It’s true, I know from experience that running Linux on old SP’s is not easy, I also have an SP5 and I installed Linux on it, it took me a long time, time that not many people are willing to give just to experiment with stuff. What I can say about it is that it’s working amazingly well, after I installed the Surface kernel… my pen works ok, the touch is weird, you can’t press with the tip of the finger, due to how it reads touches, but it’s a work in progress. Now, I use an SP8 with Fedora KDE for university, which works great. It took me just a few hours to install, due to me tinkering before with the SP5.
In my opinion, you should give it a try on a virtual machine, just to try it before installing it directly, and just give it another go. KDE came a long, long way now. It’s not perfect, but it works very well.
It’s true, I know from experience that running Linux on old SP’s is not easy, I also have an SP5 and I installed Linux on it, it took me a long time, time that not many people are willing to give just to experiment with stuff. What I can say about it is that it’s working amazingly well, after I installed the Surface kernel… my pen works ok, the touch is weird, you can’t press with the tip of the finger, due to how it reads touches, but it’s a work in progress. Now, I use an SP8 with Fedora KDE for university, which works great. It took me just a few hours to install, due to me tinkering before with the SP5.
In my opinion, you should give it a try on a virtual machine, just to try it before installing it directly, and just give it another go. KDE came a long, long way now. It’s not perfect, but it works very well.