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?

(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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 :-)

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

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