Yeah, the type cover and the pen added an additional $230 to the cost of the Surface Pro 8. However, they are definitely essential for school work, but get in the way when I want to use my SP8 purely as a tablet (play touch games, watch movies, browse the internet). However, the keys on the virtual keyboard for GNOME are tiny and don’t have good visual feedback, making using it a pain. Onboard is definitely a better virtual keyboard, but lacks Wayland support. The inconsistent touch support in Xorg and Wayland doesn’t help either.
We have seen some good progress in the bug fixes, so if you can hang on to beta, you may be happy with it.
GNOME Wayland has been touted as being more touch friendly than other DEs over on the r/SurfaceLinux Reddit. That was true a year or two ago, but KDE Plasma Wayland has caught up to and nearly surpassed GNOME Wayland for touch in just about ever way except universal virtual keyboard input support. GNOME’s virtual keyboard works with every application. KDE Plasma’s virtual keyboard (Maliit) is bigger and has visual feedback, but doesn’t support XWayland applications.
GNOME has a lot of Surface Pro friendly defaults and a much better applications menu for tablet support. However, GNOME is missing some features like a visible dock, desktop icons, widgets, and system tray support that’s common on Android, ChromeOS, and even iOS tablets. All of this can be added back with extensions, but sometimes at the cost of stability.
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Sounds like you need…
I mentioned something along the same lines. A modern web browser has the herculean task of supporting a lot of web standards. I just don’t see how that can be done in GNOME Web under GNOME’s philosophy of making things simple (ie, removing a bunch of features). The moment GNOME Web has trouble supporting all of the features of a popular site like YouTube, Facebook, or Netflix, the features of a school website for distance learning, or the privacy and security features of multiple bank websites it becomes useless to a vast majority of users. They can’t skimp out on features and support for a web browser like they’ve done with a lot of their other software.
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LOL! I actually just finished setting up KNOME yesterday! I had some help figuring out some major problems I was having with GNOME 42 and extension stability. I was also finally able to fix it so that my favorite QT based KDE apps looked well under GNOME and here is a preview of the results …
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We will have to wait and see. Web extensions are now implemented. Set site as an App is there. Forward/back swipe has been there for a year+ I am not sure which other browsers have those features. Let me know.
I don’t use those streaming services, but it sure works on YouTube.
Still as Scotty said, its an Alpha. I would not rely on it in production environments, or in your case, school work. 
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Hey, that’s not bad, how hard is it to do?
To install GNOME Web? The Flatpak script is in this thread.
No, the KNOME setup.
It’s not that hard. You just need to be careful when running multiple desktops. You need to use GDM for the log in manager (even though it’s kind of bland). GNOME needs GDM for the lock screen to work. You also have to be careful with setting environmental variables. GNOME is not very forgiving if a bad variable is set, and by “bad” variable I mean something like the “GTK_USE_PORTAL=1” variable recommended in the Firefox ArchWiki for better KDE Plasma support. That one variable causes issues with extensions in GNOME and makes the shell sluggish. Then it’s just a matter of finding the right extensions that will support your version of the GNOME shell while providing as much missing functionality as possible. Afterwards, it’s just a matter of setting the QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=‘kde’ to get QT applications to obey KDE Plasma theme settings. I used part of this guide to make KDE Plasma look good, How to Make KDE Plasma Look Like macOS Big Sur - YouTube , and followed it up with the Blur My Shell extension in GNOME to make parts of GNOME match. The wallpaper I found on the internet by doing an “abstract wallpaper” search.
It’s not about just looking good. I can do things 3 to 4 times faster in GNOME now because I can do things in 1 click instead of 2 or 3, I’m not fighting with applications that are missing features like Nautilus (no split screening folders, touch drag to drop, and a dialog that ask if you want to move or copy a file) in some vain attempt to be “simple.” I think that it’s best for the desktop environment and applications to be as flexible as possible and support what I needed them to do (since it’s my machine that I bought to get my work done), not someone else’s weird philosophy. Good luck!
Edit: Sorry I realize that I didn’t list all of the GNOME information:
GNOME 42.3 (of course)
Icon Pack: Papirus-Dark
Theme: Adwaita (default)
Extensions: Desktop Icons NG (DING), Dash to Dock for Cosmic, AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support, Blur My Shell, and Improved OSK.
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You may consider revisiting Plasma 5.25. It has GNOME like overview and a tablet mode with autoswitching.
That seems to be what I am hearing reported: GNOME is increasing worflow productivity. I once tried to get KDE to mimic them, but it involved too many hacks and time. This does it all out of the box.
KDE responded to its users with GNOME’s efficient overview. It’s good that KDE is so configurable that it can mimic the overview function.
I love my three-finger swipe workspaces coupled with Epiphany’s two-finger swipe for forward/back tabs 
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When I finally figured out how to properly scroll on Firefox I felt very happy, perhaps I should look into more touchpad gestures, especially forward / back thing.
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I use them both. In fact I’m typing this from KDE Plasma Wayland 5.25.3. Yes, the new overview mode in Plasma is great! In a lot of ways I like it better than and find that it is a lot more useful than GNOME’s activities. The only thing Plasma’s overview is missing is the ability to have a panel/dock on the screen when in overview mode to quickly launch new applications. I also use the Launchpad Plasma Dark full screen applications menu in Plasma. While it’s not feature rich or has to 3d look of GNOME’s application grid, I find that it’s a lot more stable and easier to use. Here are pictures of my Plasma setup:
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I think you misunderstood my “…faster” comment for GNOME. Vanilla GNOME was hindering my work flow. It was taken longer to do things in vanilla GNOME because vanilla GNOME is missing a lot of features. Adding the extensions made GNOME faster for me. Take Dash to Dock, for instance. Since the dock is no longer hidden under the Activities tab, I am able to launch my most used (favorite) applications in one click instead of two, and all other applications in two clicks instead of three. Desktop Icons NG allows me to have one click access instead of three click access to my school folder, where I do 90% of my work each day. AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem adds back system tray icons with touch support, which I need for Microsoft Teams, Prospect (Outlook) Email, Discord, and Steam. Without any of these extensions, it would take me 3-4 times as long to get things done in GNOME as it does in KDE Plasma or Windows. Now GNOME is almost on par with KDE Plasma for workflow speed.
By contrast, ALL of these things are in KDE Plasma by default. GNOME looks better, but I spend time fighting and adding back things that should be there. I only need to spend time making KDE Plasma look good.
I’m an oddity in the community because I see the plus and minus for both DEs.
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I just use KDE. It’s plenty fast for me and i have no worries about work flow. KDE Plasma already looks good so I don’t need to change it. 
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Choice is a wonderful thing.
As I said before in this forum, my distro-hopping days are over 
, but my DE-hopping days in KVM, have just begun
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