Touchscreen not responding

So I just installed Zorin OS 15.3 on a Surface Pro 4, there's no windows installed just Zorin. The issue I'm having is that the touchscreen is not working, everything else is working fine, it's just the touchscreen. When I go into the surfaces boot settings the touchscreen works and responds perfectly but once Zorin boots, no more touchscreen. I have an HP with Zorin too and the touchscreen works perfectly. It's a microsoft surface thing I guess. Any solutions?

Zorin 15.3 is based on Ubuntu 18.04. Searching for that i found a reddit that has the same issue. There is a link to a custom kernel, but you have to run the script first to download the drivers, then install the kernel. I don't have a surface so can't test. Good luck.

Hey thanks for the update 337harvey, I'm going to look into. I'm sure there's a fix.

Yeah I've had experience with the matter. I was setting linux up on a Surface Pro 3. But 3 and 4 aren't different. So if you really want to use Zorin, go for Zorin 16 as it has a newer kernel and is generally much better. But to be honest, after testing more than a dozen distro's I figured out that Fedora works the best outside the box. Everything was just perfect on fedora. I highly recommend that for Surface. Also, the community has tailored specific versions of the kernel for the surface lineup. It makes your experience so much nicer.
Check it out here:

They have detailed guides and information for all distros.
As a side note, some versions of the surface keyboard touchpad do not work out side the box. You have the install the synaptics driver for it to work.
Also fedora has the latest version of Gnome desktop which has the best touchscreen support out of all the distros. From what I've seen and tested out, Fedora is the best linux distro for a surface machine.

2 Likes

A post was split to a new topic: Surface Pro 4 Screen issue