Technology

WOW. Such a cool detail! 🤯 Nobara is good.

It's the best "laptop" I've ever owned. Overly expensive, but it's legitimately the first laptop I've had that hasn't died in a few years. It feels like Microsoft's response to the Mac-book.

It's exceptionally bad if one wishes to repair or upgrade, as you stated. Outside of that though - performance, reliability... it's been pretty good.

As I typed this I remembered that in the past year it's started hard locking seemingly at random requiring a full shutdown via holding the power button. So, not quite as consistent as a Mac-book.

Fedora 38 is VERY good. Really cool distro. Same here, best decision was to install linux, it is so much snappier and smooth! P.S. cool GNOME extensions pack, looks beautiful!

wwoohh. Awesome work from Surface side.

WSL does nothing to further the paradigm of Linux. WSL is a bandage for Windows to make it suck just a tiny bit less, and it generally fails miserably.

Because some people purchase and use devices for practical purposes, not just ideological.

Perhaps the Surface hardware is the most practical for some people?

In the case of the Surface Go family, there isn't really anything comparable from other companies. It's unironically the best compact tablet I'm aware of that you can put Linux on, and it runs Pop!_OS without issue once you disable Secure Boot. The only better Linux tablet for me would be an iPad Mini, but you can't put Linux on one of those and even if you could it's ARM-based so most proprietary apps won't work on it.

In general, your tablet options for something smaller and handier than full-size 2-in-1s are pretty limited if you don't want to be running iPadOS, so excluding Microsoft's devices from the running if you want to put Linux on your tablet is pointless. Yeah, buying a Surface Laptop to put Linux on there is a bit weird, but I can see the Surface Pro family yielding a good ARM Linux tablet some day.

Same with people buying Google Pixel’s and then removing the stock Android. Isn’t the Pixel’s hardware rubbish, and the only reason to buy it the software?

Because Pixel allows the removal of stock android where some phones, like Samsung's, actively prevent it.

But you're not entirely wrong. There are non-Pixel phones with better hardware and unlockable bootloaders. Often it's a preference thing. Though it should be said, the more popular the phone, the more likely it has robust support from the custom rom community, and Pixels are popular.

Also, "stock Android" doesn't mean "everything is accessible and configurable" Android. They may put a Pixel-based rom right back on, just a version that's not so restrictive. Many don't need a reason to use custom roms beyond just having more knobs and levers for their phone than stock allows them.

Honestly, one of the major reasons I use Lineage, beyond the big obvious reasons, is solely to keep the "Hold back button to kill foreground app" function that stock android removed long ago.

Buying new, sure, what you're saying makes sense. I think buying used for the form factor or whatever and not wanting windows is a fine choice, though.

I've been daily driving Fedora with surface-linux kernel on SB2 for over a year. It just works (well, maybe except for the camera).

If it was long time ago maybe you should try it again. Many improvements were made. Also, disable secure boot in BIOS, it is kinda meh on Linux.

Surface Go 2 with Manjaro Gnome as a daily driver here, everything works fine, even the camera.

Its honestly very usable. Touch has some weirdness and I haven't gotten it working on my device but its one of the laptops not the tablets so I don't really care for touch. Look through the Table of Supported Features that OP linked to make sure whatever device you plan to pick up supports everything or is at least being worked on.

Xournal++ and Rnote are the best options for hand written notes. Both available as a Flatpak from Flathub.