My old Microsoft Surface became the most useful screen in my homelab

Recently, I dug out an old Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet while cleaning out my closet. The keyboard had long given up, but I wasn’t ready to retire the screen along with it.

My Proxmox server sits in my workshop, and it needed a real-time dashboard I could glance at without having to boot up a PC. The old Surface Pro seemed worth a try, since it somehow fit perfectly inside the server case.

Naturally, giving this Microsoft-built Windows tablet a second shot at life started with installing Linux on it.