Linux @lemmy.ml MTK @lemmy.world 11mo ago

Best DE for touch screens but also normal use

Hi!

I have an HP 360 which has a touch screen and I never found a DE that is great for both regular input and touch input.

Kde is great for regular stuff but meh with touch, gnome is the other way around.

I was thinking of trying out hyperland but didn't look into it's touch compitability.

Any suggestions?

I use arch btw.

30 comments

Gnome 100%. I personally like gnome for mouse and keyboard use but it's really a no brainer for touch screen use.
- GTK4 currently has a bug where touch inputs will sometimes randomly stop working for an app.
  
  could you link to the issue
Currently most likely GNOME, maybe KDE 6 in a month.

Gestures feel nice on Hyprland, but to my knowledge there's only a workspace swipe gesture by default. Also note that it's not a DE.
- It's not?
  
  It's a tiling window manager, like i3 or bspwm.
  
  You have to pick out all the software (terminal, filemanager, text editor, whatever else a DE provides idk, but also things like a panel or launcher) yourself. Easy choices for that are KDE software (Konsole, Dolphin, Kate, etc), waybar, and rofi-wayland.
  
  It also doesn't have a settings application (unless you use the very WIP and pretty outdated hyprset), all the configuration is in a file.
Plasma on Wayland worked well for me, when i had a 2-in-1
No doubt Gnome.
I use sway, touch input works and gestures can be configured too
- How does a tiling window manager even work with touch?
  
  Sway is probably meh because it's a manual tiler. I use sway-autotiling in laptop mode and don't bother with switching the layout in tablet mode.
  
  But generally the question should be "How does a stacking window manager even work with touch?" The answer is "like shit". Instead of having your windows automatically placed on the screen, you have to drag them around with your stylus.
  
  I used to use KDE Bismuth (tiler for Plasma) and it was the best experience on a touchscreen I could imagine. I mainly used 2 tiling layouts. The usual Master+Stack for regular use and when watching lectures I used a layout which is almost stacking but makes the windows slightly smaller than full screen, so you can grab the window on the bottom easily. I had a keybind which reduced the opacity of a window making it see-through. That way I could have my lecture over almost the full screen while still being able to write over almost the entire screen.
  
  Plasma also has the option to do something when you drag from a specific screen edge. I used that to launch the app launcher, to select workspaces and lock the screen.
  
  With gestures and and waybar it can work pretty good, its not easy to setup though
GNOME or KDE. These are your choices.
Definitely gnome wayland. I have tried plasma wayland but it didn't work as well (gnome apps seem to be more touch-friendly than qt ones) and there's no built-in virtual keyboard. I also tried a custom setup with sway, wofi, wvkbd, wlogout, and some other stuff but it kinda sucked for touch.
Search "touch" in plasma settings and enable most of them.
Manjaro Gnome worked with my Lenovo T480s out of the box.
Honestly, I tried Plasma on my friend's 2-in-1 laptop and it's pretty great with gestures and touch. I haven't tried gnome but I can definitely recommend plasma.
Gnome. It's made for touchscreens, but forced on desktop users.
- Not even slightly true lol
  
  It works very well on desktops, and is forced upon nobody.
  
  When distros make it the default DE, that's forcing it on them. No different then Microsoft bundling a specific browser. I also disagree that it works well on desktops. It lacks features, and tweaking it to resemble and behave like a more common desktop design is cumbersome.
I can't stand using Gnome, but it is the only one that's vaguely touch friendly. If you pile enough extensions in there, it becomes usable. Plasma has always been a disaster for me on tablets. Maybe 6 will be better, but I'm not holding my breath.
KDE Plasma.
I would say plasma, Gnome has too many stupid issues for it to be a real contender IMO. I constantly found gnome to be laggy on my chuwi, even to the point that it would occasionally drop inputs.
- GNOME is built for touch. if I rotate my HP laptop 90 degrees sideways, GNOME automatically rotates the screen to suit. Its why latest gnome has so many multifinger touch gestures for interacting with screen
  
  Gnome might be built for touch, but that doesn't make it a great experience. Also KDE automatically rotates for me too.
- I'm DE-agnostic. What do you mean by 'stupid issues'? That's not really specific.
  
  off the top of my head,
  
  Performance of gnome isn't great I often find it laggy on my lower end devices.
  
  Configuring gnome requires two separate GUI apps, and then you still may need cli.
  
  Gnome apps like nautilus, the file browser are also absurdly slow, sometimes taking more then 4 seconds for me (and others see here https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-mess-is-not-an-accident-4e301032670c) to load thumbnails.
  
  I found gestures to be inconsistent on my Chuwi hi10x too. They often times wouldn't work and I would need to try multiple times.
  
  I did have other issues, but I didn't exactly log them.

30 comments