I noticed a few news articles recently that bemused me....relating to the addition of updates to v4.8 of the Linux kernel to support touch screen on Surface Pro 3.
This is strange to me because when I dual-booted my SP3 a couple of years ago with Ubuntu 15, touch screen worked out-of-the-box. Unity and Gnome UIs don't really deal with touch-screen input very well (but Linux doesn't really have the designers that Microsoft or Apple do), but it's not too bad. The SP 3 pen right-click isn't recognised at all so you'll need a mouse anyway. I included a photo of this in operation from a much earlier blog post.
However touch-screen input doesn't work at all with the SP4 - Running Ubuntu 16.04 and Gnome - no direct touch or pen input is detected. I can't find a touch-screen device registered by the OS either so am guessing this is the lack of drivers / support from Intel for the Iris 540 and touch-screen itself.
When I get some time later this month I'll look at the Intel Linux driver programme and the latest kernel to see if there's progress.
This is strange to me because when I dual-booted my SP3 a couple of years ago with Ubuntu 15, touch screen worked out-of-the-box. Unity and Gnome UIs don't really deal with touch-screen input very well (but Linux doesn't really have the designers that Microsoft or Apple do), but it's not too bad. The SP 3 pen right-click isn't recognised at all so you'll need a mouse anyway. I included a photo of this in operation from a much earlier blog post.
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| Ubuntu 15, using the SP3 pen as a mouse |
When I get some time later this month I'll look at the Intel Linux driver programme and the latest kernel to see if there's progress.
