I’ve had a Surface Book with an i7 processor since November 2016. I liked the idea of a laptop with detachable tablet, the touchscreen and that it comes with a pressure sensitive pen. It makes for a neat, if slightly expensive, machine. It has a fatal flaw though: Windows 10. I tried to like Windows, I really did, but it’s just so. darned. slow. File access is inexcusably slow, especially for a device equipped with lightning fast NVMe storage. In real world usage it proved 4 to 10 times slower than Linux running on the same machine… off a USB 3 attached SSD. This relegated the Surface Book to a role of a secondary machine for me, while my primary was a cheap i5 laptop with inexpensive m2 SATA3 SSD storage (and yes, there is a huge maximum performance difference to the NVMe storage, not to mention the processor speed).
To cut a long story short, I wanted to unleash the true potential of the Surface Book using Kubuntu Linux. The end goal is having a dual boot Windows and Linux laptop with the Linux side sporting encrypted storage (because of GDPR requirements) and working keyboard, touchpad, WiFi, card reader and touch screen at the very least. I’m glad to say, mission accomplished! I’m writing this article using Kubuntu on my Surface Book. Now, this is a comprehensive How To of what I did. I am writing this mainly for me to remember all the small details and in hope I can help some of you out there. Most, if not all, of what I am writing here also applies to Surface Pro 2 and above, Surface Book 2 (2018) and Surface Laptop.
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