So I’ve always wondered if the 2-in-1 form factor might be right for me, and today I pulled the trigger on a used 2-in-1 Dell Latitude 5320 13.3" w/ Intel i7-1185G7 16GB RAM 256GB SSD off eBay.
Any specific distros or desktop environments that I should look into or steer clear of in terms of touch/tablet functionality?
I’m used to Gnome and/or Cinnamon, but open to trying other things. I would love to hear from the community. Thanks!
Something with KDE or GNOME. KDE has better convertible support overall, but currently no working software keyboard (plasma-keyboard is in development tho)
GNOME has no adaptive things, works fine tho and has a software keyboard
Malliit works great as a software keyboard on KDE
It is fine but requires the complete Kf5 Qt5 bundle (which is end of life) because it is unmaintained. But yes, that is what you would use for now
I can recommended the latest KDE Plasma, I use it on my 2-in-1. Some quirks here and there, but very good in general, especially if yoh set up gestures to switch between workspaces. I also tried gnome but that was ages ago.
How has your experience been w/ on-screen keyboard support in KDE Plasma? Any issues like the ones boredsquirrel mentions?
I use Maalit (or is it Maliit? I can never recall). It works and has an extended symbols button, just like a mobile phone osk. It doesn’t have a proper configuration panel, it’s instead configured by gsettings or something, I have never actually tried. It also as a quirk with a swipe-down gestures that is used to disable it, and is sometimes activated accidentally by the palm of the hand. But apart from that, really nice experience overall.
Zorin OS makes it easier with their Gnome skins and their touch input preset theme.
Its basically Ubuntu LTS underneath the custom UI changes. Similar to Mint’s approach, but still using Gnome.
I use Gnome on the two in one. Two in one tends to be useful to occasionally watch a video in tent or some other orientation. The keyboard disable isn’t great but your laptop is likely better supported.
Try out Zorin OS.
i did something similar in the past and just used xfce with onscreen keyboard. other options were too dumbed down for desktop usage.
Congrats on the new gear! I have a 2-in-1 Dell laptop and a Surface Go 2, both running Debian 13. In laptop mode, I really like GNOME, in tablet mode it’s… fine. The biggest problem is the GNOME OSK, which honestly is not great. It frequently needs to be manually triggered (instead of automatically opening when clicking in a text-entry zone) and it’s missing just about every modifier key unless you’re in terminal mode. And GNOME (in its infinite wisdom), decided that the user shouldn’t have the choice of when to put the keyboard in terminal mode. There is one extension, https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5949/gjs-osk/, which helps, but it just duplicates a hardware keyboard virtually instead of providing a fully featured mobile-style keyboard.
On my tablet I use Phosh, which can be installed on top of GNOME and provides a mobile-forward UI and a much better OSK. The Phosh-tablet metapackage in Debian 13 doesn’t take up much disk space and, IMHO, will give you a much better touch experience than vanilla GNOME (if you don’t mind switching back and forth depending on whether you are in tablet mode or laptop mode). Other than the inconvenience of switching back and forth, the only bug I’ve noticed is that maximize/minimize/close buttons need to be restored when switching from Phosh back to GNOME Shell.
Gnome is pretty much the only game in town for tablet devices. KDE does have a superior OSK in my experience, but overall it’s just bad at everything else you’d want for a tablet format.
This confirms my suspicion, thanks for the info.
I can’t speak from personal experience but I would recommend this video.
https://youtu.be/nCSs4CbxZHkI used Ubuntu on an old Surface Pro and it worked really well.
Would that be the GNOME desktop?
Yes but they change it quite a lot. Nick from TheLinuxExperiment tested it and thought touch support was broken, but it was jusr Ubuntus changes. Vanilla GNOME might be better
