Hey Gordon, sorry to hear you're struggling with these hardware glitches on your Surface Pro 5 after setting up Ubuntu 24.04.1. Let's work through targeted fixes for both the unresponsive touchscreen and the occasional screen flickering—these are common pain points for Surface devices on Linux, but there are solid community-backed solutions.

Fixes for Unresponsive Touchscreen #

Surface devices rely on community-maintained kernel patches and drivers to get full hardware support on Ubuntu, since Microsoft doesn't offer official Linux drivers. Here's what to try:

• Install the Linux Surface optimized kernel
  This is the most critical step for Surface hardware compatibility. The community maintains a custom kernel that includes patches for touchscreens, pen input, and other Surface-specific components:

  1. First, add the dedicated Surface PPA (a trusted community software repository):

     sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linux-surface/ppa
     

  2. Update your system's software source list:

     sudo apt update
     

  3. Install the optimized kernel and essential driver packages:

     sudo apt install linux-image-surface linux-headers-surface linux-libc-dev-surface linux-surface-security-meta libwacom-surface
     

  4. Reboot your system to apply the new kernel:

     sudo reboot
     

• Verify touchscreen detection and reload drivers (if needed)
  After rebooting, if the touchscreen still doesn't work:

  1. Check if the system recognizes your touchscreen device with this command:

     xinput list
     

     Look for entries like "ELAN Touchscreen" or "Surface Touchscreen" in the output. If you see it, the device is detected but the driver might need a refresh.
  2. Reload the touchscreen driver module (replace elan_i2c with the module name matching your device if different):

     sudo modprobe -r elan_i2c && sudo modprobe elan_i2c
     

  3. Also, double-check the system settings: go to Settings > Touch and ensure the touchscreen isn't manually disabled.

Fixes for Occasional Screen Flickering #

Screen flickering on Surface Pro 5 (which uses Intel HD Graphics 620) is often tied to display power-saving features or compositor settings. Try these steps:

• Disable Intel Panel Self-Refresh (PSR)
  This is the most common fix for Intel GPU screen flickering on Linux:

  1. Open the GRUB configuration file for editing:

     sudo nano /etc/default/grub
     

  2. Locate the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Add i915.enable_psr=0 inside the quotation marks. The line should look something like this:

     GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_psr=0"
     

  3. Save the file (press Ctrl+O, hit Enter, then Ctrl+X to exit) and update GRUB:

     sudo update-grub
     

  4. Reboot your system for the changes to take effect.

• Adjust GNOME Compositor and Display Settings
  Ubuntu 24.04 uses GNOME, and compositor quirks can cause flickering:

  1. First, confirm your display is set to the correct refresh rate: go to Settings > Display and ensure the refresh rate is set to 60Hz (the native rate for Surface Pro 5's screen).
  2. If flickering persists, try restarting the GNOME compositor: press Alt+F2, type r, and hit Enter. This refreshes the window manager without rebooting.
  3. For persistent cases, you can temporarily disable the compositor to test if it's the cause:

     metacity --replace &
     

     If the flickering stops, you can adjust GNOME's animation settings to reduce strain: go to Settings > Appearance > Animations and toggle off non-essential effects like window animations or dynamic workspaces.

• Install System Updates
  Make sure your system is fully up-to-date, as updates often include bug fixes for display drivers:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
  

If none of these steps resolve your issues, you can dig deeper by checking the Linux Surface community's compatibility notes for the Pro 5, or file a bug report with Ubuntu's hardware team including output from lspci and lsusb to help diagnose specific hardware interactions.

备注：内容来源于stack exchange，提问作者Gordon O