It is now March 2024 and a lot has been happening with the Surface Pro 3 LINUX thing.
Among the big things has been that Linux Mint is now at v 21.3, and Mint 21.2 Cinnamon works more or less perfectly on the Surface 3, so I will soon get Cinnamon 21.3 set up on it.
The biggest news however, is that I have finally managed to work out how to best set up a Persistent-Live USB Flash Drive with the right partitioning space.
The less exciting news is that I cannot get a USB stick over 64GB to boot. A 64GB stick set at 90% for Persistence however, gives me about 45GB of user space for files and Apps.
That's not too bad considering that the Surface Pro 3 has its MicroSD card slot still available, and that takes (so far) a 256GB card.
And just like that another month has passed.
I got Mint 21.3 installed 'Live - Persistent' and for some reason mkusb only gives me a 4GB writable partition and the 45Gb space is now Read Only. That sucks.
To top that off, the same thing is happening with some other distros, and even worse, Kubuntu 24 is now out, and that won't boot to a live 'parsistent' desktop at all.
Neither would KDE neon 6.
The last really successful Neon 6 I had runnign Persistent Live was one of the ver first 'Beta 2' releases. Those would still boot to X11. Later releases of Neon 6 started ONLY booting to Wayland, and the most recent ones don;t even seem to have an X11 option 'if' I manage to get them to log out.
In desperation i tried Ventoy and followed the instructions carefully - and that failed, so I followed the instructions for a slightly different setup and that also failed.
It 'seems' something has chnaged in the 'Installers' of some distros neither mkusb nor Ventoy seem to like it. Once I get over the frustration I will experiment more.
The last 'Perfect' Persistent-Live'installations I have are Cinnamon 21.2 and KDE neon 6 Beta 2. It now seems I deleted the ISO files for those early Betas. There were so many of them, and the way thngs were going I decided I would not need them.
If it was not for needing X11 to run NoMachine properly I would not bother, because the Live Persistent USB drives run pretty well perfectly on the Surface Pro.
So where am I now?
I still have two Live Persistent USB drives running Mint Cinnamon 21.2, so the obvious decision is not to modifyt those in any way - but keep them as failsafes.
My project this week will be to try creating a couple of 64GB Live Persistent USB drives using the most recent Mint Cinnamon 21.3
Mint Cinnamon has so far proved to be pretty robust, and while I prefer the 'look and feel' of Plasma 6 on the Surface Pro, Cinnamon still 'just works'.
