I’ve been quite enjoying Mint as well. Granted, it’s been reeeal light use. But so far loving it. I’ve always enjoyed Debian distros. RHEL can kiss my butt. It was always frustrating to work with at work. I think Slackware was Debian? That was probably my first back in like 2004ish. Generally just works™
Nope, it does not. You can install a kernel made just for surface devices and you’ll get mouse emulation via touch, but Mint doesn’t have Wayland yet and it’s my understanding that Wayland is where all the good things, like gestures, lives. So, I’m waiting for that but it honestly works fine without the touch. I’d use it if it was there, but it’s fine honestly.
That said, I’ve been using Linux/osx as my primary at work for a lot of years now so I’m super unfamiliar with even basic sysadmin stuff on Windows, so I’m happy that the surface is now on Linux. Need to move my desktop to it one day, but I honestly almost never use it.