Hello all!
Given that Windows 10 is going to be unsupported by the end of this year, I was planning on switching to Linux since my laptop doesn’t meet the requirements to run Windows 11.
My current laptop is an HP Pavilion x360 and by far, my favourite part about it is how it’s not only a touchscreen, but the hinges allow the laptop screen to lay completely flat just like a tablet, (the interface even changes to a more tablet ish version) it’s great for watching movies and drawing. When I switch over to Linux, I want to be able to keep as much of this feature as much as possible. I was planning on installing Elementary OS as it’s designed to be more ‘plug and play’ as I’m not super tech savvy. When I was looking into if converting a touchscreen laptop to Linux, I read that Ubuntu has some touchscreen support which Elementary OS is based on, but I’m not sure how good it is, as all the Reddit threads on the topic were pretty old.
Whats the touchscreen support on Ubuntu like now? If you have a touchscreen laptop running Linux at the moment, how responsive is the screen? Is there other distrios that support touchscreen that are don’t have a steep learning curve?
Thanks!
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Ubuntu
Don’t use it. They apply some weird patches to make the touchscreen experience worse. Try Fedora instead.
This is the problem. Perfectly fine laptops and desktops but can’t run windows 11. So they’re going to become ewaste. Sucks. Fuck microshaft
Ikr it pissed me off to no end! Planned obsolescence should be illegal.
I have an thinkpad x1 yoga with kubuntu. The touchscreen works.
One thing to understand here is that it mostly depends on the “desktop environment”, which is basically the GUI of the system. (Imagine you could have the Windows XP GUI on a Windows 11 PC. Or the macOS GUI on a Windows 11 PC.)
Distros intended for desktop use will typically come with a certain desktop environment by default, so to some degree, you can talk about the distro, but yeah, there’s just gonna be a strong correlation with their default desktop environment.
To my knowledge, GNOME and (recent/Wayland versions of) KDE have good support. Most comments here imply these two desktop environments, so for example Ubuntu, Fedora and POP!_OS are typically GNOME, whereas Kubuntu and Nobara are typically KDE.
Some folks here also mention Linux Mint and LMDE working well, which use the Cinnamon desktop environment, so I guess that works well, too. Cinnamon is somewhat based on GNOME.
Well, and Elementary OS’s whole shtick is its Pantheon desktop environment, which is also based on GNOME.So, basically, as Elementary’s Pantheon is its own thing, there’s no guarantee that it’ll work, but I would not be surprised.
As someone else already said, you can use a Linux Live USB to try it out before installing. You should be able to just follow along the installation instructions of Elementary OS and shortly before you actually install things, you should find yourself in Pantheon and can try it out.The Linux Experiment recently looked into touchscreen support of different desktop enviromenents. His findings mostly align with your comment. However, this seems to be one of the rare cases where the distro matters for Gnome. Upstream Gnome (e.g., as shipped by Fedora) works fine with touch screens, but support on Ubuntu Gnome appears to be quite broken.
The Linux Experiment videos:
Generally yes but those HP laptops can get really glitchy when they run something other than windows. You can try it but next time just avoid HP.
The screen with my Lenovo Yoga 720 (I think) is a convertible touch screen. The brightness never stays consistent in Mint. It constantly changes brightness no matter what I’m doing with it. However, I’m not sure it worked right, even with Windows 10. Still a decent machine.
Yes, I run Pop_OS on my Lenovo Yoga 6, no complaints whatsoever
Same setup here no problems
Yoga 11e here. Fedora (Plasma Edition) worked perfect right out of the box.
Arch Linux on Dell 7389 : just works. Also had OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on this machine, best installer ever.
Debian on Thinkpad X390 Yoga : with included variable-pressure pen, the touchscreen is actually a wacom tablet, perfect. Also, one if the best installer there is.
Ubuntu on Thinkpad T480s : just works. Installing Ubuntu today is literally just a couple of clicks. Wife hasn’t complained in 3 years, this distro must be doing it right.
(Everything Gnome here, no additional setup whatsoever. The KDE gang will argue that Plasma has a lot of goodies for touchscreens, be sure to check it out)
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad L13 Yoga with Mint and touch screen works perfect. Only thing not configured yet is screen rotation.
Also works fine with an external USB-C touch screen with extended desktop, but a command to re-position touch location is needed, and when going back to internal screen only (haven’t automated it with udev rules yet).
I use Fedora Atomic (GNOME Desktop Environment) and it works amazingly with a touch screen!
Same here! My screen was not rotating in the beginning (relatively new hardware I guess). I was not to annoyed by it - but received a kernel update that fixed it without me doing anything, which was nice.
I’ve got a little 2 in 1 laptop, a Dell Inspiron 3670 (I think). Works great out of the box with the XFCE desktop environment, less with others. XFCE specifically is the only one that disables my keyboard correctly when I fold it backwards into tablet mode, and re-enables when I fold back
I’ve been running kubuntu on a lenovo yoga for years, works great.
I think the only think is that the touch screen maps incorrectly when there’s a second monitor plugged in. I didn’t use it enough for that to be annoying, and it’s possible it’s fixed on plasma 6, I haven’t tried yet.
I have a similar convertible device, and it’s almost good with KDE. KDE components switch to a layout with more whitespace and bigger icons so they are easier to touch, and some KDE programs like the file manager also opens a special menu on long press on files that is an easier to use version of the right click menu.
firefox also handles it well, I can easily scroll a page with momentum, but I can also select text.
my device also has a plastic pen (no buttons or battery in it), and linux knows to ignore touch input when the pen is near the screen so that I can rest my palm on it while writing.
but a major pain point is that so far I haven’t found a real touch keyboard. there is Maliit, which is much harder to build locally than other programs, and if you get it to work it is hard to use. then there is squeakboard, but last time I was looking into it that depended on wayland protocols that were not implemented yet in KDE’s compositor
I can’t see why it shouldn’t be. I have used it with touch screens. It works great. Remember that Android is linux too, and that really spurred the development in that area… :-)
Mwahahhahaaaa!
I’m running aurora on a surface pro5 for ages, the thing works like a charm out of the box.
