What Linux Desktop Environment do you use on tablets?
Currently, I use GNOME on my tablet. While the general UI/UX and features are really good, its on-screen keyboard is inconvenient, buggy and not usable in terminal.
Is there any better alternative Desktop Environment (with Wayland support) primarily for browsing the Internet, reading e-books,... and occasionally typing in terminal?
I really can't stand any of the DE's. I have a perfectly customized set up for Awesome WM. It's very low resources, so works equally well on my high spec'd Thinkpad, as well as on a 10 year old netbook. I'm considering getting one of these for learning on the go: https://liliputing.com/2020/07/linux-on-the-onegx1-mini-lapt.... I'll definitely install awesome and leave gnome as a fallback.
GNOME3 really needs a better OSK. It should be possible to replicate the featureset of The Hacker Keyboard (for AOSP, available in F-Droid), which does include a full PC keyboard layout with a choice of reduced subsets.
Most of my tablets run Android and seem locked down and unable to run some alternative Linux desktop environment. These are mostly slower arm based machines that I think would be difficult to load a clean Linux onto them. I'd love to be wrong because the versions of Android are becoming quite slow on these devices.
I did pick up an inexpensive Intel bay trail tablet a couple years back that I now run Void Linux on. I don't run any desktop environment on it. I don't even have Xorg (or Wayland) installed! I mostly use it as an always on "server" and ssh into it daily. The only problem is that it seems like it's not possible to turn the backlight off so eventually that will burn out I guess (I think lifetime is 100 000 hours). I did manage to set the brightness to 0 but for some reason the backlight will not turn off.
I know most Linux die-hards probably think it's sacrilege but the best Linux experience on a tablet is ChromeOS.
You can enable Linux apps in settings, and it gives you a Debian terminal. If you install apps there (ex: GIMP or VS Code) app icons show up in the ChromeOS launcher, and it uses Wayland forwarding to integrate their windows into the ChromeOS Window manager so they feel native.
And as far as tablet interface goes, the UI is a bit less polished than Android but similar and (IMO) very competent. Way better than Gnome and friends. Oh, and you can install any Android app you want!
I use my Lenovo Duet a ton now. Only thing holding back this particular device is ARM compat with some dev tools.
Which tablet are you using?
I used a customised MATE on a Raspberry Pi with touch screen. It wasn't an amazing experience, but the on-screen keyboard was reasonable. I don't know what OSK Gnome uses - it could just be a version of the same thing - but the one in Ubuntu MATE for the Pi was OnBoard.
I'm using Zorin (Gnome 3) and the touchscreen support it has is just great.
Android, actually.
It provides all the apps I need on the go, including a desktop like environment when I plug my bluetooth keyboard and mouse into it, including some programming.
I have given up trying to fit GNU/Linux into places where it doesn't come pre-installed out of the box, also it advances the technology stack further of the C and C++ desktops that GNU/Linux is stuck with.
Ironically it is the closest we have to Inferno/Limbo ideas.
I briefly tried Ubuntu on a notebook computer. Very briefly. Touch screen performance and battery performance were both poor, which would have been show stoppers for a tablet.
I don't know what layer of a Linux system is responsible for making the touch screen or battery work better, but I suspect it's not the fault of any specific distro.
I use a Lenovo X1 Yoga 2-in-1 for my daily and tried Ubuntu, Manjaro and PopOS. All of them sadly completely paled in comparison to Windows for out of the box tablet experience. Weird sizing issues, high battery usage, no face recognition login (extremely useful in tablet mode) I’m back to using WSL2.
I'm using Gnome 3, on Manjaro, with the surface-linux kernel. It's fine for touch use, but writing is a poor experience compared to Windows with OneNote. Sluggish response, glitchy, limited feature set etc.
Not exactly "tablet" its a hybrid, but on my Yoga 11e the only one that works like a champ is Solus, alas some features like "tent" eg screen auto-rotate are not working automatically.
Has anyone tried running a full distro in chroot on a Galaxy tab s7 (e.g. with Andronix or similar)? Love the device but I need Chrome's dev tools so Android won't cut it.
Why not Android? It's Linux, and it has tons of Google-researched optimizations that you're unlikely to get from Linux distros (at least the same level of polish).
Opensuse with kde had worked ok for me on an old surface pro.
Strangely it has an on-screen keyboard to login, but not once you login. It's pretty easy to add one.
I used to run Gallium on my touchscreen chromebook. Really enjoyed that combo until the chromebook died.
Same question but for general Linux distros.
Not sure I'm willing to try Ubuntu for the 8th time. I use Linux server all the time, but I don't want to mess with configurations and installing a bunch of unique software to get netflix to work. More bloatwear the better. (I half joke)
Definitely don't recommend owning any tablet.