A few months back I had to buy a laptop for my study. My university recommended a site that would give me a discount and guaranteed that the laptops there would be of the standard the university approved of. I went on this customer-unfriendly site (the stupid security system did not allow me to have more than one tab on the site) and typed into the search bar 'laptop'. There was just one laptop-looking product so I bought it with the thought 'finally this is over'.
Turns out it was a Windows Surface Pro 2 tablet with Windows 8 RT as operating system. Dang. (You are allowed to make fun of me for that but my fellow students already have to a great extent)
That was the backstory, now the question: what other operating systems can my dad (whom I gave it to) put on it? He was thinking about Windows 10 possibly but he has had some experience with Linux in the past. The thing is that we don't know much about how the RT chip would handle a different operating system.
Saddly you cant do dick with it. learn to love your windows rt. you can at least use the remote desktop function with another PC which defnitly helps with rt's lack of everything.
First of all... is it Surface Pro, or Surface RT? You wrote, that it is Pro running WinRT - such Surface doesn't exist.
- If it is in fact Surface RT, tough luck. It has mandatory SecureBoot and it is quite hard to do anything about that. You could ssh to a proper machine, jailbreak it to run (some) standard software, but nothing covers all use-cases.
- If you've got the Pro, you can install Ubuntu pretty easily. It won't be perfect, cause supporting such a locked-in proprietary hardware is quite tough. IIRC the keyboard doesn't work, wifi can get only 2.4GHz frequency and many smaller bugs.
- If all else fails, why don't you get some cheap second-hand laptop, or chromebook and run linux on it?
My opinion, just learn how to use the version of windows on there or sell it on; anything else will be too much of a compromise and you'll never really be happy with it.