Less than a year ago I decided to buy a Surface Laptop Go 3. The form factor is incredible and I needed something light and easy to carry around for writing and basic stuff.
I went for the Surface Laptop Go 3 as it is the entry level model and does not have any integrated AI or Co-Pilot feature. All other higher end models are beautiful, but way too overpowered for what I need.
I always had the intention to replace Windows with Linux, and as the OS was getting slower and slower with each update, I decided it was a good moment to do it.
There is a really cool, really well documented github repo with all the instructions and information one needs, including a nice feature matrix showing what works and what doesn’t. Turns out that on this laptop I would pretty much only lose the fingerprint reader functionality, which I really do not care about, so I decided to go ahead.
I was not interested in backing up any of my data, so the first step for me was to disable bitlocker and note down my bitlocker key.
Note: I disabled bitlocker several weeks before I actually found the time to install the new OS, and in the meanwhile Windows seems to have received a few updates so when I looked to double-check that bitlocker was indeed off, I couldn’t actually find the option right away where it was before. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
With that step out of the way, I picked a linux Distro and burned a live iso (instructions on how to do so are available at each distro website, and unless you go with Arch or pure Debian – or any other barebone distro I guess, it’s a fairly easy process).
In my case, since I wanted something light, straightforward and that still looks good, I went for Linux Mint.
I did pick the Mate flavour initially, but it was acting a little weird with the battery notification, and to be honest I don’t like it so much compared to Cinnamon, so I immediately switch to Cinnamon after install.
The first issue I found, which is not documented anywhere in the git repo, or Mint website, was a pretty serious sounding error message: “mmx64.efi file not found. Something has gone seriously wrong”.
Some internet searching led me to just rename grubx64.efi to mmx64.efi in my live install drive, and then I was set and could just carry on following instructions.
It is really quite important to install the Surface Kernel as soon as the OS is installed, as on many devices a lot of the functionalities won’t work properly without it.
Outside from the weird quirk with mmx64.efi not being there in the live install image, everything else was really smooth, really easy, and took very little time.
I think this is another case where this type of operation has become very easy and accessible, and the hardest part now is to convince the average user that they can absolutely do it and that they can absolutely use a distro like Linux Mint as easily as they used Windows (if not more easily! These days Windows has become a bit of a mess and a lot of the workflows are now quite counterintuitive, while a distro like Linux Mint is really straightforward).
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© Melyanna. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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