I’ve already embarked upon this journey on my first gen Surface Go, which I mostly just bought as a drawing tablet with it’s own CPU. It came with Windows 10 and was in no way suited to running it in any form whatsoever (despite being “designed” by Microsoft and a itself being a thoroughly Windows-first device). Shockingly, it was declined the update to Windows 11 in the first place, but since it still works fine and is capable of web surfing and taking notes.
While my usual instinct in the past has been to install the latest version of Fedora and call it a day, my home server (a slimline ThinkCentre that sits on my desk and houses a bunch of storage) has been solidly chugging along with the blue hatted variety for a while. This seemed a little overkill for the Surface, which I wanted to turn into what was essentially just a Chromebook: boot a minimal desktop that can run a browser.
For that task, I went fully down the “minimal” rabbit hole and ended up with a version of Alpine that runs Sway as it’s desktop. But, while that would fly on 72 cores of Xeon goodness – it’s not really a suitable ‘daily driver’ operating system.
I’ve also decided that I’m not really a fan of Gnome 3. It works fine on the Fedora server, which I opted to keep a GUI on so that I could still fire up a copy of Qt Creator if I need to compile a native binary. But replacing Windows, should be something that feels roughly Windows adjacent and if I’m especially interested in letting the OS get out of the way and do the bare minimum – something light and performant should be the go.
I briefly considered going the other direction and have it be fully flashy and futuristic (a la Hyprland), but didn’t see any point wasting resources on so what should be “background” services. Armed with a copy of Ventoy and a bunch of ISOs, I booted up on my Surface to test before taking the plunge on the “beast”.