There are few things more exciting in the technology world than seeing alternate operating systems run on different hardware. Operating systems like OpenBSD, for instance.
This is an open source, security focused Unix like operating platform primarily used for developing security mitigations.
Well, if you want to use it for this purpose, then perhaps you might want to run it on the newly announced Surface Go 2. Because this OS almost feels like home on Microsoft’s latest tablet. So much so that only a couple of things did not work as expected — everything else ran fine.
Developer Joshua Stein went through with this little experiment, trying out OpenBSD on the new Surface Go 2 after he previously installed the OS on the original model.
This, because the new tablet comes with a number of upgrades over its predecessor.
And he found out that everything just worked:
“Due to my previous OpenBSD work on the original Surface Go, most components work as expected during installation and first boot.”
Well, everything except the function keys on the Surface keyboard.
Beyond that, OpenBSD is totally usable on the Surface Go 2.
There are a few other things that don’t quite work correctly, but alternatives do exist for these setbacks. As an example, the touchscreen and WiFi both worked correctly. However, features like the ambient light sensor, cameras, the gyroscope, Bluetooth, and suspend and resume are broken for now.
Definitely not something you would go rush out to buy for OpenBSD, but it’s rather impressive how most of the internal circuitry is compatible with this platform.
You can find more details in the blog pot above, and also follow along the project updates here.
