I’ve been using Linux since the days of Slackware on floppies, and I still like Mint. It seems to just work – I’m not at all averse to “more hardcore” distributions, but would rather get on with my work. That being said, the Surface kernel is a nice piece of software and worth considering for an optimal experience on Surface.

Definitely doable! I’ve run several Linux distributions on Surface devices. I had good experiences out of the box with Ubuntu and Mint, and not-great experiences with Debian Bookworm (even with the Nvidia driver, it could never seem to work out that the external monitor on my machine was a primary. I did not try the Surface-specific kernel, however. Good luck!

How about saying which states, rather than posting a clickbait headline?