14 DAY TRIAL // While Microsoft’s Surface Go comes with Windows 10 out of the box, some people would rather change the operating system to something they find more useful, not necessarily to become their daily driver, but also for the sake of experimenting with the whole thing.
Developer Joshua Stein, for example, has tried out OpenBSD on the Surface Go 2 after he previously installed the operating system on the original model.
But because the Surface Go 2 comes with several upgrades over its predecessor, deploying OpenBSD is a worthy experiment to figure out what you can expect when switching to this platform.
“Due to my previous OpenBSD work on the original Surface Go, most components work as expected during installation and first boot,” the dev explains.
Totally usable
As the other Surface models, the Go 2 comes with a Windows recovery partition, but Stein explains that you can safely remove it because there are other ways to set up a recovery image using a USB drive and an image downloaded from Microsoft.
One thing that’s not working as expected concerns the function keys on the Surface keyboard.
“If the touchpad is touched or F1-F7 keys are pressed, the Type Cover will detach all of its USB devices and then reattach them. I'm not sure if this is by design or some Type Cover firmware problem, but once OpenBSD is booted into X, it will open the keyboard and touchpad USB data pipes and they work as expected,” Stein notes.
So what is working and what isn’t? Right now, OpenBSD is totally usable on the Surface Go 2, and while some things don’t work correctly, alternatives to exist to help you with these setbacks.
For example, while the touchscreen and the Wi-Fi are both working correctly, the ambient light sensor, Bluetooth, cameras, the gyroscope, and the suspend and resume features are broken for now.
More details are available on the blog post linked above, while the status of the project is updated on the GitHub page here.