I prefer Fedora. Tried mint and hated it.

It will upgrade an existing install. I did it on my surface and all my files and settings were kept.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Since I was trying to update my surface. I’ve also installed Linux on it. Which runs a lot faster on the older Surface Nook 1 harder.

There is a way to upgrade directly. I got this from Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/1afu0uj/is_it_safe_to_install_windows_11_on_my_microsoft/

It works fine - you just won’t get the more advanced security features available in more recent laptops.

• Boot up into Windows 10
• ensure you have 30GB free space
• Download the .iso: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11
• right-click the .iso and select “mount” to create a virtual DVDROM
• create a new folder on your main system drive and copy all the files from the virtual DVDROM
• start a command-prompt
• navigate to the folder where you copied all the files
• run the following:

.\sources\setupprep.exe /product server

This will not actually install the server version of windows but will bypass the CPU check so that you can install Win11 on an unsupported CPU. The actual version of Windows installed will depend on the version of Win10 you have: Pro, Home, or Enterprise, for example.