I've been (also) working on Surface machines for a couple of years now, on Ubuntu.

They work OK on stock kernels since around 4.10 (but one must "backport" the linux-firmware package from Ubuntu Artful for having a working Wifi).

For a "non fancy" work usage (no stylus etc.; mostly keyboard and touchpad), the "only" nags are:

  - no sleep functionality
  - you can't permanently enable the Fn button, and worse, it seems that it disables itself regularly, and even worse, independenly of it being active or not, the light is off (it's not a defect; the light just turns itself off shortly after activation).

With those points in mind (point 2 is much more annoying than it reads), I think Surface machines are poor solutions for Linux users, unless the user needs to have tablet and laptop in a single machine. In fact, I'll buy the next-gen XPS 13 once it's available and mature.

On the other hand, Surface Books are the state of the art of large/work tablets. There's nothing remotely comparable: a 700gr 13.5" tablet is amazing (although the batteries don't last very long), and the fact that there is a 15" model is even more impressive.

The stylus and the touch might not work perfectly with Linux.

On the SB1, IIRC the touch screen worked but the dGPU, bluetooth and camera did not, you needed a patched kernel for hardware buttons and wifi, and hibernation didn't work (and the hardware didn't properly support suspend to ram). Not sure about the "tablet" mode.

If the parent is using a tiling WM I doubt they need the touch or the stylus much.

Same here. I can live without touch or stylus, just want a performance laptop with good screen (3:2 ratio) and keyboard.

Thinkpad?

Exactly! if only have have 3:2 screens!!! or better yet, a 4:3 screen!

Currently I'm buying a old X61s and going to convert it to X62: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-X62-Laptop-Review.21159...

Is that ratio really so important? I have a wider ratio X1 Carbon and it has never bothered me, but I guess I wasn't used to anything in particular. The screen quality is really nice though.

Perhaps it's less evident especially if you have a multi-head setup with big monitors. But for almost every laptop now that uses display scaling to make screen content readable, screen estate is precious and the extra vertical space does make coding on a small screen much more enjoyable.