Oh and at least with my hardware, the surface keyboard and trackpad worked out of the box, no problems. I’d pay special attention to any special wireless drivers you might need because if wireless doesn’t come up, you can’t hardwire the thing to get the driver. (USB could do it though I guess)
I’ve been in-process trying to flip a surface pro 6 into a Linux tablet for a while now. Can’t answer all your questions but can provide a few. First things first: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
That’s your hub for most of tue stuff you’ll need to do it. You can look up your hardware in their feature matrix and see what is supported.
Generally touch and stylus work. Things like camera are much more hit or miss.
In terms of distro… welp it’s always kinda impossible to make a “right choice”. Everything will have pros and cons. Originally uninstalled arch just to see if I could. And yes, it turns out you can. Problem is, I use Ubuntu on a couple of spare computers as servers and such and I’m more familiar with how that works, so I thought ok I’m having some trouble getting a couple things to work I’ll just put Ubuntu on here and then I don’t have to remember two different ways of using the OS (mind you I was using gnome in all cases, so really wasn’t a big deal to have to research a few arch specific things).
Problem is, Ubuntu fails to install. I’ve tried about 4 times and it always fails out, and I can’t figure out a way to access any install logs after the fact.
So I’m probably gonna put arch back in there because it worked, mostly.
You’ll have to be willing to tinker a bit and get used to some different ways of interacting. Overall touch was pretty ok and gnome in my case was pretty nice for navigation.
I was using an app called xournal++ for stylus/notetaking, and it seems very well featured for a Linux stylus application. That said, my pen stopped working a while ago, and I could not figure out how to fix it, which is why I was gonna try again with Ubuntu. (Xournal wasn’t to blame for the stylus problems, just couldn’t use it because stylus was useless)
I still think it’s a good learning experience, and probably a good way to resurrect an older piece of tech to usefulness. Personally I wanted to replicate stuff I do on my iPad, but be able to fully Adblock YouTube, etc. my iPad is way better for reading and handwriting, but otherwise is an obnoxious locked down operating system that I find more and more annoying. Basically it’s a great tablet but limited. Whereas like the windows version the surface is not a great tablet, but an acceptable hybrid.
Stuff moved so fast that I can’t keep track but…
I feel like groyper-racist-doge kid’s bad tweets were found, they reflexively fired him, Vance chided them for being into cancel culture, musk polled x and they’re gonna rehire him, all before the media even had time to spin up any original outrage.