Ah the Microsoft Surface RT. With the Ipad being all the rage, Microsoft also wanted in on the action. Like a lot of Microsoft projects, it was not the success they hoped it to be. Windows 8 was sortof suitable for a tablet, and sortof not. The Surface RT was build nicely with decent hardware, but the half baked OS, lack of apps and seemingly not too much attention from MS after the launch made it flop. The internals feature an Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC, which has 4 ARM cores, 2GB RAM and the build in GPU, making it a decent tablet at the time.
I used a Surface RT at school, as I needed mostly Office and laptops where not allowed but tablets where fine for taking notes. And I have to say, I kinda liked it. The hardware was pretty great for the time and still feels pretty nicely made today. The magsafe like charging port was also neat to have. The downside is, well, Windows. Luckily, today it's somewhat possible to run Linux on these machines!
A lot of effort has been put into this, which can be found here. After an evening or two figuring out how it all works, my Surface RT now runs Raspberry OS. Neat! There are still a few things missing at this moment, mostly no battery indicator and the CPU is not running at it's full speed. But I have typed this page on the machine so could be worse. Browsing the web is a slow affair but somewhat doable. All in all, I am happy to have Linux on it, making it sorta usable and fun. I hope the last issues and kinks can be worked out
