I really want my primary mobile computer to be a tablet mainly because I genuinely like the form factor. My current Linux laptop is dying and I thought I’d just buy the newest Lenovo Thinkpad Surface clone but Lenovo seems to have discontinued it because I couldn’t find a 2025 version anywhere, same with HP and Dell’s Surface clones. And most of the Windows tablets I could find online have dinky Intel N processors instead of Core.
Can anyone recommend a high end tablet that runs Linux well? Failing that, how bad is the Surface really with Linux as the only OS?
I just went through this with Dell xps 2 in 1 and surface pro 8 with mint and other OSes. Linux just is not fully ready for touchscreen it’s 90 percent there but for instance the last 10 percent is text boxes when clicking won’t spawn the keyboard, the keyboard regardless of input app is clunky, not phone grade speed, it’s possible but you my as well stick with a small 10 to 13 inch laptop. The folio is janky at best, using the slate solo is odd to hold and gets hot. Battery sucks. I tweaked and spent so much time wanting it to work. It just isn’t ready yet.
I have a minis forum v3 that I use all the time. It’s got decent CPU and GPU for a laptop class.
It competent runs Indy and older games, has reasonable battery life, and the general performance is more than enough for productivity.
Touch screen works flawlessly, accelerometer required some tinkering as did volume control. Thumb scanner was easy to get working. I have not gone back to try getting the IR camera for face detection working.
I am daily driving a Surface Pro 9
Drivers are okay. I had some problems with screen freezing but these were fixed easily with some kernel params.
With a full battery, I get 6 hours coding in C with VSCode and some browser tabs or 5 hours of YouTube playback. You’ll get about 8-9 hours if you are doing something like writing text
Gnome is fantastic for this form factor. Especially libadwaita stuff, as their HIG plays very nice with touchscreens.
A powerbank will give you practically infinite battery for a whole day. I love this machine so much…
Device is set to power saver in this picture but I must say power saver doesn’t seem to be doing much. I don’t notice a reduction in performance nor see a improvement in battery life.
I just leave that on power saver if I am not doing anything resource hungry. Possibly out of habit
Not quite a tablet but if you’d consider a convertible, the Framework 12 is a solid choice.
I’ve got a Lenovo tablet with an Intel Pentium processor that runs Fedora okay. Everything works, but especially remembering/detecting orientation with the keyboard attached is about as polished as stucco.
Apparently the hardware defaults to a portrait layout; it’s a 1080x1920 monitor, not a common 1920x1080, and by god and all his rapey little clergy if it CAN wake up in portrait mode, it will. Waking the thing up means turning it on, ripping it in half, waiting 3 seconds for the monitor to rotate back to the way it was when you put it to sleep, and then clicking the keyboard back on.
starlite runs the n100 and n200 cpus. the cpus are pretty great (have an n100 on my nuc). the problem with linux is the touch interface first and foremost imo. i have an old windows tablet converted to linux and its a daily headache. well, was. i haven’t used the thing for months.
Minisforum V3, but they’re now so highly sought after, they aren’t cheap.
Both KDE and Gnome have their own issues with pure tablet modes though, so just a heads up. Gnome is way better IMO, but the keyboard is still kinda “meh” compared to Android. KDE is kind of all over the place, depending on which apps you’re using.
I have a minisforum v3 that I’m not using - just don’t love the surface style form factor. I’m willing to sell it for a good price if anyone is interested. Based in USA. Feel free to DM me
I wouldn’t call N series “dinky”. N100 runs my daily device, coincidently surface-like tablet Chuwi Hi 10 Max, and three of my homelab servers. Proccessing power is more than enough to run modern desktop distro, all the todays shitty javascript websites, work in IDEs, virtualize, and all others server-side task I throw at them.
I have a Surface Laptop 4 and have been running Mint exclusively for a couple of years. It’s less well supported than the tablets and the initial installation took a bit of work, but once installed it has worked perfectly. The Linux Surface project has a detailed feature matrix that shows what’s supported for each model.
starlabs has one but really expensive
I ran mainline debian on the surface pro 2 for years and it was lovely.
I bought a second hand surface pro 7 recently and I’m quite in love with it! With a few GNOME plugins it’s a quite capable tablet AND a quite capable laptop on the go.
Sometimes I use my X380 yoga as a tablet. It’s an actual mini laptop (13" screen) but it will turn sideways as a tablet, it’s touch-screen, and it has a pen built into the side. You can fold the keyboard around (thus the “yoga” element), which disables the keyboard and makes it an actual tablet. Really great. 10/10
There are newer yoga models but I can’t vouch for them because I only have this one.
Minisforum V3 from what I’ve read seems good with Linux now
I have a Surface Go1 8GB of Ram with a typecover keyboard and it’s been great running Fedora Workstation for years.
I use it most’y docked to a bigger screen but it’s my daily driver.
How’s the performance for media on that thing? I was eying up the surface go line to replace an android tablet that I mostly use for playing movies and TV shows I’ve downloaded. Think it would do okay playing back 1080p and higher content?
To be honest I don’t think so.
When using Peertube or Xoutube I always use 720p to avoid stuttering.
But for everything else it has been performing well for 5 years.