I was daily driving Pop_OS before my System76 finally gave it up. I mostly enjoyed the experience, but when my laptop gave it up, I had to run to a big box store and grab a replacement asap. I’m now riding an HP envy touch screen fliptop and (:puke:) windows 11.
I’ve been hesitant to throw linux onto this puppy because frankly, having never had a touch/ flip screen before, I’m really digging it. Has anyone here run linux on a touch screeen? Issues? A specific release I should consider? Any other considerations?
The easiest way to find out is to boot up a live image and test on your hardware.
It’s been a lot of years that we’ve been able to run an OS without installing it. Some are even intended to be run that way. There’s literally no reason at all to be “hesitant” about firing up a live environment from usb to find out how it runs.
I’d recommend using Fedora Workstation, it was a great experience back when I myself had an HP ENVY “fliptop”. Anything with GNOME as its desktop environment should be perfect.
How was the screen rotation? I am mostly using mine flipped with a second monitor.
Also, what year was the HP ENVY?
How was the screen rotation? I am mostly using mine flipped with a second monitor.
Automatic screen rotation wasn’t exactly smooth, but it did work, and I didn’t experience any major issues because of it. I’d imagine it’s better now.
Also, what year was the HP ENVY?
Somewhere around 2018 I think, it was a while ago. But you can test in the live environment to see if the hardware support is still as good as it was.
I briefly tried Ubuntu on my Lenovo Yoga 6 a couple years ago, and the rotation was abysmal. I then tried Fedora KDE and it worked brilliantly with no tweaking. Just hopped to Debian w/KDE and having the same great experience.
Why not just test it from a bootable stick? My one one experience with a touchscreen was very positive (Plasma on Manjaro).
from a bootable stick
Good idea. I’ve got a usb drive right here I can try. I’ll set that up.
KDE Plasma handles the touch screen fine on my PineTab2.
It works in LxQt too, but only in portrait mode (which is the default for this device). I keep meaning to look up how to tell it to rotate the touch coordinates along with the display, and I keep not getting around to it.
But the main issue I’ve run into is that most GUI apps for Linux are…let’s just say they’re not designed with touch input in mind.
I have a touchscreen laptop, and GNOME is 100% the most polished desktop I tried on it. IMO they have the best touchscreen implementation I’ve ever seen (even better than windows): the mouse pointer is separate from the touchscreen “pointer”. So if you tap the display somewhere, your mouse won’t go there.
A couple months I came across a cheap convertible that I bought to tinker with and try out Linux with touch interfaces. The bottom line is that it’s very lacking. Gnome and KDE have some stuff for touch interfaces to make it kinda work but it’s definitely not suitable if you wanna use the touch stuff as your main navigation mechanic. I see a lot of people recommending Gnome in this thread and each time a similar questions come up, which I simply cannot agree with. Nautilus doesn’t even offer a way to right click. KDE’s on-screen keyboard is kinda spotty when it comes up. All in all it’s still pretty rough without mouse and keyboard. If you want to go full tablet mode you’ll be light years away from the experience Android can give you. Personally I settled for fydeOS, which is a ChromeOS fork.
A couple months I came across a cheap convertible that I bought to tinker with and try out Linux with touch interfaces. The bottom line is that it’s very lacking. Gnome and KDE have some stuff for touch interfaces to make it kinda work but it’s definitely not suitable if you wanna use the touch stuff as your main navigation mechanic. I see a lot of people recommending Gnome in this thread and each time a similar questions come up, which I simply cannot agree with. Nautilus doesn’t even offer a way to right click. KDE’s on-screen keyboard is kinda spotty when it comes up. All in all it’s still pretty rough without mouse and keyboard. If you want to go full tablet mode you’ll be light years away from the experience Android can give you. Personally I settled for fydeOS, which is a ChromeOS fork.
Great perspective thank you.
I have no personal experience with it but I see Nobara mentioned often, especially in regards to the Microsoft Surface Tablets. Hopefully someone else with more experience can chime in on it.
Plasma and GNOME support it, although in all honesty UI wise Windows might win for touch. They’ve tried very hard since Win8 after all.
I run Linux Mint Cinnamon, latest version, on a GPD Pocket 2 with absolutely no issues. The touch screen, although it is a small one, works perfectly.
I have a Thinkpad with a touch screen running on Gnome and it’s nice but I find I only really use it when scrolling on a website.
A lot of things work like pinch to zoom too.
I’ve been using linux as a daily driver on my convertible for almost two years now. I started with using Manjaro and Gnome which worked really well, I especially liked the gesture support, but I heard kde also has good support for that. I switched to a tiling WM a couple months ago because I don’t use my touchscreen that much (still works great with it though). I suggest going with any distro you like and using Gnome. All in all I’d say touch support is great. The only issue I ever had was when I used a second monitor the touchscreen wouldn’t get mapped to the internal one automatically, but that was easy to fix
Gnome seems to be a common thread here. Maybe you can dig into that second monitor issue? I move around a fair bit between my workstation and other places.
I never had that problem on Gnome, only with i3 and a couple other WM
I had the Envy’s cousin, the HP Elite DragonFly (also a touch/flip), and it worked great under Linux (Arch + Gnome). All gestures worked out of the box and was pretty smooth too. HP touchscreens are generally pretty standardized so I reckon your Envy should work fine too. Just use whatever distro you’re comfortable with, most distros should work fine.
The touchscreen on my Thinkpad P1 gen4 with Fedora works well.
I don’t particularly use it, but it worked out of the box when I was testing it after I got it.
This is great to hear.
I have an HP Envy and it has honestly been a dream with any distro I throw at it. I find KDE to have better touch gesture support than Gnome, but I have been running Gnome for a while now and it hasn’t bothered me at all.
