I was daily driving Pop_OS before my System76 finally gave it up. I mostly enjoyed the experience, but when my laptop gave it up, I had to run to a big box store and grab a replacement asap. I’m now riding an HP envy touch screen fliptop and (:puke:) windows 11.
I’ve been hesitant to throw linux onto this puppy because frankly, having never had a touch/ flip screen before, I’m really digging it. Has anyone here run linux on a touch screeen? Issues? A specific release I should consider? Any other considerations?
I have a Thinkpad with a touch screen running on Gnome and it’s nice but I find I only really use it when scrolling on a website.
A lot of things work like pinch to zoom too.
I run a Lenovo X1 Yoga on PopOS and the overall experience has been great. Touch screen works well and the only complaint I can make is that the on-screen keyboard could be a little easier to deal with but it isn’t bad at all.
The touchscreen on my Thinkpad P1 gen4 with Fedora works well.
I don’t particularly use it, but it worked out of the box when I was testing it after I got it.
This is great to hear.
I have an HP Envy and it has honestly been a dream with any distro I throw at it. I find KDE to have better touch gesture support than Gnome, but I have been running Gnome for a while now and it hasn’t bothered me at all.
A couple months I came across a cheap convertible that I bought to tinker with and try out Linux with touch interfaces. The bottom line is that it’s very lacking. Gnome and KDE have some stuff for touch interfaces to make it kinda work but it’s definitely not suitable if you wanna use the touch stuff as your main navigation mechanic. I see a lot of people recommending Gnome in this thread and each time a similar questions come up, which I simply cannot agree with. Nautilus doesn’t even offer a way to right click. KDE’s on-screen keyboard is kinda spotty when it comes up. All in all it’s still pretty rough without mouse and keyboard. If you want to go full tablet mode you’ll be light years away from the experience Android can give you. Personally I settled for fydeOS, which is a ChromeOS fork.
A couple months I came across a cheap convertible that I bought to tinker with and try out Linux with touch interfaces. The bottom line is that it’s very lacking. Gnome and KDE have some stuff for touch interfaces to make it kinda work but it’s definitely not suitable if you wanna use the touch stuff as your main navigation mechanic. I see a lot of people recommending Gnome in this thread and each time a similar questions come up, which I simply cannot agree with. Nautilus doesn’t even offer a way to right click. KDE’s on-screen keyboard is kinda spotty when it comes up. All in all it’s still pretty rough without mouse and keyboard. If you want to go full tablet mode you’ll be light years away from the experience Android can give you. Personally I settled for fydeOS, which is a ChromeOS fork.
Great perspective thank you.
I use popOS on a 2-in-1 laptop with touch and stylus input, it works fine.
Why not just test it from a bootable stick? My one one experience with a touchscreen was very positive (Plasma on Manjaro).
from a bootable stick
Good idea. I’ve got a usb drive right here I can try. I’ll set that up.
Plasma and GNOME support it, although in all honesty UI wise Windows might win for touch. They’ve tried very hard since Win8 after all.
KDE Plasma handles the touch screen fine on my PineTab2.
It works in LxQt too, but only in portrait mode (which is the default for this device). I keep meaning to look up how to tell it to rotate the touch coordinates along with the display, and I keep not getting around to it.
But the main issue I’ve run into is that most GUI apps for Linux are…let’s just say they’re not designed with touch input in mind.
https://youtu.be/UaCwLjIf3sU?si=1xdDBZyt2gNAG_bO
But if it is a capable machine, you should try Zorin OS.
Oh this looks fun!
