Looking for a good tablet PC distro

I just inherited a handful of Samsung Series 7 Slate PCs that I’d like to rebuild to be as “tablet-like” as possible for a few non-technical friends and family. They power up but arrived with non-functional Windows 7 installs. They’re Intel Core i5s with 4G RAM and 128G SSDs, so they should run pretty well under any popular Linux distro. I’m personally comfortable in the command line and don’t want to sacrifice the fact that these are “real computers with a real OS” on them, but I’d still like them to behave somewhat similar to Android tablets for less techie users.

If these were laptops with keyboards and trackpads I’d probably just install kubuntu or Mint on them and call it a day, but I’m not sure if KDE Plasma behaves well on a touchscreen tablet interface with (hopefully) an on-screen keyboard and so forth. Ubuntu Touch sounds somewhat promising, but I haven’t really played with it. I don’t want to waste hours trying to get device drivers to work for the touchscreen and other built-in hardware, so I’m hoping for a novice-friendly distro that usually just works out of the box on most hardware.

Does anyone have an obvious choice they’d like to recommend? Thanks so much!

Hector,

I have a Microsoft Surface tablet and Fedora with GNOME works pretty well on it. I usually use a stylus or the magnetic keyboard with it but when I do use the touch screen I dont encounter issues. I use PaperWM on top of GNOME and it makes it all so easy to use.

Pacmanlives, (edited )

Might want to check out Ubuntu Unity. It was made more Netbooks(when those where a thing) and Touchscreens. But as another poster pointed out Bliss looks really nice for this use case

DetachablePianist,

I’ll look at that, thanks! I put Bliss on one and I’m not really happy with it yet. Just trying to type my wifi password had the UI wigging out on me, had to use a usb kb just to type the pass. I’ll look into Ubuntu Unity tho, thanks!

nyan,

Just a note: there are a few on-screen software keyboards for X out there that aren’t tied to a specific DE, like xvkbd and svkbd. They might be worth trying if you find some distro that works well except that the default on-screen keyboard sucks. (No idea if there’s any equivalent for Wayland.)

DetachablePianist,

Great idea; thanks!

unmagical,

I have a tablet running fedora with gnome. While it works for me I cannot recommend it at all for something I’d give to someone else.

On the surface gnome looks useable as a mobile DE, but the reality is that it requires several gnome extensions to get it in a useable state (I’m talking having a reliable way to copy and paste). Those extensions are not necessarily updated at the same cadence as gnome or fedora so my ability to consistently use the device in a predictable manner is gone if I install the latest updates when available (and after years of training users to install updates when available someone you give the tablet too will click the update pop-up).

Regarding drivers, the only thing that doesn’t work on mine is the camera. I’d recommend trying out a few choices on a live boot and seeing just how much effort you have to make it useable.

DetachablePianist,

Yeah, I’ll definitely burn a few ISOs to usb to live test. I’ll be sure to update my post with the chosen winner once I pick one.

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

BlissOS blissos.org

DetachablePianist,

Looks interesting, I’ll check it out!

drwankingstein,

While I agree that it is the best tablet experience, I think that’s strething the definition of a distro pretty hard lol

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

It’s literally a distribution of an operating system that uses the Linux kernel, therefore a Linux distribution.

It’s, for example, not a Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD.

drwankingstein,

you will likely find that most people will disagree with that, the general consensus of a “Linux distro” is that gnu/linux stuff. Personally I would consider it distros in which the apps would mostly use the general linux runtime stacks since musl based distros I would still consider a general linux distro. Android uses it’s own distinct runtime, for the vast majority of usage, and although using things like termux we can get close, how android is setup it lacks a good chunk of things that can only be resolved with a chroot/proot

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t need to find people in agreement, just as I don’t need to find out whether people agree with the Earth being round or flat. Sometimes a fact is just a fact.

If you want to argue whether something like Alpine Linux that builds upon musl instead of GNU’s libc is a Linux distribution or not, please take that discussion there. I merely wanted to give OP a suggestion what should work best with his laptops.

drwankingstein,

I think it’s worth keeping in mind since when people ask for something, they generally want something specific. in this case they asked for a distro, so there is a non insiginificant chance they wanted a “generally agreed upon distro”

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Quote: “I’d still like them to behave somewhat similar to Android tablets for less techie users.”

Also OP gave a positive reply.

Can you leave me alone now with your wrong notions of “there is no Linux if it’s not GNU/Linux”? I’m not interested in discussing that.

drwankingstein,

each one of them has issues, I cant in good conscious recommend any atm

DetachablePianist,

That’s a shame. I have a few promising leads to look into; I’ll update this post with my findings and chosen winner once I pick one

Sarcasmo220,

It sounds like you have a few devices, so I would recommend trying out this testing distro with MauiShell. There is a testing iso under the heading “Downloads and Sources” in this most recent blog post about its development progress.

mauikit.org/blog/maui-release-briefing-4/

a0193143,

In my experience, both GNOME and KDE’s pure touchscreen experience are not good as Android or ChromeOS for now, and not even close to Windows 10.

GNOME has its onscreen keyboard, although not bad actually.

I haven’t been using GNOME for two years, so maybe there’s some improvement?

My suggestion is give ChromeOS a shot (Brunch Framework), if you don’t mind Google things.

DetachablePianist,

hmm, anything Google is usually not my first choice, but thanks for the suggestion! If I’m not happy with other options I might give chrome a shot anyway. Thanks!

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