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!

  • poinck@lemm.ee
    0·
    10 months ago

    Yes, I tried PostmarketOS with Phosh on my old Lenovo Ideapad. It just works without tinkering.

  • phanto@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    I have LMDE on an old Lenovo Yoga, but it doesn’t disable the keyboard when in tablet mode. It’s on my list of crap I need to fix. Make sure to check that behavior before you go full install.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    The touchscreen on my laptop works without having to configure anything. Mine doesn’t fold into a tablet, so I rarely use the touchscreen though.

    I would suggest that you load Elementary OS or Ubuntu on a flash drive, boot it up and try it out. You don’t have to install anything, it will run right from the flash drive. That’s the best way to figure out if a distro works with your hardware.

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    Touchscreen (and 2-in-1) support in general is quite good, both Gnome and Plasma (two most popular “desktop environments”) support it well. It should be about as responsive as it is on Windows, because the response time generally comes from hardware and not software. However, I must warn you that I’ve had a similar HP 2-in-1 (although a different model) and there simply wasn’t a Linux driver for the touchscreen so it didn’t work at all; all the other tablet-like features worked fine. I would first check on a liveUSB - the touchscreen should work there the same as it will on the installed distro. If it doesn’t work, well, there’s your answer.

  • jrgn@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Running an Acer Chromebook R1 on OpenSUSE right now. ChromeOS was end of life, so I managed to get Libreboot to work. It got a touch screen and you can fold it into a tablet. The touch functionality is ok, but the problem is that the Chromebook specs shit, so I have to run xfce. But tbh, I didn’t use the touch functionality much when it was a Chromebook either.

  • That Weird Vegan@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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

  • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    My last laptop was an HP Stream. Crappy laptop, but it had a touchscreen. It worked fine whenever I remembered that it had a touch screen. I didn’t have to set anything up, it was just automagicly setup for me on Ubuntu. Couldn’t tell you how responsive it was and that laptop would have been a poor benchmark anyways, but if I touched a button or scrolled the screen, it would do the thing.

    Sorry, I’m old. Prefer a physical keyboard to a screen keyboard any day.

  • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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

      • blindbunny@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        You’re not wrong but the fact that the stylus works and the keyboard disables when it’s in table mode, out of the box puts it top tier for me.

    • 7eter@feddit.org
      0·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • moody@lemmings.world
    0·
    10 months ago

    I have Nobara running on an old Lenovo Flex 15 with an 8th gen i5. Everything on it worked right out of the box including the multi-touch screen, I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work on any other distro. I can’t tell the difference in responsiveness between Windows and Linux on it.