Hello all!
Given that Windows 10 is going to be unsupported by the end of this year, I was planning on switching to Linux since my laptop doesn’t meet the requirements to run Windows 11.
My current laptop is an HP Pavilion x360 and by far, my favourite part about it is how it’s not only a touchscreen, but the hinges allow the laptop screen to lay completely flat just like a tablet, (the interface even changes to a more tablet ish version) it’s great for watching movies and drawing. When I switch over to Linux, I want to be able to keep as much of this feature as much as possible. I was planning on installing Elementary OS as it’s designed to be more ‘plug and play’ as I’m not super tech savvy. When I was looking into if converting a touchscreen laptop to Linux, I read that Ubuntu has some touchscreen support which Elementary OS is based on, but I’m not sure how good it is, as all the Reddit threads on the topic were pretty old.
Whats the touchscreen support on Ubuntu like now? If you have a touchscreen laptop running Linux at the moment, how responsive is the screen? Is there other distrios that support touchscreen that are don’t have a steep learning curve?
Thanks!
One thing to understand here is that it mostly depends on the “desktop environment”, which is basically the GUI of the system. (Imagine you could have the Windows XP GUI on a Windows 11 PC. Or the macOS GUI on a Windows 11 PC.)
Distros intended for desktop use will typically come with a certain desktop environment by default, so to some degree, you can talk about the distro, but yeah, there’s just gonna be a strong correlation with their default desktop environment.
To my knowledge, GNOME and (recent/Wayland versions of) KDE have good support. Most comments here imply these two desktop environments, so for example Ubuntu, Fedora and POP!_OS are typically GNOME, whereas Kubuntu and Nobara are typically KDE.
Some folks here also mention Linux Mint and LMDE working well, which use the Cinnamon desktop environment, so I guess that works well, too. Cinnamon is somewhat based on GNOME.
Well, and Elementary OS’s whole shtick is its Pantheon desktop environment, which is also based on GNOME.
So, basically, as Elementary’s Pantheon is its own thing, there’s no guarantee that it’ll work, but I would not be surprised.
As someone else already said, you can use a Linux Live USB to try it out before installing. You should be able to just follow along the installation instructions of Elementary OS and shortly before you actually install things, you should find yourself in Pantheon and can try it out.
The Linux Experiment recently looked into touchscreen support of different desktop enviromenents. His findings mostly align with your comment. However, this seems to be one of the rare cases where the distro matters for Gnome. Upstream Gnome (e.g., as shipped by Fedora) works fine with touch screens, but support on Ubuntu Gnome appears to be quite broken.
The Linux Experiment videos: