Observing the partition types from the output of fdisk -l should indicate the Windows partition.

Make sure to not overwrite Windows when partitioning the disks.

If you do not see the Arch installation screen, try changing the boot order in the BIOS.Later, we'll re-enable Secure Boot to eliminate the unsightly, bright-red boot screen.įollow the wiki instructions to install Arch using a USB drive. holding volume-up and pressing and releasing the power button to enter the BIOS.Naturally, our to-be-installed Linux kernel is not approved and thus will not boot. Secure Boot verifies the boot loader against a local list of approved kernels before booting. Defragmenting the disk by running defrag C: /X /H.Įach of these changes can be reversed after the disk is resized.Disabling virtual memory by disabling automatic virtual memory and setting the page file size to 0.Disabling hibernate by running powercfg /h off.I tried each of these until the available disk space reflected the actual disk usage: It's likely that Windows will tell you that there isn't enough disk space available to shrink more than 2GB. You will need 5-20+ GB for the Linux installation depending on which applications you install and how much space you want for any personal code, documents, media, etc. Here are the steps I followed to get Arch up and running:įirst, to get some disk space to install Linux, shrink the Windows partition by: I wanted to use Xournal, an open-source note-taking app, which runs natively on GNU/Linux. Mostly, it was hard to view and edit OneNote files across my devices. I run Arch Linux on all of my computers (except the tragedy of the 12' Macbook) so using Windows on my Surface 3 created issues.

Arch linux macbook screen brightness