2 ms·

To answer the general point first: >I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display ser

To answer the general point first: >I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display servers Phosh, Plasma Mobile and SXMO are DEs for phones and tablets, so they support touch fine. I run Phosh (also on pmOS) on my phone and have none of the problems you described. GNOME is also making its own GNOME Mobile. --- Now, for your specific hardware: I don't know how old your "old surface tablet" is, but I run postmarketOS on the very first Surface RT and it works fine. It uses the kernel from [1] and requires a one-time semi-complicated procedure to bypass Secure Boot and switch away from Windows [2], and even then it has some issues with CPU scaling etc not supported. So I won't recommend it as a general-purpose Linux tablet, but it's good enough for what I use it for. >On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland It's a Tegra 3 chipset so I don't run a wayland compositor on it (it would need CPU rendering), just Xorg with i3. I haven't tried an OSK inside i3, but the OSK at boot time to enter the disk encryption password (unl0kr) works fine. If you do run wayland, wayland-native programs should be able to auto-launch the OSK because they will invoke the input-method protocol, and xwayland programs probably won't. This is the behavior I see on my phone running Phosh - firefox and foot (terminal) showing wayland windows trigger the OSK (squeekboard), whereas chromium using xwayland does not. But even then, chromium does respond to the OSK input when I manually trigger the OSK. >X had trouble with screen rotation. The grate kernel supports reading the tablet's accelerometer sensor, so I just wrote a script to listen to iio-sensor-proxy signals and run `xrandr` to rotate the screen accordingly. [1] https://github.com/grate-driver/linux https://github.com/grate-driver/linux [2] https://openrt.gitbook.io/open-surfacert/common/boot-sequence/uefi/secure-boot/disable-secureboot https://openrt.gitbook.io/open-surfacert/common/boot-sequenc...

PrivateButts 3y ago
My point was more towards the 2-in-1s and tablet PCs, not really phone or 'true' tablets. Devices that have been pretty popular over the last decade, like Surface Pros (I had used a Pro 2 and Pro 3 during my experiment) or Lenovo Yogas. ---- Didn't really consider postmarketOS. I haven't played with installing mobile operating systems on desktop hardware in a long time. ---- Yeah I think what screwed my testing was applications that were using xwayland without me noticing. The stable firefox snap at the time (which is preinstalled on Ubuntu), uses it apparently. I have only used Xorg before, as I've never felt the need or desire to step into the tarpit that's migrating to Wayland. ---- Neat workaround for your tablet, glad it works well for you. ---- End of the day, I'm sure that I could have puttered on it and eventually got it all working (aside from the hardware on the surface that appears to be completely locked down), but it's a pretty poor showing out of the box. YMMV and all that, and I hope that more investment in the space makes it a better experience in the future.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  Phosh and SXMO at least (not sure about Plasma Mobile but probably it too) generalize to running on large screens with external keyboards etc, so they should work for such hardware too, so you can try them if you are still interested.

PrivateButts 3y ago

My point was more towards the 2-in-1s and tablet PCs, not really phone or 'true' tablets. Devices that have been pretty popular over the last decade, like Surface Pros (I had used a Pro 2 and Pro 3 during my experiment) or Lenovo Yogas. ---- Didn't really consider postmarketOS. I haven't played with installing mobile operating systems on desktop hardware in a long time. ---- Yeah I think what screwed my testing was applications that were using xwayland without me noticing. The stable firefox snap at the time (which is preinstalled on Ubuntu), uses it apparently. I have only used Xorg before, as I've never felt the need or desire to step into the tarpit that's migrating to Wayland. ---- Neat workaround for your tablet, glad it works well for you. ---- End of the day, I'm sure that I could have puttered on it and eventually got it all working (aside from the hardware on the surface that appears to be completely locked down), but it's a pretty poor showing out of the box. YMMV and all that, and I hope that more investment in the space makes it a better experience in the future.

Arnavion 3y ago
Phosh and SXMO at least (not sure about Plasma Mobile but probably it too) generalize to running on large screens with external keyboards etc, so they should work for such hardware too, so you can try them if you are still interested.