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Best DE for tablet use (and surface pro 3 with linux)

AlexGoesHigh
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So, my workplace has decide to throw away some old surface pro 3 that have been replaced and in storage for years and they allowed people to take them if they desired, so i decided to snag one for myself, since its basically an over 10 years old computer that has a mere 4GB of RAM i'm just gonna put linux on it straight away, looking up manjaro seems to be the best distro to install on them, as of now i just managed to boot into manjaro with the KDE DE and everything works on it except wifi but the fix seems to be to just install an additional firmware package from the repositories (and i haven't tested the pen which i have cause its looks to be out of battery so i ordered both the AAAA and 2 319 coin cells but i don't have those until tomorrow)

 

Anyways with the very brief time i had booting into the live ISO with KDE it seems to be not great for tablet use which i care cause i mostly snagged to use for drawing, not the best tablet for it but I'm not gonna complain since i got it pretty much for free.

 

Regardless, is there any DE that best suited for tablets? even better if its at least in the manjaro repos but i don't mind hassling around to make it work in manjaro though i suspect it wouldn't be to hard or obscure to do given its arch under the hood where pretty much anything in linux already works on it.

this is one of the greatest thing that has happened to me recently, and it happened on this forum, those involved have my eternal gratitude http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/198850-update-alex-got-his-moto-g2-lets-get-a-moto-g-for-alexgoeshigh-unofficial/ :')

i use to have the second best link in the world here, but it died ;_; its a 404 now but it will always be here

 

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5 minutes ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

So, my workplace has decide to throw away some old surface pro 3 that have been replaced and in storage for years and they allowed people to take them if they desired, so i decided to snag one for myself, since its basically an over 10 years old computer that has a mere 4GB of RAM i'm just gonna put linux on it straight away, looking up manjaro seems to be the best distro to install on them, as of now i just managed to boot into manjaro with the KDE DE and everything works on it except wifi but the fix seems to be to just install an additional firmware package from the repositories (and i haven't tested the pen which i have cause its looks to be out of battery so i ordered both the AAAA and 2 319 coin cells but i don't have those until tomorrow)

 

Anyways with the very brief time i had booting into the live ISO with KDE it seems to be not great for tablet use which i care cause i mostly snagged to use for drawing, not the best tablet for it but I'm not gonna complain since i got it pretty much for free.

 

Regardless, is there any DE that best suited for tablets? even better if its at least in the manjaro repos but i don't mind hassling around to make it work in manjaro though i suspect it wouldn't be to hard or obscure to do given its arch under the hood where pretty much anything in linux already works on it.

 

Gnome is the best DE for tablets.

Asus Zephurs Duo 2023:

 

CPU: 7945HX

GPU: 4090M

OS: BazziteOS

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You want GNOME for tablets and I'd probably go with Fedora Workstation as they have the best ootb config for GNOME and tablet support. Id also enable typing booster under input methods if you want auto completion for the on screen keyboard.

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Thanks both, gonna try gnome tomorrow on it then, not a fan of it on desktop though but given the environment its worth a try. 

this is one of the greatest thing that has happened to me recently, and it happened on this forum, those involved have my eternal gratitude http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/198850-update-alex-got-his-moto-g2-lets-get-a-moto-g-for-alexgoeshigh-unofficial/ :')

i use to have the second best link in the world here, but it died ;_; its a 404 now but it will always be here

 

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On 5/8/2024 at 2:18 PM, Nayr438 said:

You want GNOME for tablets and I'd probably go with Fedora Workstation as they have the best ootb config for GNOME and tablet support. Id also enable typing booster under input methods if you want auto completion for the on screen keyboard.

So bone stock gnome?

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5 hours ago, 10leej said:

So bone stock gnome?

Stock GNOME shipped with it's accessibility dependencies and accessibility compatible apps. Canonical butchers it with their own implementation of various things and most other distros just ship a base config typically with added extensions surrounding whatever the latest trend is that doesn't always play nice.

Fedora Workstation is the only distro that I know of that actually ships a complete vanilla GNOME Desktop Environment with GNOME's accessibility in mind and focuses on accessibility across other software. As a added bonus it also happens to be one of the distros that ships with a working secure boot setup, the SP3 can weird about it sometimes.

And when I say accessibility that includes things like tablet, pen, and on screen keyboard support, it's just kind of how GNOME has it grouped together. An interesting one for example is GNOME console still doesn't support GNOME Accessibility features and as a result Fedora still ships Terminal by default.

With that said you could reach the same goal on any distro, it's more about the ootb experience.

I often use Fedora Workstation as a reference for Arch because of how well it's put together.

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On 5/8/2024 at 11:08 AM, AlexGoesHigh said:

So, my workplace has decide to throw away some old surface pro 3 that have been replaced and in storage for years and they allowed people to take them if they desired, so i decided to snag one for myself, since its basically an over 10 years old computer that has a mere 4GB of RAM i'm just gonna put linux on it straight away, looking up manjaro seems to be the best distro to install on them, as of now i just managed to boot into manjaro with the KDE DE and everything works on it except wifi but the fix seems to be to just install an additional firmware package from the repositories (and i haven't tested the pen which i have cause its looks to be out of battery so i ordered both the AAAA and 2 319 coin cells but i don't have those until tomorrow)

 

Anyways with the very brief time i had booting into the live ISO with KDE it seems to be not great for tablet use which i care cause i mostly snagged to use for drawing, not the best tablet for it but I'm not gonna complain since i got it pretty much for free.

 

Regardless, is there any DE that best suited for tablets? even better if its at least in the manjaro repos but i don't mind hassling around to make it work in manjaro though i suspect it wouldn't be to hard or obscure to do given its arch under the hood where pretty much anything in linux already works on it.

Gnome one of the DEs that has best support for tablets, gestures etc. 

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