I got the Cube i7 stylus, basicly a pretty good surface 2 clone running Windows 10. Now I wanted to run linux instead to learn it a bit better. So I was wondering, what is the best linux dist for tablet pcs? I tried Linux Mint before and got eveything working except the automatic rotation and the touch screen was quite lacking, it lagged alot and was very slow.
Is there other distributions that have better support for 2 in 1 devices like tablet pcs? And by that I mean touch screen and accelerometer support and a big touch keyboard for the login screen.
Is the touchscreen support dependent on what desktop eviroment you use? I really don't need a "touch friendly" ui, the only thing I use the device for without the keyboard is reading pdf's in portrait mode and for doing that no "special" ui is needed for me. As long as I can scroll through pds in fullscreen and navigate the file system from the touchscreen i'm happy. All other time I'm either programming or surfing the web and in that case a "windows like" navigation will be just fine.
Probably only ubuntu has support for that stuff because of ubuntu mobile versions. You might even wanna try a to install the actual ubuntu touch image.
Has it progressed since I first saw it and I mean first. I used it when it annoyingly replaced my gnome desktop after an update the first time it was rolled out. I did not like it then partially because I was used to one thing and they changed it, kind of like the win10 thing, I liked one and little warning it was suddenly something else.
I am sure going back now with it being a long time since playing with any Linux that it would be a different experience. Probably a lot nicer with updates and not having previous expectations or habits from another DE.
I've been running debian testing with Gnome on my Acer Iconia W700 i3. Screen rotation works, brightness control works(Even if the lower limit disables the backlight completely), GDM3 works fine with a touchscreen and a bluetooth keyboard, even auto rotation and the auto rotate switch on my device work out-of-the-box.
So I have finaly had time to try some distros out so I gave some of them a shot in a VM. Ubuntu (Unity) was okay, dragging windows around and pressing stuff worked just fine, but pinch to zoom or scrollning through windows did not, which is a deal breaker for me. (I am literarly just going to use scrolling for pdfs). Then I tried Ubuntu (Gnome) but it had the same problems. As of Auto rotate, I couldn't test it properly as I used a VM.
I found some software that should be able to work with touchscreens and program gestures to use with them but I just couldn't get it to work.
I've had pretty flakey experience with on screen keyboard. The programs like Firefox/chrome and desktop environment do not behave the same no matter what distribution. Onboard is the best compromise but still not great..
@Baxtex What kernel version were you running? There is a kernel rolled for touch screens out in the wild. kernel 4.8+ has better support for touch screens. might want to try a distro with rolling release or a distro with a kernel 4.8.x or higher :cough:Fedora25:cough:
You could use a program called touchegg in Ubuntu. It allows you to set up your own gestures, but I just copied the touchegg.config of a youtube tutorial which worked straight away. Scrolling with two fingers worked fine and if you get into it it’s highly customizable.
The video I copied the config from is called Touchscreen gestures in Linux using Touchegg. It’s first searchresult if you search for touchegg on youtube.