What are your latest DE experiences with Touch- and/or 2in1-devices? I heard some prefer Gnome for their gesture support and modern layout. Others prefer the highly customizable KDE Plasma. Sometimes with custom installed virtual keyboard. However most discussions where kinda dated. Referring to Plasma 5 or older etc.
So I am asking the Fediversians for their experiences and setups! 🐧
None of them are really great, Im hoping cosmic in the future will be, as it stands.
“Touch primary” DEs (IE. Phone, tablet with no keyboard or detachable etc.) I think are the way to go.
Plasma mobile is king 100% nothing gets remotely close right now.
Phosh I found far too buggy, and the apps are far too limiting. Things like squeekboard for instance don’t scale properly, I had issues running chromium browsers on it too.
Ubuntu touch uses lomiri which im sure is great, I havent had luck running lomiri on any “common generic PC” linux distros. I did try getting it running on arch but found too many issues.
swmo is nice in theory, but it’s missing a lot of the ergonomics.
Plasma mobile is missing a lot. It has some not great design choices I find, however it by far has the best app ecosystem in terms of actual app quality, as well as actually working fine on tablets and phones alike.
For touch secondary experiences I find KDE and Gnome to be just about as you would expect, Both are fine and mostly navigatable on touch only stuff, I would say KDE is often a lot better in terms of responsiveness, Gnome I can find bugs out as @[email protected] said. That being said, In portait mode, KDE is down right terrible some times as many KDE desktop apps have zero support for portrait aspect ratios, and you are relying on scaling being “low” enough that the app can fit fine anyways.
as for some stuff you can look forwards to in the future, We are starting to see stuff like catacomb which is designed for phones. I also had some actually great luck with Niri but it’s mostly just buggy, and you still need something to manually launch keyboards.
In terms of applications, I have absurdly high hopes for cosmic apps. Each one I have used this far has a “tiling first” design policy, which translates pretty much 1:1 with being flexible for a phone it turns out, While cosmic apps have really poor touch support, if you install them and pretend your mouse is a finger, you will find that each one is almost perfect in a phone form factor.
EDIT: I wish I could say linux touch was in a good spot but realistically it’s not. I personally recommend just installing something like Bliss or using waydroid as the primary experience. I am very active in the bliss community because in large part tablets and touch support. Android is still far better then linux is in general, even if a little less flexible, you can have a fully foss install like what I have personally.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights!
GNOME. It even has several unofficial mobile focused versions.
People at postmarketOS is working on Linux for smartphones. They are using Gnome. There is your answer.
Correction, hi postmarketOS dev here, we are using whatever the user wants. We ship Phosh, GNOME Mobile, Plasman Mobile, SXMO, Lomiri. We don’t have just one interface.
Ubuntu Touch and postmarketOS use GNOME too.
Ubuntu Touch uses Lomiri (a successor of Unity), not GNOME.
there is also Plasma Mobile (I have no experience with either of those).
I was originally thinking more in the direction of classical desktops in the tablet/2-in1 format.
Plasma Mobile exists but let’s just say it’s not good.
Ubuntu touch uses unity
No, Lomiri. It is a succesor of Unity
A correction they are using PHOSH, which is a variant of GNOME.
Correction, hi postmarketOS dev here, we are using whatever the user wants. We ship Phosh, GNOME Mobile, Plasman Mobile, SXMO, Lomiri. We don’t have just one interface.
I hear that Gnome can struggle on touchscreens due to some GTK bugginess.
Plasma is probably a good bet since it has a dedicated touch friendly mode and is tested on the Steam Deck, which has a touch screen.
Will add that most buttons are far too small to touch reliably on my Steam Deck, so I use the track pad in KDE
this is a massive issue even on my tablet too, but many toolkits have this issue
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I disagree. GNOME is a bit buggy, but plasma is not designed for touch, and I think that matters a lot. Steam deck also has touchpads that most users use when mousing about their regular de, the steam decks touch support is mainly meant for the steam bigscreen ui.
I’m using Ubuntu/Gnome/Wayland on the lenovo tp tablet x1 and very happy overall. Mostly using it for browsing, zotero, xournal++ and almost everything works out of the box and very snappy. Not at the level of win or ipad but can do everything I need.
Gnome. It was designed first for touch and desktops last.
GNOME is the only one I use on my tablet
It has a few bugs. It’s not the smoothest, but it works pretty well
The gnome on screen keyboard feels lacking to me, there’s just something up with the user experience that puts me off
I have PopOS on one old HP notebook and Fedora with KDE Plasma on another. I barely use the touch screen capabilities but when I do I haven’t had any problems on either. Smooth all around, at least for my uses.
Phosh is good, very lightweight. Plasma is good, I have used it on a touch laptop. Never tried Plasma Mobile.
