What's your experience with a touchscreen laptop on your distro?

Hello everyone!

I’m finally tired enough of the invasive and anti-consumer practices of Windows to convert over. I’m going to start with my laptop, but I’m concerned about compatibility for 2-in-1 convertible touchscreens.

A distro that’s sufficient for both computers would be ideal for consistency’s and simplicity’s sake.

  • 2-in-1 convertible touchscreen laptop. Can be folded into a “tablet” mode. Used for web browsing and simple games
  • Main workstation for gaming, programming, etc. NVIDIA GPU (no touchscreen)

Most anecdotes say touchscreen support is hit or miss, and the On Screen Keyboard / Auto-rotate support is an additional challenge. MINT with cinnamon seems to be the best contender at the moment due to its compatibly with most games and the touchscreen support seems to be there.

But, I’d love some fresh perspectives as most sources were ~a year old. Thanks for your time!

Morgoth_Bauglir,

I actually just went through this exact situation in the last month and I switched to LMDE6 on my 2-in-1 lenovo touch screen. Auto rotation didn’t work right out the gate, but iio-sensor-proxy fixed that. In general, I’ve noticed that the touchscreen default setting for some apps (eg, firefox) treats touches as a mouse click, so rather than scrolling it would select text. But I’ve found this AskUbuntu fix worked for me. Been a good experience since then.

julianh,

I’ve been using fedora on a surface go 3 and it’s been a good experience - auto rotate works and osk mostly works. In general Gnome seems to be the best DE for touchscreens, especially if you use it in tablet mode a lot. You’re gonna at least want something up to date and probably using Wayland, so I wouldn’t go with mint.

One option is to use something like Fedora or Arch for both PCs, but use a different desktop environment (gnome on the 2-in-1, kde on the desktop).

joyjoy,

Using an xps17 2019. The touch screen works ok, but it stops working after closing the lid. Using EndeavourOS with Wayland btw.

dylanmorgan,

I use Fedora on a gen 7 Carbon X1 thinkpad and the small amount I use the touch screen has worked fine.

Jakeroxs, (edited )

I also use Fedora Wayland but on a HP Spectre X360 from like 2013 or something, touch screen works fine and overall runs a lot better then win 10 was prior.

SaintWacko,

I use an old Surface Pro 3 with PopOS and it works perfectly

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