I recently was able to acquire an older Dell Venue 11 Pro 7130 with an Intel i3-4030Y and 4GB of RAM.
I installed Fedora GNOME spin thinking GNOME might be the right DE for touch interfaces. Sadly it behaves sluggishly and the touch capabilities are lacking. Nautilus for example can’t deal with long clicks to simulate right clicks, making file browsing a chore since I need to plug in a mouse and keyboard.
Does anyone have any experience with older convertibles? What distro do you use to make use of the touch interface while keeping a snappy system?
Try KDE Neon, it bundles Plasma that has nice touchscreen support and has a virtual keyboard installed that just needs to be enabled, if even necessary.
I second Plasma as a touch desktop. Neon is pretty great, but I’m not a huge fan of the LTS base + bleeding edge DE combo. I’d personally recommend either Fedora KDE for frequent updates overall, or Kubuntu LTS for general stabilty.
it’s a lackluster experience which ever way you turn. plasma has a better touch experience and consistency but its keyboard (maliit was it?) is horrible. GNOME’s keyboard is better but still crap.
everything feels like a proof-of-concept, something that was shipped in this sorta-works state and left. if you’ve ever used an android tablet, this is a long, long way off.
GNOME terrorized us for a decade with those comically gigantic UI elements because it’s supposedly touch friendly but the moment you start touching them it feels like utter crap.
try running android x86 on it, I had some good experiences with bliss OS. old kernels there, so hardware support is hit n miss.
PostmarketOS with Phosh or Plasma Mobile perhaps? Both are meant for relatively low powered, touch-first devices
Mobile Linux distributions for smartphones might offer some hints on how to tackle your problems - these apps are created in a convergent way, which makes them work well on laptops, tablets and PCs alike. Look for an alternate file manager, for example, to replace Nautilus. Check out https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/
Oh, and as for the touch UIs, not much luck if GNOME doesn’t work well enough. KDE can be made to run well with touch input, but for me it needed some work to configure it. But I liked it afterwards.
There are Mobile Linux UIs (which might run better on tight resources) but I am afraid they might not be good for multitasking on a tablet screen.
Gnome offers a setting that enables simulating a right-click by holding the left-click.
