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BTW usually the graphics glitches weren't immediate, but would come after waking it from sleep a few times.

As an ex-Linux on Surface Go 1 user, I didn't like the experience. Under Debian Testing, it was always mostly usable, but I'd come across the weirdest bugs, like graphics glitches. Also, last time I checked, the camera was miserable to set up - I got it working, but it's really weird. Secure boot was also really painful.

Running Linux on the Surface Go made me curse the Surface line and put the Go in a junk drawer. I might go back to it one day, but I have no reason at the moment. Still, if you already own one, it's worth a shot.

If you go ahead, though:

1. Whatever easily supported the linux-surface kernel.
2. I really don't know. I don't quite use Linux in that manner.
3. No. SD cards are slow, so the system will take an eternity to load. Put personal files on the SD and the install internal, not the other way around.
4. I have no idea about the pen, but the keyboard mostly worked fine. I remember it having problems in the Debian installer, so I had to use a USB hub dongle and a keyboard to install, but after that I remember it working pretty well both mainline and linux-surface.

Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.

Not necessarily - pavucontrol switched to GTK4, and there are a lot of other applications that I use that are on it as well. If XFCE stays on X11, I wouldn't be able to run any application that updates to GTK5 (except through some hack like running Weston nested in X, which I used to do when I used Waydroid).

Stares in Debian Testing. (Though I use Bookworm on my laptop, probably soon to be Trixie. Nice thing about Trixie is I'll no longer have to use the Backports kernel on my Thinkpad and can just stay on the LTS one.)

Let's just hope XFCE can finish the transition before then. If not, I am not looking forward to having to shop for a new DE.

I'm not sure about NVIDIA drivers. Otherwise, it depends on what kernel your distro is using; if it's Debian, there's a chance you might have problems, though you could install the backports kernel, which I do on my Thinkpad E16.

I think it wasn't actually Stallman - it's a common misattribution.

Depends on your hardware and distro. Might not be so bad assuming it’s one of those old Thinkpads. Also, though, if you’re on Debian; they deblob their kernel already and put the blobs in separate packages so they can be optionally used. Don’t install any blobs and you’re good.

It's mostly a breeze. The only misery I can recall is I remember I had a wonky knockoff Arduino board that kept jumping serial ports, but that was a hardware issue.

I agree. The only feature where I'd say it's weaker feature-wise is it doesn't have any form of virtual GPU acceleration - either you deal with software rendering or have to pass through a graphics card (I've done it, but it's not easy.).

Otherwise, I'd say it tends to run better than VirtualBox, though it's been years since I last used Vbox anyhow. A plus is Virt Manager comes in most distro repos, whereas VirtualBox doesn't. Also, it allows you to directly edit the XML, so you can do some cool stuff that would be really annoying (not impossible) to do in VirtualBox.

Coolio, but I won’t be using it at least until it hits Debian Testing. Hopefully this can be in Trixie - looks like the freeze hasn’t happened yet.