The Surface has come a long way. I had (and still have) a Surface Pro 3 that had pretty much everything going for it: excellent build quality, great high-res screen, nice optional keyboard and decent PC-grade specs. There were two major flaws, though:

1. Linux support was pretty bad. You needed a custom kernel for an enjoyable experience, and even that was pretty unusable on anything other than x11 GNOME.

2. The overheating was a dealbreaker. I presume this was either a driver issue or hardware failure, but the device would regularly hit 55c in normal workloads, which was a no-go for that sort of product.

It was so close to being the Linux iPad of my dreams, but fell just short. I might give one of the later models a shot someday, but I'm not really in a rush. Maybe once Alder Lake makes it's way into a decent Windows convertible, it will finally be The Year of the Linux Tablet.

I have a m3 Surface Go 2. It's making a fairly decent Linux tablet with Arch using Gnome 42 (Wayland) and the mainline kernel. The camera doesn't work well, but everything else does including LTE.

It's actually a ton faster in Linux, but with a bit worse battery life.

The biggest flaw with using Linux on the earlier Surface line was the shit Marvell Wifi. That would drop out all the time. So glad they switched to Intel for the later ones.

Hm, I think I'll still wait for the Alder Lake update, but it really does sound like a good setup. If I didn't disagree with the direction GNOME was going in this choice would be a lot easier...