I've got a Surface Pro 5 with the dogshit m3 processor and 4GB of Ram, anyone have any concept of how it'd run under linux? It basically folds at any real task in Windows
Incidentally, I had the exact same device. It actually worked pretty good to be honest!
Of course it will not magically be a top tier device. Programs will need some time to load the first time, and then be thrown out of RAM again.
BUT, compared to Windows, it will be a difference between night and day!
I strongly recommend you the silverblue-main-surface-image from universal-blue.org.
Why?
Because you need the linux-surface-kernel for it to work. Otherwise, most functions, like touchscreen, webcam, adaptive brightness, auto-rotate and more won't work at all.
You can install the kernel on other distros too, but it might break. I had that already happening. On uBlue, it's baked in and won't break. And if it does, you can just roll back.
It comes with Gnome by default and provides you a great touchscreen experience
And you can install Waydroid easily, which gives you access to Android apps.
I don't recommend using another DE than Gnome for that. Especially those "light weight" ones like XFCE are horrible for touchscreens, and if you use a browser, those few hundred MBs RAM less used by them is negotiable.
"KDE is heavy" is so 2000s. It's been quite a while since KDE is very tight on resources usage. Unless you're running a raspberry or similar, there's no point on constraining yourself with one of those desktops for an everyday use device.
All good, but I think it's really often a misconception that a DE like KDE, which is big and brings tons of features, must be more ressource intensive than a (feature wise) smaller DE. Which, as the benchmarks show, is surprisingly not the case.