What problems will I encounter when I attempt to install Zorin on a Surface Pro 6?
I intend to wipe windows 10 off of it so it will be a complete Zorin machine. Is there something I should do before starting?
Hi, kbe31.
I recommend you use the Try Zorin option when you run the installation from the boot medium. Check your keys, mouse, etc are working before you decide to install. If you do decide to install, I suggest using the “Something else” option as detailed here: Partition Scheme for Zorin (and removing Windows 10)
You will also need to turn off in the BIOS if present: UEFI - change to legacy or EFI/Legacy, disable Fast Boot, and/or Windows Boot Manager. And before that whilst in Windows 10, Control Panel | Power - and view hidden elements so that you can turn off the hard drive from going to sleep (that is why Windows 10 always boots quickly because it never fully turns off the hard drive (and prevents you from booting off any other media).
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Thank you carmar.
I don’t think you’ll have any obvious problems. I would check that you can control backlight brightness. Also check that Bluetooth and wifi work. Check that the touch panel registers touch, and also, if you have a surface pen, make sure that you can pair that or that it works with the screen.
Other things to check are battery life and thermal observations. IE: does thermal throttling work, or is your surface heating up like a heat blanket.
This is important, because heat kills computers. You don’t want your laptop or surface to run any hotter than it has to. Poor power management doesn’t throttle the CPU that well or allows all processes to run rampant.
These are the things you should be mindful of.
Windows 10 sucks for privacy, but it is a very fine tuned piece of drivers that work well with Windows. There is a cohesion between it and the surface line that you wont find on most Windows machines.
One thing you might consider, as is my experience, is that Linux has a long ways to go in the power management department. Thus using Zorin through a VM on top of Windows might be a solution. You can lock down Windows using WPD.app and the Tinywall firewall. This turns off all of the privacy issues on Windows, and catches anything else with the firewall. For the really paranoid, you could just set the firewall to block everything except the hypervisor of your choice for your VM.
Just some thoughts. Good luck!
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@2disbetter Using Linux on Windows 10 would mean using WSL - and there is a firewall leak at the moment!
I agree with everything you have said about Power that is one area where Linux can't compete. The same goes for battery life. It's the nature of the beast!
I was talking about using something like VMWare Workstation to run a Linux Guest VM. Not using WSL. Although WSL2 is pretty spiffy.
VMWare costs too much for me. I prefer Virtual Box. If spiffy includes security leaks on the firewall it’s not so spiffy. 
And the sooner M$ is barred from contributing code of any sort the better it will be for the whole GNU/Linux Community.
You can believe that if you wish. It has been the embracing of propreitary software that has given Linux any traction, especially as it pertains to device drivers.
Far from it friend! As I have stated elsewhere when a German maintainer contributor of the Linux kernel swears in English instead of German about recent USB drivers written by M$ you know it’s bad. DVD drivers were written by a16 year old Swede back in the 90s and was put under house arrest for breaking copyright when he reverse engineered the code for DVD players in PCs.
The real tragedy with MS software is that the brilliance and genius behind it are hampered by business aims of the bureaucrats at MS.
A lot of the stupidity that people think they see when looking from the outside in are just elements of legacy support that the average user doesn’t take into account. Windows more than any other operating systems has had a gigantic elephant of legacy on its back. This is something very little praise of respect goes towards.
Now that being said, because Linux in many cases is able to operate without the aims and goals of a crooked bureaucrat, it is able to implement things in a much more straight forward manner. However, intuitive or user friendly is seldom a part of that equation.
And as much as I love Linux for all of its strengths, I cannot fully embrace it, but hardware I use is not supported under Linux. This is a problem. Further more, battery life is non existent.
Linux is pretty enough now, what we really need is low-level work to improve things like cpu frequency efficiency, process scheduling, and power management.
But I’m going to bow out from this conversation. I have had it hundreds of times with Linux users, and it is always the same driving in circles activity.
Zorin OS is great, and I hope it worked out on your Surface!
Hardware is not supported under Linux due to closed source = copyright, not copy left.
And don’t think there aren’t crooked bureaucrats in Linux - you obviously don’t know about Michael Robertson who was more interested in making a quick million by selling off Linspire that was reaching maturity with it’s Click’n’Run software that disappeared into Xandros (remnant of Corel Linux) that didn’t last much longer.
Thanks everyone. I decided not to install Zorin on the Surface. I do have Zorin on a desktop PC. So far am liking it more and more.
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