I recently had occasion to wish, yet again, that I had a proper Linux tablet.
So afterwards I dug out an old Linx 8 windows tablet and tried various distros on it. It came with windows 8, which was pretty bad, and I had upgraded to windows 10, which is better but glacially slow. I tried various distros on it including several Puppies, some of which not bad but no touch support, Fedora, which would not finish booting, slitaz (failed to boot), MXlinux (no touch). Several others. Zorin (failed to boot). A desktop derived from Alpine.
So far the best I have found is Peppermint 32 bit. XFCE. Touch works, it sees battery status, its reasonably fast considering the hardware. I haven't got on screen keyboard yet, but there seem to be several choices of this. My impression is that it would be a viable solution on a more recent and powerful x86 tablet. But which?
I'm thinking now about getting a used Surface. It seems like the Surface 5 is the best choice among them, apparently a significant improvement on the model 4, and that it should work with Linux. It should be able to manage Fedora which is widely recommended for touch devices. There is also a Lenovo with detachable keyboard of lower cpu spec and similar vintage, at about the same price. Lenovo Ideapad Miix 700. Bigger screen. The Surface 5 seems to have been a significant upgrade from the previous Surface 4.
Do you all have any thoughts about this? Any other x86 tablets to consider? Any other distros that are more promising than Peppermint? Is Chrome worth considering?
Peter