this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I've gone with super terminal heavy setups for years. If I want to dip my toes into a more GUI oriented setup what's your rec? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/archlinux@lemmy.ml
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I've got a refurbed thinkpad yoga in the mail. It's a stylus oriented laptop so I need to change the software I use to be more clicky.

For years I've favoured stuff like netctl, xrandr, xbacklight etc etc over GUI alternatives and usually gone for very minimal WM setups (e.g. dwm).

For obvious reasons this would be actual hell with a stylus in tablet mode, but it's been around 15 years since I last had a clicky linux setup and I'm really lost as to how to set one up on arch. What do you folks recommend for laptops?

EDIT: update for wayward souls. Went with plasma, less works nicely out of the box but gnome hung occasionally on a 2019 yoga x1. There's a lot about plasma I would say is annoying but configuring it is vastly easier than gnome.

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[–] NoisyFlake@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

Try some of the well known DE's (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce) and see what you like. I personally enjoy KDE right now.

[–] CaptainJack42@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've used KDE on my convertible during uni and it worked pretty good. I mean for a GUI oriented setup your options are pretty much KDE, gnome, cinnamon, xfce (don't know how good that is with touch though) or cosmic (is that out yet? Idk tbh).

Afaik gnome and kde both have good touchscreen support, maybe you'll need to do some slight modifications, so I'd say just try them out and see what you like.

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, that's good to know.

What made you favour KDE over gnome?

[–] CaptainJack42@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago

Not really sure anymore tbh, I think kde had a decent tiling plugin and gnome not and kde felt like more control and options on contrary to gnomes streamlined Mac like interface. Nowadays I'm on i3/sway though, haven't really tried any DEs in a while

[–] CalicoJack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

These days, I'm partial to EndeavourOS with KDE for those kinds of installs. It's still Arch underneath, and I don't mind a "lazy" install for a DE.

It also gives you several DEs to choose from during install, so you can take your pick.

[–] Cralder@feddit.nu 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Back when I had a surface pro I used GNOME with a plugin that gave a floating dock that could be shown by pressing a semi-transparent button. That made it a lot easier to use without a keyboard. For applications I mostly used the default GNOME ones. They are often pretty easy to navigate with just a touchscreen.

Also, if you want to use the stylus to take notes or edit pdfs I recommend Xournal++. Krita is of course also great for drawing and has great stylus support.

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I admit to being gnome-curious after their post about mosaic.

Xournal I remember from my uni days, although it appears to have come a long way!

With gnome are there integrations for managing pacman and the like? I seem to remember on Debian etc you get clicky ways to interact with apt (software "store", update notification bubbles etc)

[–] infeeeee@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With gnome are there integrations for managing pacman and the like?

GNOME Software integration with pacman was removed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Tips_and_tricks#GNOME_Software_integration_with_pacman

There are other pacman/AUR graphical frontends: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers#Graphical

I remember using pamac long time ago, it worked flawlessly. That's the package manager of Manjaro, but also works on Arch. It's written in GTK4, so nicely blends into Gnome UI

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

Oh shit that is a sweet arse wiki page.

Thank you kindly!

[–] mellejwz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I'm the same, I love using the cli for many things, but it's just no go on my Surface Go 2 if I want to use it as a tablet. I'm using KDE Plasma on Arch Linux, and it's pretty awesome in terms of touchscreen support. I also tried Gnome, but it has a nasty backspace issue in the on screen keyboard. When you use backspace it's like you press the left arrow key and then backspace, leaving half of the characters. Otherwise it's great.

It takes some time to get everything working right though. I didn't know how to get the on screen keyboard to work (Maliit), which is pretty important if you plan to use it on a tablet.

Another important thing is to use Wayland, as that greatly improves touchscreen support over Xorg.

So personally I'd suggest KDE, but Gnome is also really good if you don't mind the backspace issue. Or am I missing something that would fix that?