Maiq

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 .pacnew files. Luckily there are easy ways to do this using meld to 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 brtfs by default and sets up snapper for 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!

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.

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

Hands down the most advanced and secure smartphone os is grapheneOS.

https://grapheneos.org/

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?

What happens when you let mullvad handle your dns?

https://www.dnsleaktest.com/

The only way I was able to uninstall facebook on my old S9 was through adb. It works for preinstalled bloat probably should work for system apps as well.

adb uninstall package.appname.here