I have an unused Windows tablet from 2021 running some Core M processor or other that I want to put Linux on and start using again. It doesn’t have a keyboard so I would have to actually use it as a tablet and not a laptop. Is there a distro built around one of the mobile desktop environments that also runs well on x86? (Last time I tried Linux mobile it was pretty much only for ARM and I never got it to work well on even an x86 virtual machine.) Or is regular GNOME deskrop still my best bet for a tablet?

  • KrapKake@lemmy.world
    3·
    12 days ago

    I have an older x86 tablet that I tinker with. The DE I have found to work the best with touch only is KDE Plasma Mobile. Reliable and works similarly to Android.

    GNOME has been surprisingly unstable, like an update might ruin some touch capability and make the tablet unusable. It also had weird quirks like not being able to move some windows around, or the cursor some how getting stuck and needing to plug in a mouse to move it again.

    Currently I am running EndeavourOS with plasma mobile installed from the AUR which works really well the only thing that sucks is when there is an update for the DE and I have to build the package, which takes a while on that tablet.

    Whichever distro you pick, go with the KDE version, then install “plasma-mobile” from the repos.

    • Jiří Král@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      12 days ago

      I don’t recommend Fedora as a distro for this as they do not have the Maliit keyboard in the repos and you will have to build it yourself.

      Last time I tryed Fedora KDE few months back it had a Maliit keyboard, but I was using the desktop version of the shell.

      • KrapKake@lemmy.world
        1·
        12 days ago

        Now that I think about it I think you are right. I think I was thinking about the word prediction for the keyboard they didn’t have.