Hi! There’s no Surface on Linux Lemmy community (yet), but I didn’t feel like asking on reddit, so I thought that this community is my best bet.
I was thinking about getting a surface go, since I really like the form factor and have fond memories of my old Surface Pro 3 in Uni.
Now, there’s a deal going on, where they’re selling the tablet for under 300€, but it’s the low-spec one with 4GB RAM and the weakest processor. I was wondering if I would be doing myself a favor by getting a tablet with these low-end specs.
My usecases would be: Note taking with rnote/xournalpp, surfing, reading, youtube and maybe some light coding.
A FOSS system with encrypted home directory is essential for me, which is why I’m not even considering Android/Apple tablets.
I think I’d give Fedora Silverblue a shot, because Gnome is supposedly great for tablets and it seems more stable to fuck-ups. But maybe the meager storage space (64GB) makes this infeasible
Do any of you have any experiences with these low specs? Or even with a Surface Go 2 in 2023 daily use?
Don’t waste your money on a PC with 4GB of RAM that’s soldered on the motherboard.
Sorry, that’s just not a helpful comment. It kind of ignores my usecase.
It’s a tablet and I’m not going to use it for big workloads.
If you know of any PCs with stylus support that I can carry in the pockets of my jacket with modular RAM, please do tell.
I’m using a Thinkpad X1 Yoga with touchscreen and stylus support. Works flawlessly with Fedora. Bought the 8 GB version with an 8th gen i7 from a local shop in Vienna for 200€, but there’s also a 16 GB one.
I would say that Surface is too old for proper use especially for that price. Have a look around more, and better deals just gonna fall into your lap.
You’re probably not going to find a tablet with modular RAM, but 4GB will barely run a web browser these days. You will be using swap a lot and that will put a lot of wear on the non replacable SSD.
Oof. Didn’t even think of the SSD bit. The surface devices are generally good quality but the repairability is apparently atrocious with all these soldered Chips.
It’s a 10" tablet, how big is your pocket?
My bigger concern checking its specs is this:
Storage: 64 GB eMMC Flash, 64 GB
Unlike ram, ssds die after some use. So the lifespan of this device depends on this SD card, eMMC is basically a soldered SD card, a bad quality ssd. I have 3 old tablets with dead eMMC, they are otherwise perfectly fine devices, but unusable for anything
I’m not too familiar with the surface lineup, but iirc there are higher end devices with replaceable ssds. I think soldered ram is not a big deal in this form factor if it’s enough for the expected use case, but a soldered hard drive lowers the lifespan of your device
Not x86_64 based, but the PineTab2 and PineTab-V are 2 alternatives. The PineTab2 is aarch64 (ARM) based while the PineTab-V is, you guessed it, RISC-V based.
Both 8 GB RAM versions go for about $210 on their website.
Unfortunately, those don’t support a stylus. Although I love seeing a RISC-V tablet (although I wouldn’t be able to use it, since I’m not a kernel developer ;)
No worries. Just wanted to throw some alternatives your way, since I think €300 is a steep price for a 4 GB RAM tablet with no upgrade option. :) PS: Didn’t know stylus support was a thing. TIL about EMR.
Not sure I’d recommend getting anything resembling a computer with 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage nowadays, but it’ll certainly still work.
I’d probably start with a minimal Debian installation (or Arch if you prefer being on the bleeding edge I guess) and then add GNOME desktop and whatever else I need afterwards. I don’t recommend checking the box that says “GNOME” in the Debian installer, as that installs a whole bunch of packages you’ll probably never use, and disk space is at a premium here.
Performance should be doable as long as you don’t multitask a lot, but don’t expect any wonders as 2 physical cores really isn’t a lot these days.
Anything that has less than 6GB of RAM nowadays it completely useless for normal use. Don’t buy it.
I’d say 4GB of RAM is barely enough. It’ll probably do for the things you mentioned. But opening a browser and surfing the web, or using modern Electron apps/software will quickly get you to the limit.
Another idea would be buying something second-hand / refurbished. It’ll get you better specs for roughly the same money. But probably not a Surface or a tablet, so YMMV with that approach.
