Starlite or Surface Linux? (self.surfacelinux)

submitted 1 month ago by recently_Coco to c/surfacelinux@lemmy.sdf.org

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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?

buy a new Starlite tablet (Linux pre-installed!)
buy a new surface and load Gnome
try to find a used surface and load Gnome
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?

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[-] actionjbone@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't know Starlite, but here's my Surface experience:

I've installed Linux on a couple of Surfaces (4 and 6, with Endeavour, Ubuntu, and Mint).

There's a custom kernel that's maintained just for Surface devices: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

Right after a fresh install, it basically functioned but not everything worked.

After installing the custom kernel that includes all the right drivers, everything seemed to work really well!

You can get a used Surface Pro reasonably inexpensively online. For power, performance, and reliability, I probably wouldn't recommend going older than an 8 right now.

[-] xia@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago

I keep telling myself that next time I will buy a "designed for linux" device. It's not that you can't make it work, but the accumulation of little things (webcam, wifi, whatever the that newest thing is that they wanted to try out for this one model), kind of wears on you.

Considering your rather minimal requirements (read PDFs and take handwritten notes), I would actually recommend something far different that either of those two paths... a supernote manta.

this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025

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