There's some good news for those of you who have been mulling the possibility of installing Linux on your Surface 3, as support for the touchscreen is included with the new release candidate of version 4.8 of the Linux Kernel.

The change will mean that those who wanted to try Linux on their Surface 3 will be able to do so and still keep full use of the touchscreen with no worries on flakiness – or at least that's certainly the theory.

As Betanews reports, Dmitry Torokhov, a software engineer on the Chrome OS team at Google, and Linux Kernel Input Subsystem Maintainer, highlighted a number of new drivers which would be in the kernel including a "driver for [the] touchscreen controller found in Surface 3".

Drivers aplenty

There's a ton of driver tweaking going on with the release, although this particular addition will clearly be of interest to those who have forked out for one of Microsoft's hybrids.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, noted that "about 60% of the non-documentation diffs [are] drivers (gpu, networking, media, sound, etc)".

You can still grab yourself a Surface 3, incidentally, with the vanilla device (2GB of RAM, 64GB storage) costing £420 ($499 in the US, which is around AU$650), although Microsoft is winding manufacturing of the hybrid down, planning on curtailing it completely at the end of this year.

The version with 4GB of RAM and 128GB storage is already out of stock on the UK store, and the situation is worse in the US, with all models out of stock except for the 2GB/64GB device with 4G LTE on board.