I just recorded for an upcoming episode of Live With It, talking about my experience runnning Ubuntu on an old Surface Go. I’ve always wanted to live the tiny laptop life (the 12-inch PowerBook G4, Toshiba Libretto, Sony Vaio P), but I never had the money to drop on something that was utterly impractical.

But I recently found a used OG Surface Go on Goodwill with the type cover and stylus for $80, so I pulled the trigger. Some thoughts after running it for a while.

The hardware is great

Completely undersold about this cheap little tablet is how nice the hardware is. The display is bright and crisp, the hinge is all metal and feels like it’ll take a beating. Even the type cover feels really nice. It is a nice device to interact with on a physical level, honestly a rarity in Windows world for me.

Watch out for BIOS

So when I bought this, I didn’t realize it had been used in a corporate deployment. Because all the boot settings were password locked. And after trying “root,” “admin,” and “password” I was out of ideas on how to unlock it. That is kind of a big problem, because all the guides to install Linux on a Surface device start with disabling secure boot in the BIOS. I thought I was going to be stuck running out of support Windows 10 on the Go. Luckily a helpful person on Reddit suggested I try Ventoy. This works a little different than typical ISO flashing apps work. It somehow let me do some of the intial setup from within Windows. I don’t know by what dark sorcery, but it worked to install Ubuntu.

Don’t go for the Gold

While the physical hardware is great on the Go, the specs limit what you can do with it. I specifically made sure I had the model with 8GB of RAM and faster 128GB SSD. But there’s no getting around the Intel Pentium Gold process in there. 2-cores, 4-threads, all pretty wimpy, and it can’t have seemed any better when this was new. It’s fine when I have a browser with 2-4 tabs open. But running Xournal, Firefox, and a mail client is enough to get the processor chugging. While it never gets hot, it can feel warm when you push it. I tried a light video editing app with some scanned Super8 footage. It was faster to scan the footage than to export it.

(Mostly) worked out of the box

I was shocked how well everything ran off a stock install. Sounds, Wi-Fi, graphics, touch screen, auto-rotation, pen input, it was all just there. The only thing that I knew would be an issue were the cameras. Even after following advice from the Surface Linux threads and asking Claude for some help, I couldn’t get them working. The way I use the tablet, this is no loss, but still annoying.

Fine battery

For an 8-year old tablet, the battery life is decent. Not multi-day forget about it good. But not, I’m rushing to an outlet every time I pick it up. Suspend works well so the battery doesn’t drain when I’m not using it. I probably get 4 hours of use, depending on how hard the CPU is chugging.

What am I using it for

Most for notes. Xournal is a great little app with pressure sensativity support. It’s no OneNote, but it works well with the hardware. It’s also a great YouTube machine when I want something a little bigger than my phone. And it’s kind of the ultimate kitchen PC. In plain tablet mode with no type cover, it’s perfect for sitting on the counter and displaying a recipe, doing quick conversions, those kind of things. Not earth shattering but way more convenient than using my phone. I just wish I could get Paprika on it.