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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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… :-)
Oddly a jailbroke Chromebook i5 has been the best 2 in 1 I’ve ever used
Probably because it was sort of running Linux from the factory.
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.
My two Intel laptops work great with Fedora KDE.
My two AMD laptops do not. Neither of them detect that they have an accelerometer, so turning the laptop to portrait mode doesn’t turn the screen. My minisforum V3 is the worst because volume output is either off or on, there is no turning it down.
All of them detect the keyboard being flipped around and disable the keyboard and trackpad.
I suggest GNOME for getting started in Linux with a touchscreen. There is less to learn than KDE, and the last time I tried Cinnamon on a touchscreen was painful (granted that was years ago, it might have improved since then).
Look into the DE (desktop environment) and find out if it supports Wayland. If it does, there is a good chance that it will support touchscreens out of the box, but unless it’s changed in the last year, only KDE and GNOME currently have Wayland as the default display driver. (Not talking about window managers, they aren’t in the scope of what OP is looking for)
If you are going to use a Debian derivative (elementaryOS, Ubuntu, Mint), stick with GNOME. Unless the distribution specifically upgraded the KDE version (Like KDE Neon, the official KDE distro), most of them are still using 5.27 KDE. It works, if you use Wayland, but it is far less smooth.
For your distribution choice, a Debian derivative will be rock solid, but will lag on getting the latest updates. With an older system, that’s not really an issue for hardware. A Fedora derivative will be cutting edge. The latest updates roll out with each new version for the most part, but that can introduce some instabilities. As I understand it, an ARCH derivative (Manjaro, Garuda) is bleeding edge. Great when it works, but breaks often (particularly Manjaro).
Works on my surface pro 3 with fedora gnome
Ubuntu
Don’t use it. They apply some weird patches to make the touchscreen experience worse. Try Fedora instead.
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
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
Totally agree. On the other hands, cheap laptop for us.
Ikr it pissed me off to no end! Planned obsolescence should be illegal.
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 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 have an x360 running bazzite with gnome and it runs great.
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.
I recently bought the TUXEDO InfinityFlex 14 which is a 2-in-1 as you describe. Well, they call it a 3-in-1 because you can fold it in such a way that you can stand it on a table and watch movies on it which is a bit silly to call a 3-in-1.
Anyway! It works very well. TUXEDO OS is bascially Ubuntu but they put the latest KDE Plasma on it which has much improved tablet mode support compared to Plasma 5.27 that Kubuntu 24.04 comes with. I really like it. You can install it on non-TUXEDO laptops too like yours. I mainly use tablet mode to read books or browse websites in a more relaxed pose on the sofa.
There’s a touch keyboard too which works well enough if you need to type a sentence here and there but for anything more than that you would revert to laptop mode.
My previous laptop had a touch screen, and the Linux driver worked for it with no configuration on my end. Not exactly what you’re asking about, but I was impressed by how it “just worked”.
But that was a traditional laptop.
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:
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.
