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!
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My previous laptop had a touch screen, and the Linux driver worked for it with no configuration on my end. Not exactly what you’re asking about, but I was impressed by how it “just worked”.
But that was a traditional laptop.
Yes but your mileage may vary. My pavilion x360 had okay out of the box support for it’s touchscreen. I don’t remember if tilt worked.
My touchscreen is currently busted and the hinges broke the case (and probably the digitizer) so I stopped using the convertible function of it.
Arch Linux on Dell 7389 : just works. Also had OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on this machine, best installer ever.
Debian on Thinkpad X390 Yoga : with included variable-pressure pen, the touchscreen is actually a wacom tablet, perfect. Also, one if the best installer there is.
Ubuntu on Thinkpad T480s : just works. Installing Ubuntu today is literally just a couple of clicks. Wife hasn’t complained in 3 years, this distro must be doing it right.
(Everything Gnome here, no additional setup whatsoever. The KDE gang will argue that Plasma has a lot of goodies for touchscreens, be sure to check it out)
My last laptop was an HP Stream. Crappy laptop, but it had a touchscreen. It worked fine whenever I remembered that it had a touch screen. I didn’t have to set anything up, it was just automagicly setup for me on Ubuntu. Couldn’t tell you how responsive it was and that laptop would have been a poor benchmark anyways, but if I touched a button or scrolled the screen, it would do the thing.
Sorry, I’m old. Prefer a physical keyboard to a screen keyboard any day.
Tell me you understand the health risks with unnecessary touchscreen use.
Do these health risks apply to phones :/?
Yes, I tried PostmarketOS with Phosh on my old Lenovo Ideapad. It just works without tinkering.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad L13 Yoga with Mint and touch screen works perfect. Only thing not configured yet is screen rotation.
Also works fine with an external USB-C touch screen with extended desktop, but a command to re-position touch location is needed, and when going back to internal screen only (haven’t automated it with udev rules yet).
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:
I can’t see why it shouldn’t be. I have used it with touch screens. It works great. Remember that Android is linux too, and that really spurred the development in that area… :-)
I have an x360 running bazzite with gnome and it runs great.
I have Nobara running on an old Lenovo Flex 15 with an 8th gen i5. Everything on it worked right out of the box including the multi-touch screen, I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work on any other distro. I can’t tell the difference in responsiveness between Windows and Linux on it.
I have LMDE on an old Lenovo Yoga, but it doesn’t disable the keyboard when in tablet mode. It’s on my list of crap I need to fix. Make sure to check that behavior before you go full install.
I’ve used an Acer Spin 5 and Dell Latitude 7440 with Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora and NixOS over the years without many issues.
I’ve heard that the x360 laptop you have may be a little troublesome but you can always test things out on a live Linux USB.
- I’ve heard that the sound quality might be degraded on Linux, or certain speakers don’t work
- The flip switch doesn’t work, meaning that the keyboard and trackpad aren’t disabled when flipped.
Ofc, there are a few x360 laptops so it might not apply, I’d encourage you to just give it a go with a live USB.
For using your stylus for note taking, I’d recommend trying Xournal++ and/or Rnote
Yes, I run Pop_OS on my Lenovo Yoga 6, no complaints whatsoever
Same setup here no problems
Yoga 11e here. Fedora (Plasma Edition) worked perfect right out of the box.
I’ve been running kubuntu on a lenovo yoga for years, works great.
I think the only think is that the touch screen maps incorrectly when there’s a second monitor plugged in. I didn’t use it enough for that to be annoying, and it’s possible it’s fixed on plasma 6, I haven’t tried yet.
