Yes, I got an SP3 a couple of months ago so I'd have a machine for a road trip I was planning.

I'm pretty heavily invested in Linux, and before getting my SP3, I only ever used Windows for gaming. I considered dual-booting Linux, but I was nervous about accidentally screwing things up ahead of my trip, so I decided I'd postpone that to after my trip.

So I installed stuff to make myself comfortable instead. PuTTY was one of my first installs, so I could SSH into my VPS whenever I wanted a familiar command-line environment (and with that, access to my coding projects and vim). Another was the suite of KDE apps, so I could use the GUI apps I'm familiar with. TortoiseHg, too, so I could pull stuff down that I wanted to work on (I use Hg as a means of backing up my stuff -- not just code, but a lot of plain text documents and stuff -- to my VPS).

So, yes, if you want a Nix-like ecosystem on a Surface, you can do that. I could've gone even farther and installed a full Cygwin environment, but I didn't bother just because PuTTY into my VPS was a much more efficient way of accessing a CLI environment. For that matter, I could've installed a Linux VM, too (and I probably would have, but I forgot, and it didn't come to mind until I was already packing).

And it's totally possible to install Linux, if you want. There are guides for installing Arch, Ubuntu, etc. on the SP3, and I doubt the SP4 or SB will be much different. Only reason I didn't is because I wanted to make 100% sure that if I accidentally did something wrong and blew away the wrong part of my SP3, it wouldn't happen until after I'm home from my trip.