I recently was able to acquire an older Dell Venue 11 Pro 7130 with an Intel i3-4030Y and 4GB of RAM.
I installed Fedora GNOME spin thinking GNOME might be the right DE for touch interfaces. Sadly it behaves sluggishly and the touch capabilities are lacking. Nautilus for example can’t deal with long clicks to simulate right clicks, making file browsing a chore since I need to plug in a mouse and keyboard.
Does anyone have any experience with older convertibles? What distro do you use to make use of the touch interface while keeping a snappy system?
Try KDE Neon, it bundles Plasma that has nice touchscreen support and has a virtual keyboard installed that just needs to be enabled, if even necessary.
I second Plasma as a touch desktop. Neon is pretty great, but I’m not a huge fan of the LTS base + bleeding edge DE combo. I’d personally recommend either Fedora KDE for frequent updates overall, or Kubuntu LTS for general stabilty.
I suggested Neon due to its bundle with a onscreen keyboard. Fedora KDE or most other distros with Plasma don’t.
Fedora KDE or better ublue.it Kinoite I would say.
Btw what did you choose?
it’s a lackluster experience which ever way you turn. plasma has a better touch experience and consistency but its keyboard (maliit was it?) is horrible. GNOME’s keyboard is better but still crap.
everything feels like a proof-of-concept, something that was shipped in this sorta-works state and left. if you’ve ever used an android tablet, this is a long, long way off.
GNOME terrorized us for a decade with those comically gigantic UI elements because it’s supposedly touch friendly but the moment you start touching them it feels like utter crap.
try running android x86 on it, I had some good experiences with bliss OS. old kernels there, so hardware support is hit n miss.
Bliss looks really promising, thanks.
The new SteamOS has good support for touch but unfortunately it has no official release yet. HoloISO should be okey as long as you don’t use Nvidia (because of wayland)
next stop, fydeOS. good luck!
Bliss is pretty old LineageOS based though. Would be great to have GrapheneOS or just DivestOS on x86
PostmarketOS with Phosh or Plasma Mobile perhaps? Both are meant for relatively low powered, touch-first devices
Mobile Linux distributions for smartphones might offer some hints on how to tackle your problems - these apps are created in a convergent way, which makes them work well on laptops, tablets and PCs alike. Look for an alternate file manager, for example, to replace Nautilus. Check out https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/
Good idea. I’ll look into integrating mobile apps into a KDE environment.
Oh, and as for the touch UIs, not much luck if GNOME doesn’t work well enough. KDE can be made to run well with touch input, but for me it needed some work to configure it. But I liked it afterwards.
There are Mobile Linux UIs (which might run better on tight resources) but I am afraid they might not be good for multitasking on a tablet screen.
I use KDE plasma with this plasmoid and this kwin script that I wrote to navigate between apps. Basically, each window is placed in its own virtual desktop, and the plasmoid allows to switch between desktops by sliding the finger on it. It’s in a early development phase, so don’t expect it to be perfect, but you can give it a try :)
Oh and if your machine isn’t too powerful, you can disable baloo (file indexer) if you don’t need it
Also KDE Connect and CUPS for security and probably battery. KDE connect needs to be uninnstalled or an empty desktop starter with
touch ~/.local/share/applications/kdeconnectd.desktopafaik.Cups is a systemd service so
sudo systemctl disable --now cups.service && systemctl mask cups.servicerevert that with unmask and enable respectively. Cups is also as big security risk as Printers suck, printing from USB sticks is often a better solution.pcmanfm-qt is a good replacement for Dolphin which is way slimmer and runs on Wayland natively, its simply the best filemanager for KDE or similar systems apart from Dolphin.
Debloating Fedora KDE is very much needed, Kinoite doesnt need to be.
I didnt test Video players but Celluloid is a modern MPV GUI that supports Wayland (literally the only video player it seems).
Browser have to be all fine because they are both pretty hard on resources.
Gnome offers a setting that enables simulating a right-click by holding the left-click.
That’s true. At least for me it doesn’t work in nautilus sadly.
Like dindongitsabear said, the touchscreen capabilities are not perfect, but you can try out some distros, see what works and what you like. I have Fedora 38 xfce installed on a Lenovo Miix 310-10ICR (I don’t have its keyboard), but it took some time getting the screen and on-screen keyboard to work adequately, and I still haven’t set up automatic rotation and right click function. But hey, at least the sound works with media playback. Here’s a video of some guy trying to get Linux and anroid OS running on his x86 tablet. Might want to have a look at: https://youtu.be/UaCwLjIf3sU Oh, and in my opinion, Void Linux is rather light-weight, you can get it as x86_64, and with that musl thingy, which, I heard is also faster performing or something. Another light-weight Gnome distro I can suggest is Zorin OS Lite.
