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I decided to try Fedora 34 on my Surface Pro 2, and here is my experience.

Installation

Installation of Fedora was pretty easy. I just selected my disk, changed my timezone, and off it went. The Anaconda installer is really good, but I still think that certain installers are better. Everything went well, and it installed properly.

Using Fedora

Using Fedora on my Surface Pro 2 was pretty cool. Since it was a touch screen, I could use swipe gestures to move between the desktop, workspace view, and application view. I installed my applications like Brave, LibreOffice, htop, neovim, etc. It was a pretty good experience compared to Ubuntu, and even suspend worked!

Fedora Troubles

After a bit of time using Fedora, I wanted to put it in hibernation mode, since Windows does it and it is really good for battery. This took me on a spiral of confusion and anger. Trying to get hibernation to work using BTRFS was a nightmare, as it isn’t officially supported by Fedora. I even tried reinstallation using ext4, but it still didn’t work. After a while of trying, I was ready to go back to Windows.

Conclusion

Do I recommend Fedora to people using a Surface Pro 2? Yes. It is a great experience if you do not like Windows, and it works way better than Ubuntu. While you don’t get Secure Boot, it works great. Applications load fast, and it is a good experience. Just don’t expect to have amazing battery life using Fedora. For me, I went back to Windows 10 to try Windows 11, which I am running on it now. I will probably write an article about my experiences with Windows 11 so far. Thanks for reading!