I find that even if you get a touch primary device, make sure to get one with a keyboard, Ubuntu, Fedora, doesn't matter, KDE, Gnome doesn't matter, the touch only experience on linux is simply not great. Make extra sure to get the keyboard with it if its optional.
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Absolutely. Touch would just be a nice extra feature to me.
+1 have been trying to make a Linux tablet work. Gnome is alright but it's got a crap CPU and 2gb of ram and nothing lightweight has good touch support annoyingly
I am, very hesitantly, optimistic for the new smithay based compositors. Cosmic doesn't have touch support yet, but it's super light weight, I get better perf then I do even with KDE. I plan on swapping to it full time on my tablet when it gets touch support. (and when some touch friendly gui stuff is available). you also have catacomb which is an actual mobile compositor. Very promising stuff, but still very far out
I was trying things along the lines of hyprland, sway and i3. I have this idea in my head that a touch screen tiling WM would work really well (from what I've seen that's what people love so much about the iPad nowadays anyway)
Hyprland has something called hyprgrass I think which enables touchscreen gestures, still in the process of figuring out how to install that in NixOS though. (it's got a nix.flake but it's not in nixpkgs and I'm still unsure of how to install flakes to a traditional configuration.nix setup)
You could probably look into something like paperwm or Niri, I think scrollable window managers have a lot of potential to be a novel but good touch experience
EDIT: Im not sure if niri support touch, I havent tested it, but I think i might actually try it myself when I get the chance now
I got a pretty good setup going with forge, problem is gnome is too heavy, this thing has 2gb of memory and like 2ghz CPU
I ordered one. First units should be shipped early December. Right now they seem to be some out - just few days ago you could order with 7-8 weeks delivery, now it's just 'notify when available'.
I preordered on announcement day, I expect it'll arrive December. I am excited for it to replace my 12" iPad pro. The 3:2 screen is perfect for reading and office app work.
You can check their status page for updates by model https://support.starlabs.systems/status
Thanks for the link! I'm really close to pulling the trigger on this.
Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I'll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.
I put Ubuntu on a handful of Surface Pros a couple years ago for work, and while the process wasn’t horrible, I was wishing for something with more native support the whole time. Nice to see I wasn’t the only one.
This was another route I was thinking about. Any idea how hard it is to do now?
It’s been awhile and I haven’t tried to latest hardware, but I’m sure it’s still doable. The process wasn’t terrible, just a few extra steps to add compatibility for some of the devices.
I mostly just used the guidance here:
Sounds freaking sweet!
Doesn't look like it's available yet
I don't really like tablets in the first place. Don't understand what they're for that laptops can't already do.
But aside from that, the problem is not hardware, it's the OS. Android, iOS and iPad OS are all distinctly very different from their desktop counterparts, with respect to how you interact with the device. Linux needs the same.
gnome
They’re more portable, lighter and arguably perfect for media consumption on the go. Add a decent detachable keyboard and it’s all the computer quite a few people will ever need.
Just depends on how you use your pc.
They’re more portable, lighter
Sure, but is that so important that it's worth spending hundreds of dollars on an entirely separate device that you still have to carry and manage?
You're assuming that everybody that buys a tablet like this also wants/has a laptop. Many people ONLY want the tablet as a portable computer while having a more powerful desktop in their home or office
In my case I have a tablet and a laptop, but my laptop ends up staying at home 99% of the time docked and acting as a desktop. When it comes time to replace it, I'll just get a desktop and keep the tablet
I see. I guess everyone I know that has a tablet also has a laptop, and carries both of them around. Makes more sense as a laptop replacement, I suppose.