Just a cat wandering about Tamriel.
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So I installed Fedora on my surface. It was a huge pain in the ass. Then I went the with easy arch install of Garuda and everything has been pretty painless. I’m not really suggesting you follow suit as arch distros do require a bit of maintenance others don’t. But you can research garuda and see if it’s a fit for your needs and see if the maintenance is worth it. One benefit of the arch install is almost everything worked right out of the box. Didn’t even need a usb heyboard for installation. Full disk encryption was easy to use because the keyboard just works. That wasn’t the case in fedora, i has installed with full disk encryption and would have to pull out the USB keyboard every boot just to unlock and boot then I could plug the surface keyboard back in to use. Just a heads up if you are wanting to use full disk encryption. You can also set up the encryption to unlock via USB and while not that hard to setup that might be more work than you want to be doing.
Whatever distro you pick you should install the linux-surface kernel and drivers for the stylus. They can be found here, along with specific instructions.
Hands down the most advanced and secure smartphone os is grapheneOS.
It only runs on pixel devices. App sandboxing, buffer overflow protection, separate users, optional sandboxed google play if you need it for banking apps, automatic reboot after a set time to re encrypt your filesystem, assigning permissions for app access to folders and the list goes on and on.
just trying to understand what I did wrong.
You might not have done anything wrong.
There is also the possibility of a bad USB drive or write memory failure. There is lots of things that could go wrong that’s not your fault. Might try a different USB or a different USB port on your machine.
You might want to try zeroing out the USB, if=/dev/zero. Then you might need to make a new partition table. You can use something like gparted. Or https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-manipulate-partition-tables-with-fdisk-cfdisk-and-sfdisk-on-linux
You can try GPT or DOS. I dont think it matters.
Not sure if the ISO will have the partition table so you might want make the new partition table just to be sure the stick defiantly has one. If dd overwrites it from the iso no harm no foul.
Thats all the troubleshooting steps I can think of right now.
Did you make sure that the of is correct? lsblk to make sure.
If your sure it wrote to the right drive i would make sure that you have a good download. Did you run your checksums?
I think fedora works with secureboot but you might want to disable it just to see if that is the issue. I believe you can reenable it after install.
Make sure to go into the bios and boot from external drive/usb.
Out of 15 years of using dd i have never had a problem.
I mean not using whatever app your trying to pass mullvads dns through. Trying to see if it is the OS, or the other (firewall?) app causing your issue. That way you can file a bug report to the right place. If its your not your OS and mullvad works as expected its the other app. Might not be worth using depending on what applications your trying to lock away from the internet.
On my computer I had firefox set using cloudflare dns and also had mullvad handling my dns causing leakage. Well not really but I has two ip show up in dnsleaktest. One cloudflare and the other mullvad. Is your browser the issue here, can you set dns in the browser settings?
just to make sure that you haven’t installed the steam-flatpak.
flatpak list --all and look for steam. You might be able to grep for steam like so flatpak list --all | grep steam. If steam is not there you don’t have flatpak version of steam.
If steam is not in the output there I would consult the Fedora documentation for how to downgrade a package and follow those steps to downgrade steam to an earlier version. If that doesn’t work.
As I reread this thread, I must apologize, I could have done a better triage diagnosing this issue. I have been raw-dogging adhd lately and find myself a bit scattered. I really am sorry for being a bit everywhere! I do sincerely hope that downgrading steam will solve this issue. If it doesn’t I’m out of ideas.
That steamwebhelper error I haven’t seen before but I took a look and found this github report
maybe try if you installed steam as a flatpak:
/usr/bin/flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam
You might be suffering from this bug and might have to downgrade steam till the fix reaches you. I have no Idea how to do that on fedora. I’m sure their documentation is tip top.
First do the games launch normally without error? If you have errors you might need to do the chown thing if you users are mixed up.
if everything is working fine you can use locate to find where you OS keeps steams .desktop files:
locate 'steam.desktop'
on my machine they are :
/usr/lib/steam/steam.desktop
/usr/share/applications/steam.desktop
so since both the desktop files are in a root directory we have to change it with root privilege.
sudo nano /usr/lib/steam/steam.desktop
will open the file in nano. Look for an entry that looks like Exec=/usr/bin/steam-runtime %U and change that to Exec=/usr/bin/steam. To save it [Crtl] + o and then [Ctrl] + m to save, then [Ctrl] + x should exit nano. You might want to back up those files before you edit them so you have something to go back to if something goes wrong.
sudo cp /usr/lib/steam/steam.desktop /usr/lib/steam/steam.desktop.bak
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop.bak
here is a cheat sheet for nano
Lets first make sure that your USERS aren’t messing with steam.
What happens when you start steam from a terminal, --> /usr/bin/steam
What are the errors that your getting?
Did you change ownership of the files you moved from your old storage device to a new user you setup on second install.
ls -la from your home directory and make sure that the third and fourth entries from the output match the user you have set up. They should be the same output as what echo $USER gives.
The output should look something like this
drwxr-xr-x 1 **user** **user** 13 Apr 13 2024 .
The bold bits should match your echo $USER output.
If they don’t match your user you can use chown
To take ownership of those files you moved.
chown $USER:$USER **file**
There might be many files to take ownership of and it might be worth chowning your home directory recursively.
cd ~ && chown -R $USER:$USER .
Arch isnt that hard to use, just more maintenance, you have to update often and you can break things easier. It is defiantly harder to install. Thats why I recommend Garuda as it has a nice gui installer. It comes fully riced too. KDE dragonized is what i went with. The non gaming edition.
You will have to maintain your new system with fresh updates very regularly. You will have to get used to going through
.pacnewfiles. Luckily there are easy ways to do this usingmeldto view pacnew files side by side with their corresponding config file that helps you migrate data easily.Being an arch based distro your on the bleeding edge of linux and this means sometimes you will get cut! But an update will come along fairly quickly to heal those wounds. For instance the screen rotation broke a few months back. Easy fix in udev config though.
Debian based distros are pretty bullet proof, takes a but more to fuck one up. You’ll have to wait a lot longer for the things arch users get every day.
Personally i don’t find garuda to be that hard to maintain but Im used to arch already so I know what to expect and more of how to fix things. One of the best things about garuda is it uses
brtfsby default and sets upsnapperfor you so when things go wrong you have an easier time fixing things.You can always try it out and if it’s not for you you can move on to the next distro. And hop until you find what your looking for.
Best of luck!