<story><title>I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2</title><url>https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10396-i-finally-found-a-solid-debian-tablet-the-surface-go-2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dwighttk</author><text>As a person who has tried setting up Linux like 5-10 times over the years this sounds exactly like my experience and basically what I assume Linux use is always like.&lt;p&gt;It’s just like cars, there are people who are super comfortable just tinkering around with cars and fixing crap and say “this car is great” and if I tried to drive it it’d break down 5 minutes in and I would consider it a total loss.</text></item><item><author>highwaylights</author><text>It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post.&lt;p&gt;- EFI didn’t work.&lt;p&gt;- The camera doesn’t work.&lt;p&gt;- The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful).&lt;p&gt;- Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover).&lt;p&gt;- Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly).&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d want this, and it sounds like the author might be trying to force a tablet to be a laptop when they’d have just been better of with a laptop to begin with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pizza234</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been using Linux professionally for a decade, on many machines (desktop&amp;#x2F;laptop), and the compatibility is really hardware-dependent. It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;for tinkerers&amp;quot; on some hardware, and &amp;quot;fully mainstream&amp;quot; on other.&lt;p&gt;Choosing a Microsoft laptop to use Linux is asking for trouble :) I had two of them, and Microsoft had this awful idea of the connected standby, which caused standby&amp;#x2F;suspend problems (power-hungry standby, which is a very serious problem on a laptop). At least the older machines should now have a good upstream support, in other words, everything working out of the box, with the exception of touch (Linux is just not there).&lt;p&gt;Regarding other brands, it depends. I remember IBM&amp;#x2F;Lenovo (Thinkpads) as always just working out of the box. Dell used to be also very compatible, but paradoxically, the Dell XPS developer edition is marketing garbage (it&amp;#x27;s not very compatible as they claim).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve installed Linux on a couple of budget computers and they worked fine. I suspect that low-end laptops tend to be much more compatible, since they use more common&amp;#x2F;cheap components.&lt;p&gt;Bluetooth has started to be compatible just in the last couple of years - bluez is poor software (and Ubuntu has been sloppy in handling it), but it finally reached a usable level.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t remember having to do any tweak on desktop machine, except the time where I had a very modern Ryzen that was supported by very recent kernels only.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2</title><url>https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10396-i-finally-found-a-solid-debian-tablet-the-surface-go-2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dwighttk</author><text>As a person who has tried setting up Linux like 5-10 times over the years this sounds exactly like my experience and basically what I assume Linux use is always like.&lt;p&gt;It’s just like cars, there are people who are super comfortable just tinkering around with cars and fixing crap and say “this car is great” and if I tried to drive it it’d break down 5 minutes in and I would consider it a total loss.</text></item><item><author>highwaylights</author><text>It doesn’t sound solid reading the author’s post.&lt;p&gt;- EFI didn’t work.&lt;p&gt;- The camera doesn’t work.&lt;p&gt;- The SSD is too small so needed to be topped up with a MicroSD (awful).&lt;p&gt;- Not lap-friendly for travelling (type cover).&lt;p&gt;- Windows 11 needed to be kept around despite not being used (and sometimes rewrote the boot menu, if I’m reading this correctly).&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a downright painful experience. I’m not sure why you’d want this, and it sounds like the author might be trying to force a tablet to be a laptop when they’d have just been better of with a laptop to begin with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vanviegen</author><text>I teach a university course for which we require students to install Linux on their Windows laptops, all of them different. These are overwhemingly inexperienced students that we give a short manual, mostly about tweaking a few bios settings before you insert the installation medium.&lt;p&gt;Of the 35 students in my class, 25 completed the installation without issue, with all hardware (never asked about fingerprint scanners) running fine. The rest required some help from expert googlers like me and some patience, in most cases related to Nvidia drivers. We got all but two to work fine or well enough in the end.&lt;p&gt;Having 5 to 10 consecutive bad experiences sounds like a fluke to me, given the 70% instant success rate I&amp;#x27;ve seen.</text></comment>