[Obsnold]

I bought a Go for my wife for Christmas as I had heard good things about them. To us it seemed like a rubbish tablet combined with an awful laptop with the terrible windows 10 on it. In the end she has just gone back to using her 8 year old laptop with Ubuntu. Does any one have any suggestions for similar devices running Linux?

[sergiosgc]

I would go with a Thinkpad X1 Yoga. I don't have experience with the Yoga variant, but I've owned X1s since the original 1st gen. Nothing but good experiences running Linux on them. Apart from the awful idea of a touch strip for Fn keys on the 5th(?) gen, nothing but good stuff to say on the hardware side of things. They're not cheap, though.

[lorenzhs]

I think it was the 2nd gen that had the awful touch strip (if you haven't seen it, think of it as a shitty implementation of the touch bar). I have the 5th gen (2017) and it's a fantastic machine that works really well with Linux. The 6th gen had some issues with Linux, however, those were mostly Intel's fault iirc.

[sergiosgc]

My memory is lousy. You are most probably right about the generation, or somewhere near. If I had a 1st gen, I certainly skipped at least one generation, so I'd put it at least 3rd generation. Not as late as 5th though.

[solarkraft]

Any Intel Windows tablet will run Linux, most of them without any issues.

On the ARM side your best bet are Chrome OS devices (Chrome OS itself is a pretty mainline Linux and the devices run Coreboot), some of which are tablets. Most interesting to me currently is Lenovo's Chromebook Duet, which comes at 280$ for 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage or 128GB for 20$ more. Maybe that's enough for her.

Last time I tried Chrome OS on my tablet (Dell 5285, not a bad main machine and quickly falling in price) I wasn't very happy with it, but maybe it's better when pre-installed. It can in theory run Android and Linux apps, which seems pretty cool to me.

Unfortunately the Linux tablet experience in general is not nearly perfect. Your best bet is GNOME and even that kind of sucks (well, it's GNOME).

[jpm48]

I've installed Pop!_Os on my Surface Go as the primary OS (deleted Windows) and it works really well. A few issues with the touch screen but I just disable that anyway. Using it for coding in C++ and Python and it works well.

[cosmodisk]

Was there any reasons Windows couldn't be installed in it?

[jpm48]

I found windows to be getting too slow and sluggish, switching to Linux has made it much better, also battery seems a little better too.