I just inherited a handful of Samsung Series 7 Slate PCs that I’d like to rebuild to be as “tablet-like” as possible for a few non-technical friends and family. They power up but arrived with non-functional Windows 7 installs. They’re Intel Core i5s with 4G RAM and 128G SSDs, so they should run pretty well under any popular Linux distro. I’m personally comfortable in the command line and don’t want to sacrifice the fact that these are “real computers with a real OS” on them, but I’d still like them to behave somewhat similar to Android tablets for less techie users.
If these were laptops with keyboards and trackpads I’d probably just install kubuntu or Mint on them and call it a day, but I’m not sure if KDE Plasma behaves well on a touchscreen tablet interface with (hopefully) an on-screen keyboard and so forth. Ubuntu Touch sounds somewhat promising, but I haven’t really played with it. I don’t want to waste hours trying to get device drivers to work for the touchscreen and other built-in hardware, so I’m hoping for a novice-friendly distro that usually just works out of the box on most hardware.
Does anyone have an obvious choice they’d like to recommend? Thanks so much!
In my experience, both GNOME and KDE’s pure touchscreen experience are not good as Android or ChromeOS for now, and not even close to Windows 10.
GNOME has its onscreen keyboard, although not bad actually.
I haven’t been using GNOME for two years, so maybe there’s some improvement?
My suggestion is give ChromeOS a shot (Brunch Framework), if you don’t mind Google things.
each one of them has issues, I cant in good conscious recommend any atm
Just a note: there are a few on-screen software keyboards for X out there that aren’t tied to a specific DE, like xvkbd and svkbd. They might be worth trying if you find some distro that works well except that the default on-screen keyboard sucks. (No idea if there’s any equivalent for Wayland.)
Great idea; thanks!
I have a tablet running fedora with gnome. While it works for me I cannot recommend it at all for something I’d give to someone else.
On the surface gnome looks useable as a mobile DE, but the reality is that it requires several gnome extensions to get it in a useable state (I’m talking having a reliable way to copy and paste). Those extensions are not necessarily updated at the same cadence as gnome or fedora so my ability to consistently use the device in a predictable manner is gone if I install the latest updates when available (and after years of training users to install updates when available someone you give the tablet too will click the update pop-up).
Regarding drivers, the only thing that doesn’t work on mine is the camera. I’d recommend trying out a few choices on a live boot and seeing just how much effort you have to make it useable.
Yeah, I’ll definitely burn a few ISOs to usb to live test. I’ll be sure to update my post with the chosen winner once I pick one.
I have a Microsoft Surface tablet and Fedora with GNOME works pretty well on it. I usually use a stylus or the magnetic keyboard with it but when I do use the touch screen I dont encounter issues. I use PaperWM on top of GNOME and it makes it all so easy to use.
Take a look at my post from several months ago: https://feddit.de/post/1892175
In the end I went with fydeOS since the touch experience with both Gnome and KDE was too lacking out of the box.
It sounds like you have a few devices, so I would recommend trying out this testing distro with MauiShell. There is a testing iso under the heading “Downloads and Sources” in this most recent blog post about its development progress.
