I’ve got an x86 tablet, and I don’t want to run Windows or Android, so I have always been left with the option of Linux with GNOME. GNOME is a solid DE, but despite the design language, it is nowhere near ready for touchscreens. Depending on the distro, it was either severely outdated or just generally buggy, particularly with the onscreen keyboard. This lead my to completely abandon my tablet for a while, but today I had an arbitrary though that I should try out KDE Plasma Mobile. Low and behold, it was exactly what I needed for my tablet.

I expected it to be a bit buggy, because I had tried out KDE Bigscreen and this seemed like the mobile equivalent of bigscreen, a fork that is half-baked and still has lots of work to do before it’s worth daily driving. Imagine my shock when I booted the Fedora liveUSB and everything felt incredibly fluent and polished. I knew about 15 seconds in that I was switching. The navigation feels like an Android tablet, which I see as a positive, and the keyboard is just so much larger and more responsive. The GNOME default OSK is hardly usable because it’s letters are so small, so this was a relief being able to type with no need for checking that I’m writing correctly every few characters. The next thing I noted is how polished it feels even for large screens(I have a 12 inch tablet). The gestures work on the whole screen, and this makes it feel effortless to navigate around. The final thing I want to touch on before I stop glazing is the really good performance. I have a very old tablet, about 10 years old, and the performance felt like it was brand new.

Thanks for reading my glazing exhortation, and if you have a tablet, I couldn’t recommend Plasma Mobile more.

P.S. does anyone know where KDE connect is?