Hi! There’s no Surface on Linux Lemmy community (yet), but I didn’t feel like asking on reddit, so I thought that this community is my best bet.
I was thinking about getting a surface go, since I really like the form factor and have fond memories of my old Surface Pro 3 in Uni.
Now, there’s a deal going on, where they’re selling the tablet for under 300€, but it’s the low-spec one with 4GB RAM and the weakest processor. I was wondering if I would be doing myself a favor by getting a tablet with these low-end specs.
My usecases would be: Note taking with rnote/xournalpp, surfing, reading, youtube and maybe some light coding.
A FOSS system with encrypted home directory is essential for me, which is why I’m not even considering Android/Apple tablets.
I think I’d give Fedora Silverblue a shot, because Gnome is supposedly great for tablets and it seems more stable to fuck-ups. But maybe the meager storage space (64GB) makes this infeasible
Do any of you have any experiences with these low specs? Or even with a Surface Go 2 in 2023 daily use?
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Don’t waste your money on a PC with 4GB of RAM that’s soldered on the motherboard.
Sorry, that’s just not a helpful comment. It kind of ignores my usecase.
It’s a tablet and I’m not going to use it for big workloads.
If you know of any PCs with stylus support that I can carry in the pockets of my jacket with modular RAM, please do tell.
You’re probably not going to find a tablet with modular RAM, but 4GB will barely run a web browser these days. You will be using swap a lot and that will put a lot of wear on the non replacable SSD.
Oof. Didn’t even think of the SSD bit. The surface devices are generally good quality but the repairability is apparently atrocious with all these soldered Chips.
Although the new surfaces have good repairability apparently!
The SSD is still soldered to the motherboard.
I have the 8gb model and I cant recommend. Battery life is ridiculously low, it struggle with windows, but got a little better on fedora. Keyboard broke after a year, it was about 90euros to replace Overall it’s really overpriced, you can find better.
A month or so ago I picked up an 8gb model and it’s been really nice, I wrote a blog post about it if you’re interested and have been really happy with it. 4gb is enough for note taking & code writing, web browsing, reading, and YouTube watching (at low/mid resolutions) and I actually got away with those on a 2gb RAM 16gb storage Chromebook + Debian for a while. Still though, if you can spring for 8gb of ram that will be helpful, and a necessity if you want to do things like run waydroid.
Gnome works great, just be sure to set up the on screen keyboard and run the custom hot corners plugin to make it work everywhere. Also, I know that chromium doesn’t have the best reputation in these parts, but you’ll probably need to use either a WebKit or chromium browser for their touch controls and PWAs.
I went with Debian, but I can’t imagine Fedora offering a much different experience. Mine worked fine without a surface specific kernel, but results may vary from device to device.
Last, I bought mine used for $99 US on EBay. Not sure how it varies from country to country but at least in the states you can find older surface models in decent condition starting at $70 US or $100 US for ones in like new condition with a keyboard & charger.
Edit: beyond Surfaces, if you’re deal hunting and don’t mind more research I believe most 2 in 1s running Windows or ChromeOS will accept a custom OS.
No way, if you dont already have that, its a complete waste of money. 300€ is not little! I bought a Clevo NV41MZ for that, which has 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, i7 CPU and is supported by Coreboot
I already have a laptop. I was in the market for a small tablet.
Oh didnt know surface also has Tablets
Aaand that’s how badly Microsoft messed up the marketing for the surface line. I didn’t know the surface line had laptops, I thought the surface line was a tablets only (With the detachable keyboard base). 2 random internet people who are involved in the tech world had 2 completely opposite understandings of their product line because they made the marketing and branding so bad.
Not sure I’d recommend getting anything resembling a computer with 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage nowadays, but it’ll certainly still work.
I’d probably start with a minimal Debian installation (or Arch if you prefer being on the bleeding edge I guess) and then add GNOME desktop and whatever else I need afterwards. I don’t recommend checking the box that says “GNOME” in the Debian installer, as that installs a whole bunch of packages you’ll probably never use, and disk space is at a premium here.
Performance should be doable as long as you don’t multitask a lot, but don’t expect any wonders as 2 physical cores really isn’t a lot these days.
Absolutely not.
Get a used Thinkpad X1 tablet. You find get a 16GB ram version for 300EUR. Works great with Linux without any tinkering.
I have the Go gen 1 with 4 Gb ram, for the exact same user cases ad you described.
The compatibility with Linux is great, but be mindful that you need a Windows installation to boot from USB (!). But the pen and touchscreen works out of the box.
The performance though is not the best, boot can take some time. I’d say forget about YouTube. But light coding and non-demanding websites could work. The form factor is great though… 😊
OP, if you’re interested in buying a used one, we could perhaps arrange something, if you live in Europe? Message me in that case.
PS. A Linux surface community would be great, I’d happily join it!
be mindful that you need a Windows installation to boot from USB (!)
I have the GO1 with 8GBs and while normal USB boot sticks don’t work if I use something like ventoy it works without any issues.
Huh, I’ve tried booting from ubuntu and fedora sticks with no luck but ventoy would?! I’ll have to try that and if it would work, my mind will be blown 🤯
Not x86_64 based, but the PineTab2 and PineTab-V are 2 alternatives. The PineTab2 is aarch64 (ARM) based while the PineTab-V is, you guessed it, RISC-V based.
Both 8 GB RAM versions go for about $210 on their website.
Unfortunately, those don’t support a stylus. Although I love seeing a RISC-V tablet (although I wouldn’t be able to use it, since I’m not a kernel developer ;)
No worries. Just wanted to throw some alternatives your way, since I think €300 is a steep price for a 4 GB RAM tablet with no upgrade option. :) PS: Didn’t know stylus support was a thing. TIL about EMR.
A shame that android/google and apple have the market cornered so much.
