linux-surface-overlay VS linux-surface

Gentoo - I never did install it on my SP, and I'm pretty sure I won't now. I love Gentoo, and spent many a night compiling away, but when I started to look through things like editing the make.conf, I realized how much I appreciate Arch's approach. If you're interested in trying Gentoo on your Surface, there is at least some support in Gentoo for it, including this howto, this YT video, and this Gentoo overlay, (but again it's 2 years old).

Also, the linux-surface overlay for Gentoo that I made is not officially affiliated with the linux-surface project. Thus its not officially supported by them. I may lurk around on the subreddit every once in a while but, you can report future issues on overlay's GitHub itself for better support.

If you already have Gentoo installed you can go ahead and add the overlay located here: https://github.com/Parinz/linux-surface-overlay.

I would publish the guide in the overlay wiki itself as the the overlay wiki is meant to be a gateway for surface users to enter Gentoo in general, so you can check it out from there. Writing ebuilds are sure a challenge, I am by no means an expert on it. Help is always welcomed so, you can contribute lol. The tools are from here. Scroll down abit and you'll see some tools like iptsd (ported that already) for example.

Here: https://github.com/Parinz/linux-surface-overlay

Clear Linux - I really wanted to get this working because of the optimizations the Intel builds into their distro. I was able to install the latest desktop version, and as long as I used an external USB keyboard and mouse, I was able to use the system. However, I was never able to figure out how to properly build the patched kernel to support the Surface devices. If anyone wants to play around with Clear and their Surface, you can check out this kernel patch repository. However, even if you can get those Surface patches applied to the Clear Linux kernel build process, they're actually 3 years old, so it doesn't appear to be maintained.