It's the other way around: Linux has some extra support for these laptops. And of course the place where extra support is required is the input devices. Despite Microsoft kinda pushing the industry to standardize on HID over I2C, they themselves now do HID over… uh… a custom protocol that runs over UART of all things.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/surface_ag...

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/hid/hid.git/...

Well at least it is HID inside I guess.

Meanwhile Apple used a custom simple protocol over SPI for the Broadwell-Kaby Lake generations (and now Apple Silicon), but the few "T2" generations went back to USB… over some truly cursed custom T2 USB host controller https://github.com/MCMrARM/mbp2018-bridge-drv (WTF)

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Also many Surface devices used awful Marvell Wi-Fi :/ At least the "Laptop 3" generation switched to Intel on Intel models and Qualcomm (seems like ath10k) on AMD ones.

I remember those kernel patches fondly.

Is there a Ubuntu image that supports SL4?

(Microsoft has still not yet released one for SL3, to the best of my knowledge.)

I was never happy with this. It's fine if you use it as a laptop, but the pen input was laggy, the OSK was finnicky, and there's no OneNote equivalent on Linux.