Hello everyone!
I’m finally tired enough of the invasive and anti-consumer practices of Windows to convert over. I’m going to start with my laptop, but I’m concerned about compatibility for 2-in-1 convertible touchscreens.
A distro that’s sufficient for both computers would be ideal for consistency’s and simplicity’s sake.
- 2-in-1 convertible touchscreen laptop. Can be folded into a “tablet” mode. Used for web browsing and simple games
- Main workstation for gaming, programming, etc. NVIDIA GPU (no touchscreen)
Most anecdotes say touchscreen support is hit or miss, and the On Screen Keyboard / Auto-rotate support is an additional challenge. MINT with cinnamon seems to be the best contender at the moment due to its compatibly with most games and the touchscreen support seems to be there.
But, I’d love some fresh perspectives as most sources were ~a year old. Thanks for your time!
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It has glare
I use Fedora on a gen 7 Carbon X1 thinkpad and the small amount I use the touch screen has worked fine.
I also use Fedora Wayland but on a HP Spectre X360 from like 2013 or something, touch screen works fine and overall runs a lot better then win 10 was prior.
I’ve owned a Thinkpad A485 with touchscreen for years and had several Linux distros on it including Manjaro and Linux Mint which I am currently using.
Never had any issues, touchscreen always works out of the box without me having to do anything extra. In fact, with a few distros, I’ve had issues with certain wireless mice, but my touchscreen always has worked. So I’ve actually had slightly better luck with the laptop touchscreen than some external mice lol.
Now a qualifier: I rarely use the touchscreen, and when I do, it’s always just to click something or scroll on an article or file list. I don’t do any special gestures or fancy touch functions, so I can’t speak to support from that perspective.
manjaro running on an old yoga 12. no problems. it’s the old ladies, so i would have heard.
Anything with Wayland will have good touchscreen support
I have an Thinkpad X380 Yoga running stock Fedora with GNOME and it works pretty damn well. The pen works and it recognises the buttons, the auto appearing keyboard works and so does the auto rotate. Basically very few problems at all, I don’t use it all that extensively outside of GIMP though.
My Lenovo T480 (November 2018) has a Touchscreen and it pretty much just works. Running Fedora 39.
The only issue I have is sometimes after waking from sleep, it will think I’m continuously touching and tapping in a random spot. A close of the laptop lid and reopen after a few seconds seems to fix whatever causes it, or if that doesn’t work a reboot always works. I haven’t figured out what it’s caused by exactly. On older kernels it used to be more frequent, I originally installed fc36 and used dnf to upgrade up to fc39 over that time, and since being on newer Fedora it seems to happen much less frequently. It’s more stable now.
I’ve read that latest Microsoft surface devices have proprietary touchscreen implementation so it can’t be included in main Linux kernel
thus, you need to install a customized kernel for that, read up linux-surface for that
aside from this, I think every laptop works just fine under Wayland
i have arch linux running on a surface pro 6
laptop specs: core i5, 8 gb ram, 256 gb ssd
linux setup:
- arch btw
- linux-surface kernel
- gnome (Wayland)
the touchscreen is working very smoothly
A colleague wanted to throw out Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 3, 10IGL5 (a tablet pc with IMO cool keyboard that can be disconnected and used over bluetooth, 4 core intel CPU taking like 5W & 8GB of ram). Originally bought for his kid but it is absolutely useless under windows. I’ve tested it with current Ubuntu with somewhat meh results (BT keyboard won’t work, no chance to get the automatic screen rotation going, screwy on screen keyboard) then I have installed Fedora and the thing is absolutely amazing. Everything works out of the box, I haven’t done anything “smart” at all and honestly as a XFCE (still deep in x11) user I am amazed how well the Wayland is doing on this. I would dare to say better out of the box experience than Apple - everything is similarly polished but you don’t have to register / pay anything. Now my teamleader is taking it to presentations. He connects the display over USB-C adapter to the projector, walks over the room and controls it with the BT keyboard - Mac wielding accounts are starting to cry. As docker/podman is native he continues to spin up the whole app in a container - at which point every technical person in the room needs to know what the f is that thing?! They are no longer being manufactured though, newer version does not have that cool keyboard…
