Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
My name is Knightwise and I own a Surface Go. There, I said it. I’m part of the rather controversial club of people who forked over 600+ euro’s of cash on Microsoft's underpowered entry level gateway drug to the Surface Line. A device that is either loved for its versatility, its form factor and its overall cuteness by some, and hated because its an over promising under-delivering piece of ‘garbagio’ by others.
Me? I'm still on the fence. Having owned the device for over a year now, I have seen it go through cycles of daily heavy use, and weeks of neglect. Sometimes I’m in one camp, sometimes I seem to be in the other. A couple of weeks ago I decided on a different approach. Since I already own a pretty powerful Windows Machine (I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon as my daily driver), maybe I should take a look at running Linux on this little machine (the Surface Go) and see what happens.
The hardware compatibility of the device allows you to run almost any Linux distro on this machine – out of the box. I say almost because there are a couple of things that aren’t working. Wifi is one of them and it’s important to know this before you “nuke and pave” your hard drive. The fix is easy, download some files and copy them over to some directory, and boom, bob is your uncle. But make sure to do it either before you install Linux or do it on a separate computer. The Surface Go has no classic “ethernet port”, so popping in a network cable is not that easy.
Everything else just works or is provided by installing a custom kernel written by a great guy named Jake. I could lie and say it’s hard to do, but it’s not. Jake has written a simple script that you copy and paste into your terminal and boom: Screen rotation, stylus support and all the other goodies, but one, just work.
Hardware Support
The one thing that does not work yet are the webcams. And that is a darn shame because the webcam quality on the Surface Go is downright awesome. Seriously. The cam quality on this little laptop puts the one on my Macbook pro to shame at 1/3rd of the price. I know the programming geeks who reverse engineer the Linux drivers on this thing are probably recluse and shy, so a webcam is not as high on their list as it is on mine, but I would like to see this fixed pretty soon.
Screen
The only additional tweak I would recommend is setting the screen scaling to 150% (and you need a gnome command for that). It’s not that hard to find, but worth it since a 100% scaling makes the text on this full HD 10” display too tiny, while the 200% makes it too large.
Performance on this baby under Linux is even better than under Windows. Some CPU heavy processes (like permanent file indexation) don’t run under Linux, so the device is pretty snappy. Battery life is not as optimal as under Windows, but still gives you a pretty fancy mobile Linux machine. There is the possibility to play around with suspend/hibernate when you close the lid, but Ubuntu’s sore thumb (no proper support for hibernate) still sticks out here. The device boots lightning fast, so having to ‘power down’ to save battery is not the worst thing in the world.
I went for the Surface Go with the 8 GB of RAM and 128 gigs of hard-drive space. The linux distro does not eat up much space so there is plenty of room for your data. I went for the “minimal Ubuntu Install” and “picked and chose” my favorite mix of Command-Line and Gui Apps. Additional storage was added by jamming in a 128 gig micro SD card in the back and I have successfully doubled my storage capacity.
Ports are pretty scarce on this thing. One USB C port (and the well known ‘Surface’ connector) is about all you get. You can even charge the Go via USB and hook it up to an external USB C hub (or a dock). When jamming it into my USB-C HP Dock, I can get it to power one 25-inch display as a “second screen”, but powering 2 x 25-inch displays is a little beyond the capabilities of the Go.
The one thing that makes the GO pretty sweet is its size. It’s slightly larger than a regular iPad (and has a very unique form factor), but smaller than its 12-inch Surface Pro brothers. This is a very important factor for me when using it as a touch device. I flip the keyboard back and I have a light and comfortable device to read, watch videos, and scribble down some notes in Journal++ The weight and the balance of the device makes it a pretty cool ultraportable lappie.
I’m not a developer so I can’t say anything about compiling speeds and such, but I DO work in the “corporate world’ as an IT consultant. I am pretty sure that if they fixed the webcams I would have a sweet machine to survive out there. I can run an entire Office365 environment in my browser, Install the Citrix Client, and no-one of my suit-and-tie-wearing friends would be any the wiser that my Go is actually dancing with the Penguin. (I don’t wear a suit and tie by the way :p ).
In the end, I mostly use my Surface Go (under Linux) as my little “drag along” Linux laptop. Gnome 3 is not a bad OS for touch-enabled devices, but I do tend to use the keyboard and mouse most of the time. Linux on the Surface Go surely turns the little tablet/laptop into a very interesting device that, like any other touch device without a “real” mobile operating system, sits somewhere in between awesome, quirky and useless, depending on your mood.
Links
The SurfaceLinux Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/
Jakeday’s Kernel page https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface