Microsoft Surface Go 3 goes Linux

I had a Surface Go 3 sitting on my shelf for about three years now. Back then I needed a cheap Windows device for testing and the Go 3 happened to be the cheapest device I could get my hands on. Instead of letting it collect more dust and because the need for the device is gone I decided to throw Linux on it. How hard can it be (tm).

The Linux Surface project is doing a great job at making sure the Surface hardware line actually works. And they have a nice matrix in their wiki showing what is working on which device. I wanted to start as simple as possible and put plain Fedora on it, no additional patches or repositories applied.

The installation was a bit tricky. It feels like disabling secure boot should not have been needed, but I had to do some debugging. For some reason a perfectly fine USB thumb drive I always use to install systems and that worked on two other laptops did not boot. It was recognised by the system. It works after the installation was done. Just booting from the drive failed. So I had to resort to an age old thumb drive I had buried in a drawer. It was slow. But it worked. Once Fedora booted the installation was the same as on any other device.

And things worked. Just like that. Screen rotation, touch, the camera, all was there. This was kind of anticlimactic. I expected kicking, screaming and compiling a kernel. And yet I touched the screen to open Firefox and it "just worked". I did not test the modem or biometric sign in yet mostly because I did not get to installing Howdy.

Battery life is pretty good. I am getting four to five hours of a charge with a moderate workload. Performance is okay. Windows 11 was unusable. The cores were pinned at 100% load and barely let you open Explorer. With Linux I can use the Go 3 for browsing the web, writing some code and even playing a random indie game.

Connecting the Caldigit dock with mouse, keyboard and external screen worked without any issues. (Ignore the cables, the cover is sitting in the basement for a few weeks now)

The UI animations are not the smoothest and driving a 3440x1440 eternal screen does not help the little machine. But beside that it is very workable. Also today I learned that neofetch is archived and I had to manually install it because Fedora dropped it from their repository. Zed was workable. Not good, but workable.

The two things that really do not work well are GDM and Gnomes virtual keyboard. GDM lags. A lot - actually multiple seconds sometimes. Disabling GDM makes the Go 3 sleep and wake up as fast as my iPad. For the keyboard, whoever thought the whole thing should expand and shrink when a key is pressed: WHY?! This is the most irritating time I had with a touch keyboard in 20 years.

You would think this would be a longer post. That things are bad before adding additional patches and a lot of cursing at Microsoft to be involved. Sorry to disappoint. Things are pretty good. The Go 3 is doing way better than I expected and than it should. Far better than it ever was with Windows and a fun little device to carry around.