I have been looking for a good tablet for Debian for… well, years. I want thin, light, portable, excellent battery life, and a servicable keyboard.

For a while, I tried a Lenovo Chromebook Duet. It meets the hardware requirements, well sort of. The problem is with performance and the OS. I can run Debian inside the ChromeOS Linux environment. That works, actually pretty well. But it is slow. Terribly, terribly, terribly slow. Emacs takes minutes to launch. apt-gets also do. It has barely enough RAM to keep its Chrome foundation happy, let alone a Linux environment also. But basically it is too slow to be servicable. Not just that, but I ran into assorted issues with having it tied to a Google account – particularly being unable to login unless I had Internet access after an update. That and my growing concern over Google’s privacy practices led me sort of write it off.

I have a wonderful System76 Lemur Pro that I’m very happy with. Plenty of RAM, a good compromise size between portability and screen size at 14.1″, and so forth. But a 10″ goes-anywhere it’s not.

I spent quite a lot of time looking at thin-and-light convertible laptops of various configurations. Many of them were quite expensive, not as small as I wanted, or had dubious Linux support. To my surprise, I wound up buying a Surface Go 2 from the Microsoft store, along with the Type Cover. They had a pretty good deal on it since the Surface Go 3 is out; the highest-processor model of the Go 2 is roughly similar to the Go 3 in terms of performance.

There is an excellent linux-surface project out there that provides very good support for most Surface devices, including the Go 2 and 3.

I put Debian on it. I had a fair bit of hassle with EFI, and wound up putting rEFInd on it, which mostly solved those problems. (I did keep a Windows partition, and if it comes up for some reason, the easiest way to get it back to Debian is to use the Windows settings tool to reboot into advanced mode, and then select the appropriate EFI entry to boot from there.)

Researching on-screen keyboards, it seemed like Gnome had the most mature. So I wound up with Gnome (my other systems are using KDE with tiling, but I figured I’d try Gnome on it.) Almost everything worked without additional tweaking, the one exception being the cameras. The cameras on the Surfaces are a known point of trouble and I didn’t bother to go to all the effort to get them working.

With 8GB of RAM, I didn’t put ZFS on it like I do on other systems. Performance is quite satisfactory, including for Rust development. Battery life runs about 10 hours with light use; less when running a lot of cargo builds, of course.

The 1920×1280 screen is nice at 10.5″. Gnome with Wayland does a decent job of adjusting to this hi-res configuration.

I took this as my only computer for a trip from the USA to Germany. It was a little small at times; though that was to be expected. It let me take a nicely small bag as a carryon, and being light, it was pleasant to carry around in airports. It served its purpose quite well.

One downside is that it can’t be powered by a phone charger like my Chromebook Duet can. However, I found a nice slim 65W Anker charger that could charge it and phones simultaneously that did the job well enough (I left the Microsoft charger with the proprietary connector at home).

The Surface Go 2 maxes out at a 128GB SSD. That feels a bit constraining, especially since I kept Windows around. However, it also has a micro SD slot, so you can put LUKS and ext4 on that and use it as another filesystem. I popped a micro SD I had lying around into there and that felt a lot better storage-wise. I could also completely zap Windows, but that would leave no way to get firmware updates and I didn’t really want to do that. Still, I don’t use Windows and that could be an option also.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with it. Around $600 for a fully-functional Debian tablet, with a keyboard is pretty nice.

I had been hoping for months that the Pinetab would come back into stock, because I’d much rather support a Linux hardware vendor, but for now I think the Surface Go series is the most solid option for a Linux tablet.