I thought 2025 was supposed to be "the moment" for AI PCs. Dell and other manufacturers were sure as hell spamming the shit out of that premise in their incessant online ads. But then it all fell through because of the sagging economy on Main Street, and the fact that many people didn't like AI being forced down they're proverbial throats. So yeah, 2026 won't be any better for this ill-thought out marketing strategy.

I have a NPU for no fucking reason

I'm on the hunt for a replacement for my Surface, but sure as shit not getting anything with copilot. Curious what alternatives are out there.

Linux options seem a little light on the tablet front.

I still play Gears of War and Forza, unfortunately. Hopefully someone gets native Microslop games working on Linux soon.

The year of the AI PC comes immediately after the year of the linux desktop.

Touch inputs can be a little messy, driver support for closed source hardware (e.g., MS Surface) is understandably rocky, and I've had bad experience with battery longevity especially on open source hardware.

My 6-year-old SP battery still has ~70% capacity, which is teriffic. I have had other laptops lose 90% of their capacity after just a year or two, so I'm skeptical of the tablet market.

I'm not saying good Linux tablets don't exist, just that I'm looking for recommendations since the waters feel murkier to me.

This makes me happy, but then also sad.

seems like raspberry pi os on touchscreen devices supports on-screen keyboards and basic touch-screen features. There's also the Librem 11 tablet, that runs linux on an Intel chip with Gnome.

Yeah.. It is the Windows that finally pushed me the fastest to install Linux. I was very comfortable with Debian servers as part of my work, but never managed to switch my daily driver. Two weeks ago that happened. Peace..

2026 is the moment FOR LINUX

Make Linux PCs and you will PRINT MINT. I WILL BUY ALL OF THEM!!!

🐧

🐧

I think still too many people missed the turning point when Microsoft suddenly stopped releasing products/software that were superior in basically all areas to their previous versions. I think that turning point was Windows 8 already, for many who consider Windows 8 a single-time mistake like ME or Vista it was Windows 10, for others it took until Windows 11 until they noticed the decline of Windows as a whole.

And it's not just MS, but a lot of consumer tech is growing anti-consumer and gets enshittified to the point of where you really have to think hard whether or not you even want the new stuff they're spewing out. My consumer habits have certainly changed to be much more rigorous than, say, 10-20 years ago. I read a lot more reviews these days and from many more different sources bevore I even think of buying something new.

"AI PCs" will increase your dependency on MS' online services (which is probably the main thing that MS wants), decrease your privacy even more (also what MS wants - that's a lot of data for sale), consume even more energy (on a planet with limited resources), sometimes increase your productivity (which is probably the most advantage you're ever getting out of it) and other times royally screw you over (due to faulty and insecure AI behavior). Furthermore, LLMs are non-deterministic, meaning that the output (or what they're doing) changes slightly every time you repeat even the same request. It's just not a great idea to use that for anything where you need to TRUST its output.

I don't think it will be a particularly good deal. And nothing MS or these other companies that are in the AI business say can ever be taken at face value or as truthful information. They've bullshitted their customers way too much already, way more than is usual for advertisements. If this was still the '90s or before 2010 or so - maybe they'd have a point. But this is 2026. Unless proven otherwise, we should assume bullshit by default.

I think we're currently in a post-factual hype-only era where they are trying to sell you things that won't ever exist in the way they describe them, but they'll claim it will always happen "in the near future". CEO brains probably extrapolate "Generative AI somewhat works now for some use cases so it will surely work well for all use cases within a couple of years", so they might believe the stories they tell all day themselves, but it might just as well never happen. And even if it DID happen, you'd still suffer many drawbacks like insane vendor dependencies/lock-ins, zero privacy whatsoever, sometimes faulty and randomly changing AI behavior, and probably impossible-to-fix security holes (prompt injection and so on - LLMs have no clear boundary between data and instructions and it's not that hard to get them to reveal secret data or do things they shouldn't be doing in the first place. If your AI agent interprets a malicious instruction as valid, and it can act on your behalf on your system, you have a major problem).

Recently switched to Linux Mint on my daily driver.
Trying Zorin OS on an old laptop.
Both run smoother than windows OS ever did.
My father wants to buy a new laptop, trying to convince him to use Linux (debian based preferably since that's what I've been most familiar with for years now).

The problem is not the concept of ai pc but of microsoft ones that are network connected. I think linux distribution based around a local llm that is limited to assiting with the os and then have opt in for other capabilities could be really interesting.

Wow the Microsoft article really is a mess. I honed in on a promise made about "AI PCs" and was initially interested in a promise to do local translation (perhaps of un-subtitled foreign films or news?)

AI PCs are powered by a turbocharged neural processing unit (NPU) [that] performs more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS)... This matters because:

• AI tasks, like real-time translation, image generation, and intelligent search, run locally instead of requiring the cloud
• Responses feel faster and smoother
• Your battery lasts longer

(Responses are "faster and smoother" and the battery lasts "longer"... compared to what? Surely those magical cloud AI solutions can go faster and offload AI processing, something Microsoft seems to be jockeying for anyway.)

Never mind that technicality. I want local translation. And my PC can do an AI, I thought, until I realized the definition of "AI PCs" is mixed with a more exclusionary selection of CoPilot+ PCs:

Some of the tools listed, including Recall and Live Captions with Translations, are only available on Copilot+ PCs with an NPU capable of 40 TOPS performance (or better).

Supposedly, according to the Microsoft article, AI PCs CoPilot+ PCs are capable of translating stuff on the fly (which sounds awesome) and generating images, all locally. Allegedly.

I have yet to run into anybody that's actually talked about these so-called innovations though. I have a PC with Windows and the beefy GPU and I would love to get live transcriptions. But the (MS) article doesn't even mention how I would do that...

Even if everything Microsoft promise was true, though, the lines sure are intentionally blurred between what runs locally and what doesn't.

Count me out especially if it actually is a:

• Subscription based
• Always online
• High latency
• Single point of failure
• Hallucinating
• Voice controlled
• Vibe coded

Monstrosity!

I'm sort of way out on a niche branch on Linux with Garuda as base with my own rudimentary Hyprland deployment… I have never loved working on my workstation more

https://reddit.com/r/surfacelinux/

I installed Ubuntu in my surface go 2 and it’s light years ahead of windows in terms of performance.

I couldn’t get the camera to work though. But other than that it’s rock solid.

Yes, and they intentionally want those lines to be as blurry as possible.

Microsoft is basically an equivalent of Nazi in private market.

I don't even know what an AI PC is.

Adoption is slow because it doesn't fucking work, not because they explained it poorly

Mint runs great on my dell tablet. Touch screen works fine although I haven't tried it with a pen yet.

I am trying to see if I can get away switching to linux

No it isn't.

I've been waiting for the "big year" since 1996. It's never going to happen. This is not to invalidate anybody's appreciation of Linux but it's not for the public and it never will be.

I have... Moved my gaming over to it... Admittedly better since I don't play anything like cod or bf. But you can keep a dual boot just in case. Still plays horizon zero dawn, fallen Jedi, borderlands 4(probably better on Linux), and Doom Eternal. Also Rocket League.

If you're truly interested, reach out to the community. We got your back.

Debian servers... But what direction did you go for your daily driver? There is no wrong answer, but I like hearing how people migrate over.

I was the same as you, btw, started with Debian servers be it an Apache Cloudstack hypervisor, or k8s host.

But because I decided to go with a tiling Windows manager, somehow I ended up down the hyprland rabbit hole on Arch.

Hyprland is my new favorite. Never even thought I would like a tiling Windows manager before, but it is pretty sick. Quickshell is pretty cool too...

So I haven't felt the need to go with a tiling compositors. I already use multiple munitors, and kind of have designated spots for the apps I use.

I love stability and don't want any surprises after Windows made enough surprises. So decided to go with Debian Trixie, and KDE.

But I use Arch in my spare laptop, btw. EndeavorOS where I experiment some stuff. Maybe down the line I will give hyprland a try on my spare first.

Are you using pop!_os or another distro ?

Year of the Mac then?

I put Mint on my Surface Pro 5, it works quite nicely so far. Granted I do "typical" stuff on it like web browsing, email, basic picture editing, and some chats, but for those things everything's working fine.

The only different part of the install was installing the Surface kernel after the fact: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

Uh... My journey actually started with Nobara after researching. But I wanted to try hyprland, so switched to Arch.

One of the things I like about Arch is the yay util designed to build packages basically straight from GitHub, and provide an easy way to upgrade them.

I will also go ahead and say that jumping straight to Arch is a bad idea. I would look at Ubuntu or Fedora first. Arch pushes updates really quickly and it can occasionally cause issues.

EndeavorOS... I've been wanting to try that... Although I heard some good things about CachyOS and need to try that one first.

That said if you're on the hyprland journey, you may look at Omarchy, it is basically Arch with hyprland preconfigured. Not a huge deal, but simple for a test.

Great to know! Does the pen still generally work for writing/notes? Also any clue if things work well with the newer generations?

Last I dug into Linux on the SP, it was a 3-4 generation lag on stable compatibility. My tablet is nearing EOL (because the charge port sucks and mine doesnt support USB-C charging as a fallback). If I replace it I don't love replacing it with something used, 4 years old, that may have a short life.

Thanks for you answer. I'm a novice concerning linux. I wish too leave microsoft but i'm a bit afraid of breaking my computer.

So far i'm hesitating between mint and pop!_os in dual boot

are you looking at the newer version of pop os? It's still in beta, I think you would have a better experience with mint.

Most people mention PopOS (debian-based) or Bazzite (fedora-based). I switched from Windows to PopOS (because I'm more familiar with debian) a few months ago. However, I just switched over to TuxedoOS. The main reason I migrated away is that PopOS is moving to Cosmic, which is a DE (Desktop Environment) produced by the developers of PopOS. From what I've read, Cosmic is in a rough place and I had no interest in using it as I like KDE. My recommendation would be to find a distribution that supports the desktop environment that you want to use right out of the box. I've also had no issues with gaming on either PopOS or TuxedoOS.

I've heard ZorinOS is good if you want easy switch over from windows / want to keep similar UI

Honestly, I would say either of those are good options to start with. I sincerely doubt fully breaking the PC. Maybe research Linux for your GPU, you may have multiple options. It may be worth a second hard drive so you can easily swap back and forth until you are fully comfortable. Dual booting on the same HDD is also possible, but more annoying.

Personal issue I ran into: motherboard customization on my big gamer doesn't work without Windows... Not a huge deal, but my Rainbow LED runs its animation in reverse.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Always remember you can dual boot if there's software you can't avoid using

The em-dashes in the title don‘t fill me with confidence for this article about slop.

So 2026 is "the year of the AI PC"?

Lol

More like it only drives people into downloading Linux.

Install Linux, Problem Solved.