Surface Users Out There?

Scooter

I tried using the recommended distros for my Surface Book 2. Ubuntu, Fedora, the usuals. While it was cool to get some of the features of my Surface working, none of them really made the thing improve battery life and performance much over Windows 11- at least not to a degree that I kept using it.

Solus worked straight out of the box. At least to the point where it is usable as a traditional laptop. Yeah there's no camera, nor does the tablet part come off without jankiness, but it runs far smoother than it has in 5 years.

TIP- Mine has the extra Nvidia card, but I needed to boot the live USB using the non-Nvidia option, install, and then use the driver manager to install the Nvidia driver. Oh, using Gnome here.

BuzzPCSOS

Scooter Generally benefits of running Linux do not include improved battery life. Find what the health of the battery is with inxi -B run in the terminal. Condition reported lower that about 50% is never going to return a good run time whatever OS you choose.
I am not a Surface user so not sure of what hardware you are running.
If you have an intel processor you could enable Intel Compensation Method which should keep your processor running a little cooler by running sudo eopkg install thermald in the terminal and then sudo thermald to enable the daemon. Not sure this would help battery life but keeping everything cooler is always a good thing.
I hope this helps.
Battery Optimisation can be improved a little with TLP
sudo eopkg install tlp
sudo tlp start
Pay attention to what services need to be masked for TLP to run properly, they will be listed when it is installed.

Scooter

Holy smokes. It's quite a difference in copying files and getting stuff pulled down with Insync when the Power Mode is changed to "Performance." Best only when plugged in, though!

Scooter

Thanks so much for the tips! I will try the solutions you recommend.