Desktop Environment (if applicable):
KDE Plasma 5.27.12
Problem Description:
After installing Ubuntu Studio on my Microsoft Surface Studio 2, the display is seen as two devices and the display is split in half vertically. So instead of having a single 4500x3000 display, it treats it as two 2250x3000 displays side by side.
However the touch screen is still calibrated to track along the full resolution of the screen. So with the left side set as primary, if I tap on the far right of the physical screen, the input is read in the center (far right of the primary display as XServer sees it). As I move my input to the left it gradually gets closer until my physical input matches the read input when I reach the far left edge.
The X Screen configuration seems to recognize that the display is a single piece of 4500x3000 hardware but still retains the two separate devices.
Relevant System Information:
Microsoft Surface Studio 2
Intel core i7 7820hq
Nvidia GTX 1070
What I’ve Tried:
Disabling one of the two displays and setting the other as primary in either the system settings or Nvidia XServer utility disables the entire screen. I am unable to manually edit the resolution of either display to match the physical screen.
Manually editing ViewPortIn and ViewPortOut to 4500x3000 results in it retaining the ViewPortIn setting while automatically reverting the ViewPortOut back to 2250x3000 and compressing 4500 pixels into half the width.
This issue did not occur when booting UbuntuStudio from USB in safe graphics mode for the initial install. Enabling the nomodeset flag on boot appears to have no effect.
I’m assuming this is a conflict caused by either having both integrated graphics and a discrete gpu, or something unique to the surface studio hardware itself but I’m a bit at a loss for what to look at next.
The link below is to a site which explains several methods to install NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu including from a command line or from the official NVIDIA site. First identify the graphics card and read through the entire post before beginning. Have you checked the NVIDIA forums?
Thanks for the response. The drivers are already installed. Running ubuntu-drivers from the command line confirms that. I’ve gone through both the NVIDIA forums and Microsoft Surface Linux forums and haven’t found anyone else with this particular issue. Others have had somewhat similar issues with “phantom displays” after installing the nvidia drivers but that behavior seems to be different and the suggested resolutions either didn’t work (noted above) or were already applied by default with this distribution.
Thanks, I did see that same reddit post and added nomodeset to the kernel parameters but it didn’t have any effect. My understanding was that that only prevented the kernel from loading the drivers until the X session started though so it makes sense that it wouldn’t change the behavior once the desktop loaded.
I forgot to list it in my original post but I have tried to use the custom kernel for Surface devices you linked to and unfortunately it did not address the issue.
Also I totally get this is a fringe case so not expecting any kind of official support. Just figured someone else might have encountered this before and might have some insight. I do think it’s weird that this issue didn’t arise when booting Ubuntu Studio from the install media. I’m just not sure what parameter in what configuration file I can look at to get my main environment to use the same drivers as the install environment.
I’d ask in http://reddit.com/r/surfacelinux as you’ll get a lot more people who know what to do or have experienced this there.
Since you’re not using the Ubuntu kernel, there’s nothing that can even be done from a bug standpoint as it’s literally out of the Ubuntu community’s hands.
That does not seem to be the case (though I have no idea why it wouldn’t). The only issue I have is this one, which that kernel doesn’t address. Not sure what’s different with the surface studio 2. Or perhaps the necessary drivers were included in the Ubuntu studio distro?
Either way I’ll repost over in the surface linux sub reddit since that’s more focused on this hardware line.
Ah that makes perfect sense. I guess my one question that is specific to Ubuntu then is how do I configure my live environment to use the same video configuration as the safe graphics mode for the install environment? Because that worked perfectly.
Tiled displays (two monitors in one) are not always well supported on Linux. Though I would have expected the Nvidia driver to cope with it better. Part of the reason they’re not well supported is because they’re so rare now and most developers don’t own any tiled displays…
Instead of nomodeset, try adding or removing nvidia-drm.modeset=1
Try using plain Ubuntu and/or Kubuntu 24.04 – even from a live medium would help for testing, in order to determine if this is in some way due to Ubuntu Studio or not
Try using 24.10 to see if a newer kernel, drivers and desktop help
Try using an Ubuntu variant with built-in nVidia drivers, such as Pop!_OS
