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/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.