Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was "designed" for.

I have an OG Surface Pro. The first one. It's running Windows 10 at the moment and it's doing fine except for the occasional wifi/Bluetooth bugs. I'm using it exclusively in tablet mode with the pen. No keyboard.

When Windows 10 is going to reach its end of life, I'd like to install Linux on it. But I need it to have a tablet style interface with gestures if possible.

Do I need any special distro or drivers on that hardware? And what would you recommend as the desktop environment?

You'll definitely need this: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
Gnome is probably the best with touchscreens. I had issues with Ubuntu though so you probably want something more up to date, like fedora or arch.
- Also, highly recommend checking out Universal Blue's Surface images! It's pretty much everything you need out of the box! https://universal-blue.org/images/surface/?h=surface
- Yeah, Fedora runs with wayland by default, which is really nice for touchscreens.
- Very cool. Thank you for this.
Went to Fedora on Pro gen 1, works great. Pen input in Krita works great. Really miss the form factor of that first gen. I feel like they're too big now.
I had one of those too! Sturdy little guy, reminds me a bit of the first eeepc 701 :-) But I was worried about the replacement of the charger once it would die. Besides, I have had a bad experience of Surface-line longevity, they always seem to die suddenly after a while, so I sold it.
- Hey, you wanna know something about the EeePC?
  I was the build engineer that automated the process that put together the Linux OS for those things back in the day.

(Copypasting an answer to another comment on this post, slightly modified, here, so it reaches more people.)

I had a MS Surface too a while back.
After installing Linux, it felt like a totally different device. Just like you, I thought "That is how it was supposed to be!".

I strongly recommend you to try the silverblue-main-surface-image from universal-blue.org.

Why?

Because you need the linux-surface-kernel for it to work properly. Otherwise, most functions, like touchscreen, webcam, adaptive brightness, auto-rotate and more won't work at all.
You can install the kernel on other distros too, but it might break. I had that already happening. On uBlue, it's baked in and won't break. And if it does, you can just roll back.
It comes with Gnome by default and provides you a great touchscreen experience
And you can install Waydroid easily, which gives you access to Android apps. Distrobox is already pre-installed and gives you access to the software of every distro available, including Arch.

I don't recommend using another DE than Gnome for that. Especially those "light weight" ones like XFCE are horrible for touchscreens, and if you use a browser, those few hundred MBs RAM less used by them is negotiable.

Gnome is, like it or not, king for devices like that. The gestures on touchscreen, big icons, and more, is only surpassed by Android.

silverblue-main-surface
Do you know where I can find simple clear explanation on how to do a fresh install of this? I'm kind of a noob... I've installed standard Fedora on a Surface and it works well but I have a few bugs.
- Go to https://universal-blue.org/installation/ and download the image. It's a net-installer, so you can use a small USB stick too. Then just install it the way you would any other distro, e.g. Fedora Workstation. Done.
  For me, that didn't work at the time due to internet problems. If you encounter issues, do the following:
  Go to https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ and download the normal Silverblue version there and install it the same way you did the Workstation.
  Go to https://universal-blue.org/images/, open your terminal and rebase. Do that by pasting rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/silverblue-surface (I think that's the correct image) and wait for it to download and apply.
  Reboot
  Open the terminal again and paste rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/silverblue-surface:latest. Wait and reboot again.
  It isn't as elegant as the first option, but if it doesn't work, then consider the alternative steps.

Taskbar can even be moved!

Too difficult for a multi-billion dollar company.

I bought my wife an HP Stream 13 some years back. It came with Windows 8 installed. Which worked just fine until updates bloated it so much it literally took up the entire (paltry) SSD. Windows 10 came out and it offered a free upgrade, which would have been smaller. Unfortunately, every time I tried to do that, it just complained it didn't have the space to make the switch. I rolled it back to an older Windows 8 and disabled updates to try and keep using it. It complained constantly. I finally deleted the shit out of Windows and installed Lubuntu. It's worked since then without issue.

I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it's one of the worst laptops I ever used.

Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn't connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.

The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the "supported" lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.

It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.

And it uses "special" locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.

Is KDE good for touch? I always though gnome would be the way to go for touch.

With Wayland it's pretty good
- Is there a tablet mode?

ooh, I just snagged an old Pro X. Tempted to see how it runs with Linux on ARM before even messing with Win11 that's installed.

Hmm, not supported by linux-surface :(
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/blob/master/README.md
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supported-Devices-and-Features#feature-matrix

I've got a Surface Pro 5 with the dogshit m3 processor and 4GB of Ram, anyone have any concept of how it'd run under linux? It basically folds at any real task in Windows

Incidentally, I had the exact same device. It actually worked pretty good to be honest!
Of course it will not magically be a top tier device. Programs will need some time to load the first time, and then be thrown out of RAM again.
BUT, compared to Windows, it will be a difference between night and day!
I strongly recommend you the silverblue-main-surface-image from universal-blue.org.
Why?
Because you need the linux-surface-kernel for it to work. Otherwise, most functions, like touchscreen, webcam, adaptive brightness, auto-rotate and more won't work at all.
You can install the kernel on other distros too, but it might break. I had that already happening. On uBlue, it's baked in and won't break. And if it does, you can just roll back.
It comes with Gnome by default and provides you a great touchscreen experience
And you can install Waydroid easily, which gives you access to Android apps.
I don't recommend using another DE than Gnome for that. Especially those "light weight" ones like XFCE are horrible for touchscreens, and if you use a browser, those few hundred MBs RAM less used by them is negotiable.
- Thanks for the advice, I'd not heard of that particular distro. I'm quite comfortable with Fedora so I think I'll give it a shot
It would be smooth as butter with a lightweight desktop (probably not KDE). I suggest Linux Mint XFCE edition

When these launched they seemed interesting. I liked the concept, and they still do, but the biggest flaw was basing them on windows. I've seen windows on low-power devices before, and I'm not going through that again.

Once the drivers got into the mainline kernel, running Linux on surface has been a dream. Except for using the pen, IR-cameras, booting from USB...

I think there's enough of us to have a SurfaceLinux community here :-)

Except for using the pen, IR-cameras, booting from USB...
Reminds me of android ROMs about a decade ago.
"My new L33tM@st3r ROM has just been released! Now with kernel tweaks for buttery-smooth performance and major improvement to stock battery life! Comes with it's own tuning app so you can adjust it the way YOU want!
(Not presently working: bluetooth/wifi/camera/NFC/dialler/headphones but everything else is awesome!!)"
- Yes and no. Back then, you got the ROMs from a group / individual / forum and it wasn't very much vetted like a distro coming directly from the linux community / canonical / etc.
  Also, I can live without using surface pen (-: If you compare to Asahi and its maturity (a lot running, but not sound yet), LinuxSurface kernel have made a LOT of progress in making these devices even more usable compared to they handle Win11.

I'm looking forward to doing this on my 4, Windows is chugging hard lately

Getting a surface pro 8 soon, looking forward to getting Linux on it!

Edit: installed Pop OS on my SP8, had to switch to Wayland and also needed to do some tweaks to get the keyboard to work to decrypt but it's running well so far. I believe you can get the camera working with the proprietary camera stack but it's not a priority for me right now

- Yup, I was aware of that when I bought it. Annoying but I got a good deal on the 8, and want to upgrade the storage

Gnome is going to be a better experience for most people.

Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was "designed" for.

I'm sure it is an improvement until... you've to use Wine to run something Windows only or a VM and end up on the exact same spot as initially but with extra steps and less performance. 😂 😂 😂

If every day is 1 min faster and 1 day a week is 5 min slower, that's still a net gain. And that's assuming that they need to run a windows-only app which a surprising amount of people don't.
- Everyone does run into a Windows-only app eventually. It's sad, it hurts but it is what it is.
I don't need it for windows applications, its basically something I can use for light photo and video editing and uploading to my server, all the heavy lifting is done on my PC which has windows because of adobe and better support for X264 and X265 when video editing.
- Okay that's fair. So this this the solution, fallback to a second machine running Windows? :P
Considering most proprietary software companies are moving to web technologies, I call bs on your take, sounds like you're still mentally stuck in 2015.
- Wrong. Autodesk, Adobe, Office (the real one, not the limited web experience), NI Circuit Design, Solidworks, want more examples? Sounds like you're mentally stuck on a lifestyle that doesn't include working at all.