Saved up enough to buy a second-hand Surface Pro 5 to replace my Pro 3.
Nervous as it was £90, which is a massive amount for me, but if it works then yay. Granted, running Win8.1 on it was actually an okay experience, but once the replacement arrives, I'll be using it as a dedicated Linux machine (Zorin, probably) so I can get used to that.
Hate spending money, though... grew up poor and that's never left me.
Well Zorin is a no-go. Their terminal instructions for installing the Surface firmware doesn't work at step 5, and instructions others have said to fix it just caused it to error on boot.
On to Linux Mint XFCE as that was my first choice until I heard about Zorin.
The updates didn't work, so onto Cinnamon and that is just working out of the box... no terminals, no sudo's.
Yay!
So, it doesn't detect rotation, so that's a little annoying.
It also doesn't bring up the on-screen keyboard unless I launch the virtual keyboard myself, but I just put an icon for it on the desktop.
Not perfect, but less security issues than Windows 8.1 (it chugged on Windows 10, which is the maximum it can 'officially' go)
And yep, FoundryVTT still chugs hard, even just v11 (which is as far back as I would ever work with, thanks Star Wars breaking from v12 onwards).
So got those working, but when trying to install the linux surface kernel, it reboots to that same error.
It only boots if I turn off secure boot.
Think I'll just go back to Windows 8.1 and just deal with it not being too secure... or do I take it to Windows 10 and strip out a lot of the OS so it works at a better pace?
Out of the box, XFCE doesn't acknowledge me clicking on the touchpad, just moving it around.
Good job I know my keyboard navigation from those old Win95 days.
Letting it update to see if that fixes it, otherwise it's on to Cinnamon.