After stumbling on Ben Eaters “Hello world from scratch” [1] I went out and bought the cpu some parts and breadboards. The chip is only a few dollars. It is highly recommended if you want to dive down into computers and digital logic on first principles. Also great fun to get a break from all the screens and layers upon layers of software that I have to deal with daily.
I just installed Ubuntu on mine and after updating the kernel with surface drivers[1]
It works surprisingly well (Touch works, detach clipboard, nvidia-gpu, function keys). Its really a great linux machine tbh
1 https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface