I've still not gotten Linux to work well on my surface pro 4. There are some out of tree patches - but there's no fixing the poor wireless hw (well, you could use an USB dongle). In fairness wireless is flaky in win10 too on these.

But Linux does work - I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 with a custom kernel - display is pretty - pen is so-so under Linux.

I was hoping to use it w dark table and a couple of drawing programs under Linux - but so far I've never gotten it to the quite "just works" point (compared to say, a refurbished ThinkPad).

Isn't it up to Linux Distro's and hardware OEMs (Intel, Nvidia, etc) to make sure you have a smooth experience? Microsoft doesn't block you from installing Linux on their hardware, just as Apple doesn't, but in both cases neither Microsoft nor Apple do much to support Linux.

I believe the point of the question was to ask if drivers are readily available for the specific combination of hardware Microsoft uses, not to imply that Microsoft should support it.

Sorry, I misunderstood.

In answer to that question: I'd stay well away from the Surface Book if you want to run Linux, too many proprietary "magic" drivers for the screen disconnection functionality.

The Surface Laptop uses fairly off-the-shelf hardware (shared by other ultra-portables) and you will *likely have a better overall experience.

I don't have experience doing a native Linux install on the Surface Book, but I use(d) VirtualBox and use Linux every day for development (on Surface Book and Mac). With virtualization technology being as advanced as it is, I don't think there is any appreciable performance difference to a native install assuming you have enough RAM for the extra OS.

Going the other way (Win10 on osx via VMWare) was horrible. Completely unusable. Windows was so slow I just couldn't get anything done.

Virtualization technology is advanced but not perfect. Some of my own programs are 2 or 3 times slower doing CPU stuff under virtualization than under the raw machine.

Unless ... you want to share a filesystem between the windows host and the vbox guest. In which case performance is god awful.

From host to guest network filesytems (cifs/samba) should be OK?

Depends what you're doing, honestly. Some software won't tolerate running off a network mount at all for various reasons, if so you're sunk.

Some is just slow because it's inefficient. It's been a while since I had to resort to this, but accessing a big svn checkout over cifs is so slow as to be useless.

anything involving the GPU (including desktop environment compositing) is dreadfully slow in a VM.

Really? Did you check the "Enable 3D acceleration" checkbox in Virtual Box?

Try running a live distribution on bare metal. The performance difference is night and day.

I did, and it helped the speed.

But is was plenty buggy, so much that I had to switch it off.

Its buggy, extremely feature limited, and slow.

There is Windows Subsystem for Linux, which actually works quite well.