I put Mint on my Surface Pro 5, it works quite nicely so far. Granted I do “typical” stuff on it like web browsing, email, basic picture editing, and some chats, but for those things everything’s working fine.
The only different part of the install was installing the Surface kernel after the fact: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
Pidgin was good; it did what needed to be done and wasn’t that bad at it.
The last service I was using it for was a self-hosted XMPP server for a small group of friends that were all refugees of other defunct services. We ended up finally moving to Slack or Discord (the group bifurcated along game-playing lines).
Now I’ve got to find something new yet again!
Little guy. :( I feel you, buddy.
I think at some point, big corporations like microsoft or google will try adding their crap to the repositorys and try to make them used by majority.
They’ve already done this in some obvious ways, but also the recent Rust Zealotry and the non-stop drive to penetrate the kernel code is concerning: Rust Foundation
“I can’t put my arms down!!”
The pen seems to work fine so far.
They show fairly decent compatibility with newer models: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supported-Devices-and-Features#feature-matrix
Looks like the SP5 - 7 are the sweet spot however.