Lightweight touch-capable distro

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?

SSUPII 12 points 3 years ago

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.

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Pantherina 1 point 3 years ago

Fedora KDE or better ublue.it Kinoite I would say.

Btw what did you choose?

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dingdongitsabear 9 points 3 years ago

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ISOmorph 2 points 3 years ago

Bliss looks really promising, thanks.

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DaTingGoBrrr 2 points 3 years ago

The new SteamOS has good support for touch but unfortunately it has no official release yet. HoloISO should be okey as long as you don't use Nvidia (because of wayland)

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dingdongitsabear 1 point 3 years ago

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Pantherina 1 point 3 years ago

Bliss is pretty old LineageOS based though. Would be great to have GrapheneOS or just DivestOS on x86

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amitkrxyz 2 points 3 years ago

Gnome offers a setting that enables simulating a right-click by holding the left-click.

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sado1 2 points 3 years ago

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/

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ISOmorph 2 points 3 years ago

Good idea. I'll look into integrating mobile apps into a KDE environment.

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sado1 1 point 3 years ago

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.

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tubbadu 2 points 3 years ago

I use KDE plasma with this plasmoid and this kwin script that I wrote to navigate between apps. Basically, each window is placed in its own virtual desktop, and the plasmoid allows to switch between desktops by sliding the finger on it. It's in a early development phase, so don't expect it to be perfect, but you can give it a try :)

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tubbadu 2 points 3 years ago

Oh and if your machine isn't too powerful, you can disable baloo (file indexer) if you don't need it

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Pantherina 2 points 3 years ago

Also KDE Connect and CUPS for security and probably battery. KDE connect needs to be uninnstalled or an empty desktop starter with touch ~/.local/share/applications/kdeconnectd.desktop afaik.

Cups is a systemd service so sudo systemctl disable --now cups.service && systemctl mask cups.service revert that with unmask and enable respectively. Cups is also as big security risk as Printers suck, printing from USB sticks is often a better solution.

pcmanfm-qt is a good replacement for Dolphin which is way slimmer and runs on Wayland natively, its simply the best filemanager for KDE or similar systems apart from Dolphin.

Debloating Fedora KDE is very much needed, Kinoite doesnt need to be.

I didnt test Video players but Celluloid is a modern MPV GUI that supports Wayland (literally the only video player it seems).

Browser have to be all fine because they are both pretty hard on resources.

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