I’m looking to get a straight tablet (not a 360-hinge laptop with a keyboard) that will mostly be used for mobile centric applications like when I’m out and about or when I want to binge shows in bed. Ideally it will be a device that I can exclusive use the touchscreen with for when I’m either too lazy or can’t practically prop it up and use it as a proper laptop.

I want to keep at least the software as open source as possible, so my options are either an Android tablet that I can sideload an AOSP de-googled ROM like Lineage OS, or a Windows tablet with an x86 CPU that I’ll install a Linux distro on (inb4 “Android is technically Linux”).

I currently use KDE Plasma which is my favourite environment when I’m on my desktop, and I quickly found through testing on my touchscreen laptop that it’s practically unusable without a mouse and keyboard. Here are some things that I found KDE lacking that I need:

  • Integrated onscreen keyboard that automatically pops up when you’re in a text field, and/or can easily be brought in and out of frame when needed.

  • Smooth swipe-based scrolling. I find that swiping up on many KDE apps just selects text or drags an element, or does nothing, and you have to drag the tiny scroll bar to scroll.

  • Pinch to zoom

  • A terminal that works well with touch screen, namely one that makes it easy to use special characters and control keys with an onscreen keyboard. Termux on Android is what I consider one of the best implementations of this.

  • Active stylus support with palm rejection is a plus, like the Surface when running Windows or the iPad Pro.

I consider myself very knowledgeable with Linux, and I do tinker with my computers a lot, but for this one, I do simply want something that “just works”, because I’ll either be using it at school/work and can’t afford to start diving into conf files and searching up cryptic error messages because something broke, or I’ll be in bed just wanting to relax before going to sleep.

Finally, is this futile? If we’re considering stock Android as a benchmark for a decent user experience on a tablet, can anything on the non-Android Linux side even compare?

  • Arsen6331 ☭@lemmygrad.ml
    5·
    2 years ago

    As much as I despise GNOME and their dev team, it does currently seem to be the best for tablets. It has an on-screen keyboard that you can customize using extensions, scrolling works in most apps (but some may require some environment variables set), pinch to zoom works in many apps (but not all), the terminal input isn’t great but it does work, and you can use the stylus with pressure sensitivity and palm rejection in supported apps such as Krita and Xournal++. Overall, my experience has been very good once I worked around some of the quirks.

    I’ve also experimented with the Deepin Desktop Environment, which works but is not as seamless (keyboard won’t pop up automatically, some apps don’t scroll properly, etc.). KDE went about as you described. It worked somewhat, but not too well.

    I am using an ASUS Vivobook 13 Slate OLED T3300, for which I added an entry on the Laptop/ASUS page of the ArchWiki. If you do get this specific tablet, be aware that as I said in the “Remarks” section, you will need to set a kernel module parameter for the eMMC storage to work properly if you get a model with eMMC like mine. Otherwise, you will not be able to write to the drive. Once it’s set, it works every time, so you won’t need to tinker with it after that. Also, the cameras do not work at the moment, and the fingerprint sensor is detected but can’t scan properly. These issues are dealbreakers for many, but I don’t particularly care about fingerprint or cameras, and I have no problem setting a module parameter, so my experience has been great, and it has replaced my iPad really well. It has a beautiful OLED panel, so I often use it for content, such as books, movies, etc., but make sure to enable hardware accelerated playback manually in Firefox because it will be disabled by default which will cause horrible performance. I can tell you how to do this if you don’t know.

    • communist_wife@lemmygrad.ml
      4·
      2 years ago

      I’m the same, would never use GNOME3 normally, but I bought a Thinkpad X230T and since it seems to have good touchscreen features I installed it and tbh its very good for that use case. I used it with Ubuntu. I mostly use the computer for zines, drawing, and writing, and it works great with the finger and digi pen. So yea, a reluctant recommendation from me as well. Normally am a Debian with i3 type lesbian.