Starlite or Surface Linux?

I'm looking to buy a new tablet for grad school. Mostly to read PDFs of text books and take handwritten notes.

Additionally, I'd like it to be powerful enough for some casual use in my down time. Maybe run some simple games like Balatro or others of that caliber.

I was wondering if y'all could speak to which of these options seem the best for me?

1. buy a new Starlite tablet (Linux pre-installed!)
2. buy a new surface and load Gnome
3. try to find a used surface and load Gnome
4. something easy I haven't thought of.

Some considerations:

a) From looking at the specs, a Starlite and a new Surface of around the same price have similar RAM. I don't know enough about processors to know which is better though.

b) I'd rather not support Microsoft directly, so I'm less inclined to buy a new Surface, but I'm not sure if the used market will be too limiting for me

c) I don't know how difficult it is to put Linux on a surface. I'm imagining as a Windows proprietary device it's going to be a little testy about it. My experience installing windows is putting Mint or Kubuntu on an older Win10 PC and laptop.

What does the community think? Any words of advice for me?