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?
Does Android support x86? Might be worth a look. Yes, I know it’s not strictly Linux, but it’s certainly designed for tablets.
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.
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.
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.
What type of device is it? If it’s a Surface device there’s a few distros that include the Surface Kernel add-ons, if none of the ones with it included suit you, you can compile the add-ons into the kernel for any Linux distro.
kDE Neon project might work ymmv.
unity from ubuntu would have been perfect since that is exactly what it was designed for; but it’s not a thing anymore.
if the tablet has low specs; i would go with a minimalist distro like damn small or puppy linux.
There’s some keeping it alive. Name now is Lomiri
this looks great since i loved unity; thanks for making me aware.
Should be plenty fast enough to handle Gnome or KDE. I think you’ll also want ZRAM because presumably your RAM won’t be much and your storage will either be slow or limited. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to enable.
I think both DEs are very touchscreen viable, with the possibility that you may have to configure a teeny bit, like adding a virtual keyboard
