My new laptop feels like the Molar Mac and it's a good thing
I remember some time ago I got fascinated by a random yet legendary internet pull.
I found an italian (I think) blog post about how someone refurbished an old netbook
and used it as an ultra-focus writing/coding machine. Sadly I can't find the article
no matter what. The website might have shut down, I don't really remember anything
about it, other than that the netbook in the pictures was red and I had to google
translate the whole page. Anyway my point is - I wanted to do something similar
for quite some time.
I also remember watching a talk on youtube about installing Linux on chromebooks,
and how it might become a new meta, after buying used Thinkpads, since there are
a lot of chromebooks for cheap (if you're based in the north America, which I am not).
I would love to link the video here, since I found it very interesting, but
I cannot find it. Web search in 2025 sucks gigaballs man, how did we got here? Can't
find shit. Anyway here is chrultrabook forum,
in case you wanted to check out Linux on chromebooks. I really can't find the youtube talk
right now. What a shame.
But I digress. My point is, for quite some time I was looking for a low powered
machine that I would use exclusively for writing code, learning and stuff like that.
And finally, last week I stumbled upon the Microsoft Surface Laptop SE. Had no idea
these bad boys existed. It is similar to chromebooks, at least in spirit. The Surface
Laptop SE is a 12" laptop with several years old Intel Celeron and 8GB of RAM (on my model).
It is sold exclusively to schools, and designed to be repairable. Though that is mostly
a lie. While it is true that the laptop is easy to disassembly, there are no user
serviceable parts. RAM and SSD are soldered. You can swap larger modules, like whole
motherboard, display assembly and keyboard. The parts availability might be very bad tho,
since, as I mentioned earlier, this laptop is sold only to schools. Also I think it is
in sale only in north America, but don't quote me on that. Now you may ask how did I
get my hands on one. And honestly? I got very lucky. A local refurb shop had Laptop SE
featured on their website, though not available at the moment. I tried looking at ebay,
and suddenly I found that they had new Laptops SE in stock in my favorite games shop.
Shout out to originalky.cz. Also it was cheap! Meaning this is the first laptop I got
brand new. I always buy refurbished.
Now you may ask how is it similar to the infamous Molar Mac, and to be honest,
the only similarities are that both devices are white and officially sold only
to schools. But I really like that. Owning this laptop feels weirdly exclusive.
First impressions
My first impressions were that the device feels amazing in hand. It is only plastic, but the good kind, very thick a nice to touch. And the display has absolutely no business looking this good with its very stupid 1366x768 resolution. Also the keyboard is sooo good. As a mechanical keyboard nerd, this is more than acceptable. Also also the machine is completely fanless! That's completely foreign concept to me! I booted the machine for the first time, just to check if it works, and before I could accept Windows 11 SE eula I rebooted it and installed Fedora Linux.Linux on the surface
Now there is not much info out there on using Linux on Surface Laptop SE. And Surface devices are infamous for poor compatibility with Linux. I'm glad to report that almost everything works. The volume and display brightness buttons don't work out of the box, and I couldn't be bothered yet to fix it (yet). My webcam also don't work, but I think that I turned it off in UEFI. Not that it matters to me anyway, I would honestly prefer it if I could save 5€ by buying a laptop without webcam. It is said that Microsoft did some kind of black magic to get the crazy battery life out of this device. I can't really say anything about that yet. In my experience Linux never lasts as long on a charge as Windows. I have yet to go through full battery cycle, but as I'm typing this, my battery indicator shows 80% battery with 12 hours remaining, so I have yet to see. The low powered CPU does not feel that bad to use. I use GNOME and the computer feels snappy (except for launching Codium, which takes 7s for some reason). It does boot a little longer than I would like, but since I set custom Plymouth theme I don't mind it much.
I'm nitpicking now, but there are two very annoying things about this
setup. The first is that there is no LED indicator of any activity. When I flip open
the screen I don't know if the machine was asleep or turned off. I have to press the
power button and if it boots instantly, it was asleep. If it takes a minute, it was
powered off. The other issue is software related. The resolution and screen size leads
to the UI being too big for my liking. There is already not much space on the screen,
and GNOME is making it really hard to fit two Firefox windows next to one another. I
tried the command to enable fractional scaling, but it did nothing, there is no scaling
option to be found. Kind of a bummer but not much I can do about that now.
I'm also messing around with Hyprland. While it's very cool, it feels a bit janky
on Fedora. What I really want is to run XFCE on this laptop, and make it look like
OS from the late 90s / early 2000s. But XFCE is not on Wayland yet and I'm not going
back to X11.
What am I gonna do with yet another machine
I think this may become my main "productivity" laptop going forward. I really wanted a special laptop to mess with linux, maybe break it sever times, you know, just to get a better understanding of the OS. But now I like it too much. It is just so joyful to use on a daily basis. I really like how it's not too powerful, so I don't even bother installing Steam or VLC, if it didn't happen automatically I wouldn't even log into youtube.Now since I gotta lock in this summer, I think this is gonna become my code machine. I would like to use it exclusively for this purpose. And so far it's working. The recent updates of this whole website were exclusively written on this laptop, and I plan to keep it that way, more or less. I wanna use it to dive deeper into Python (for my thesis) and Java (that's what we use at my company). I wouldn't mind if most of my thesis was written on this device. I just have a really good feeling about it, and I hope it'll work for a long time :)