Chalk it up as a lesson learned. There are some hoops you have to jump through, when installing Linux on a machine built and set up to use windows. One of these is secure boot.

IIRC the older surfaces have some challenges. But usually, there are just a few switches you have to set right in the BIOS/UEFI-interface and then some things to be aware of when installing Linux (that don’t really have anything to do with being a windows machine, but with older hardware). One thing is to be aware, i& your running it in BIOS or UEFI mode. Afair, that has implications from the partition table on your system drive down to the possible partitioning-schemes of some system folders.

And I don’t have experience with surface laptops, but I don’t think you’d need any obscure kernels from github. The mainline Linux Kernel should be fine, if you set it up correctly. And you shouldn’t be using Kernels from somewhere else, if you don’t absolutely know what you’re doing. (And even then, you’d be better off compiling it yourself, with the right settings).

Usually though, it’s just a matter of having the right kernel-params set during boot and loading appropriate models, which can all be done with a stock kernel, either by using the right boot-flags or even on a running system.

Compiling kernels, to my understanding, is something for Gentoo users, tinkerers and embedded system devs. Or if you want a streamlined installation on your laptop with minimal overhead; though that already puts you in the tinkerer category in my books.

I’ve got fedora and bazzite running on Surface Pro 5 and 4 without any issue. Touchscreen even works on Bazzite which was unexpected. Maybe the laptop is doing some weird things under the hood :(

Before I gone to nixos, I actually installed nix on mint, and it worked as great as flatpacks.

Ok yeah it’s complicated to use, but you can just use it as a traditional package manager with nix-env.

So if you want more recent packages, you may want to look into it (and ignore the complicated declarative part, unless you want to fall in the rabbit hole)

Bazzite is an immutable distro, which is great for something like a console or a hand held, where it’s only really supposed to do one thing, but not really advisable for a daily driver system. it’s not unreasonable that someone might want to change some core element of their system, and an immutable distro makes that super difficult to do.

The newer packages come from it using DNF package manager via being based on fedora. So if the issue is old packages then Fedora or something Arch based would probably a better suggestion then bazzite which is for a very specific use case. But realistically, outdated packages is not usually due to using the APT package manager, usually it comes from getting an unofficial package that isn’t being maintained well, usually from a “software store” or “software center” that allows unofficial packages to be listed. Flat pack (what bazzite defaults to using in its software store I think) has less of this issue, but there are plenty of poorly maintained flat packs out there that will cause this issue as well. Out dated packages are just the risk of relying on an GUI program for interacting with the package manager at the moment.