Touch screens on linux?
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?
It's been a lot of years that we've been able to run an OS without installing it. Some are even intended to be run that way. There's literally no reason at all to be "hesitant" about firing up a live environment from usb to find out how it runs.
The easiest way to find out is to boot up a live image and test on your hardware.
I'd recommend using Fedora Workstation, it was a great experience back when I myself had an HP ENVY "fliptop". Anything with GNOME as its desktop environment should be perfect.
How was the screen rotation? I am mostly using mine flipped with a second monitor.
Also, what year was the HP ENVY?
Automatic screen rotation wasn't exactly smooth, but it did work, and I didn't experience any major issues because of it. I'd imagine it's better now.
Somewhere around 2018 I think, it was a while ago. But you can test in the live environment to see if the hardware support is still as good as it was.
I briefly tried Ubuntu on my Lenovo Yoga 6 a couple years ago, and the rotation was abysmal. I then tried Fedora KDE and it worked brilliantly with no tweaking. Just hopped to Debian w/KDE and having the same great experience.
I have a touchscreen laptop, and GNOME is 100% the most polished desktop I tried on it. IMO they have the best touchscreen implementation I've ever seen (even better than windows): the mouse pointer is separate from the touchscreen "pointer". So if you tap the display somewhere, your mouse won't go there.
Why not just test it from a bootable stick? My one one experience with a touchscreen was very positive (Plasma on Manjaro).
Good idea. I've got a usb drive right here I can try. I'll set that up.
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.
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.
Yes. Dell 7391 2in1, works great. I have Fedora KDE on it and I flip it into tablet mode and use it on the couch.
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.
I've been using linux as a daily driver on my convertible for almost two years now. I started with using Manjaro and Gnome which worked really well, I especially liked the gesture support, but I heard kde also has good support for that. I switched to a tiling WM a couple months ago because I don't use my touchscreen that much (still works great with it though). I suggest going with any distro you like and using Gnome. All in all I'd say touch support is great. The only issue I ever had was when I used a second monitor the touchscreen wouldn't get mapped to the internal one automatically, but that was easy to fix
Gnome seems to be a common thread here. Maybe you can dig into that second monitor issue? I move around a fair bit between my workstation and other places.
I never had that problem on Gnome, only with i3 and a couple other WM
I have no personal experience with it but I see Nobara mentioned often, especially in regards to the Microsoft Surface Tablets. Hopefully someone else with more experience can chime in on it.
https://youtu.be/UaCwLjIf3sU?si=1xdDBZyt2gNAG_bO
But if it is a capable machine, you should try Zorin OS.
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Oh this looks fun!
I had the Envy's cousin, the HP Elite DragonFly (also a touch/flip), and it worked great under Linux (Arch + Gnome). All gestures worked out of the box and was pretty smooth too. HP touchscreens are generally pretty standardized so I reckon your Envy should work fine too. Just use whatever distro you're comfortable with, most distros should work fine.
I run Linux Mint Cinnamon, latest version, on a GPD Pocket 2 with absolutely no issues. The touch screen, although it is a small one, works perfectly.
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.
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.
This doesn't answer your question, but Pop!_OS isn't abandoned. They're just updating it only based on Ubuntu LTS versions, because they're working on a new desktop.
I don't think he was saying that he thought System76 abandoned Pop. I think he was saying he was running Pop on a System76 laptop, and the laptop gave up the ghost.
Yes. It was a System76 serval.
Disappointing enough that I'll never buy system 76 again.
I actually have an older HP envy x360 (AMD chipset). Works like a charm with linux (everything out of the box). The touchscreen is fully functional, but I don't really use it. I don't dig that at all 😅
One thing that bothers me is that it is impissible to update the BIOS firmware without at least a Windows VM.
I use popOS on a 2-in-1 laptop with touch and stylus input, it works fine.
It works great for me on Arch with Hyprland, even though that really isn't designed with touch in mind. I think there are some programs that provide touch gestures generically (egg something comes to mind?), but I've never needed them. I'm sure if you go with Gnome or something it would work great, so long as the touchscreen is recognised properly (I've never had issues, but that doesn't say much about if you would). I'd just get a live USB with whatever you would install, and see if it physically works. If it does, I'm sure there's a DE/WM that fits the workflow you want.
Yep, that was it. Thanks for the reminder.
I have an Asus vivobook flip, which also has a touchscreen. I daily drive pop OS, which works great with my touchscreen, altough the mouse sometimes dissapears and you need to drag it to the top bar to make it reappear. Screen rotation also works quite good by the way.
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.