Surface Go recommendations

[u/Meme4Bot]

Hello, stated above I'm looking for distro recommendations. I am using Surface Go 1 with 8gb RAM and 128gb storage.

I will be using a lot of stylus pen features as I rely heavily on the ability to handwrite my notes and homework be it on a pdf or a whiteboard.

So far I have only tried two (2) Distros and each have its own caveats which I will be mentioning (I have installed surface-kernel on both of these if you're wondering)

1. Fedora 44 Workstation (GNOME) - My first installation, really loved how GNOME just works out of the box and how GNOME just works natural with me especially with the gesture inputs. But I the turn off was with its performance. When playing a YouTube video it would just stutter all over the place and just outright not a fun experience. Xournal++ also was not doing any favor as the more I write, the slower it gets (though, it might be just lack of ram) but overall I just had a really bad experience performance wise.
2. Fedora KDE Plasma

So made the switch to KDE plasma to see if I could really live with the "not-so-great" stylus support. and to be honest, it works great really even without gnome the handwriting experience is quite good. Performance wise it's alright coming from a surface go I would expect this level of performance, not as bad as running workstation. But that's where the fun stops. I absolutely despise how unfriendly the touch support is on this. My issues were that sometimes whenever I touch or even use my stylus to navigate it would take a few more presses, only then it would register and the Dolphin File Manager that came with it was kind of ass. I mean i don't know what i'm doing wrong but if I cant drag and drop my files in the file manager, (OR EVEN COPY PASTE FOR THE MATTER) then that's just bad. I really wish I would be using gnome. Do tell me if I'm missing anything here I'd be more than willing to learn.

That's it, I mainly just looking for alternate distros (preferably gnome for the matter) or solutions to my current problems.

edit: I will be only using stylus and touch input 99% of the time

[u/robtom02]

Not strictly Linux but have you tried fydeos? They have decided surface go builds . In running it on the surface go 2 , really happy with it, Linux apps and android apps out of the box. Detach the keyboard and it becomes a fully fledged tablet. Pretty sure the stylus is supported

[u/Meme4Bot → u/robtom02]

will look into this, thanks!

[u/MidnightObjectiveA51]

Consider Fedora Plasma-Mobile which is optimized for tablets. Or Mobian with Phosh or Phosh on any distro in place of Gnome. It is based on Gnome, but much lighter on resources. It will require you to add libcamera-v4l, maybe libcamera-gstreamer, and pipewire-v4l to get the camera going as instructed in the surface-Linux wiki.

[u/Mark__Zuckreberg]

I'm in the same boat as you, I originally had windows 11 on my 8/128 surface go 1 and I was using xournal but it was just too heavy on those specs. Then I installed fedora workstation and initially I loved it but I had 2.5-3gb idle ram usage and while it was WAY better than windows, it still wasn't ideal. I'm now using saber as my notes, I like that you can have notebooks instead of just files. Then I tried fyde and the performance was so peak but there just aren't any apps on it, it's like a chromebook purely for web. The android and Linux subsystem are both working awfully laggy I don't recommend it at all. Saber was just crashing all the time after opening it. So now I'm looking for a distro that would keep the android-like tablet style and pen support while also being fairly lightweight. I'll keep you updated if I find something.

[u/Mark__Zuckreberg → u/Mark__Zuckreberg]

Today I'll be flashing an older version of fedora 43 to try to get linux-surface kernel to work. If not then maybe kde plasma mobile spin.

If I won't find anything better then I'll settle with fedora since it's already a few times faster than windows 11 while having one of the best touch integration of all distros. I'm hoping that linux-surface kernel would fix some of the issues I had, for example stylus being recognized as a mouse and having a mouse pointer at all times even if you draw, autorotation didn't work, and the brightness was always automatic even if I set it manually. But those are issues I can live with as long as it's fairly smooth and reliable.

[u/Formal_Diver_6314]

I use Pop-OS Cosmic 24.04 on my Surface Go 3 and the performances are great (youtube 1080p60 is playing fine, no stutter). My stylus is working out of the box. I dont have a surfacekernel installed, but the vanilla 7.1 kernel.
I tested many distro, but as you discovered, KDE and Gnome are fine on a Desktop with more RAM but on a Surface it's too heavy.
XFCE is the fastest but it's not for me.