I just inherited a handful of Samsung Series 7 Slate PCs that I’d like to rebuild to be as “tablet-like” as possible for a few non-technical friends and family. They power up but arrived with non-functional Windows 7 installs. They’re Intel Core i5s with 4G RAM and 128G SSDs, so they should run pretty well under any popular Linux distro. I’m personally comfortable in the command line and don’t want to sacrifice the fact that these are “real computers with a real OS” on them, but I’d still like them to behave somewhat similar to Android tablets for less techie users.
If these were laptops with keyboards and trackpads I’d probably just install kubuntu or Mint on them and call it a day, but I’m not sure if KDE Plasma behaves well on a touchscreen tablet interface with (hopefully) an on-screen keyboard and so forth. Ubuntu Touch sounds somewhat promising, but I haven’t really played with it. I don’t want to waste hours trying to get device drivers to work for the touchscreen and other built-in hardware, so I’m hoping for a novice-friendly distro that usually just works out of the box on most hardware.
Does anyone have an obvious choice they’d like to recommend? Thanks so much!
Edit - Update:
Zorin OS (Edu) for the win, with Pop! OS essentially a tie. Both distros do a fantastic job out of the box offering tablet options like on screen keyboards that automatically pop up when needed. I’m giving Zorin the win only because it just happened to be the last distro I installed and haven’t had a reason to replace it yet.
Distros I tested for use on these tablets:
Bliss OS - Honestly, I really wanted to like this, in spite of it being an Android clone instead of a proper Linux DE. It sports an obviously tablet-friendly UI that almost won me over… except there were horrible issues just typing in basic settings like wifi password. The keyboard kept disappearing mid-password, making me start over repeatedly. I finally had to grab a real keyboard to join wifi, and it still misbehaved. Not an experience I want my less geeky family members to share.
kubuntu - I run this on a personal laptop and was biased toward it from the start. It isn’t really a great tablet experience though, even with xvkbd installed. Works great while docked of course, since it’s a Linux DE I already use.
ubuntu-unity - Another good DE, but just not very tablet friendly. I guess I hoped this would be more like Ubuntu Touch, which I was really excited about as a new phone possibility awhile ago, but just never really went anywhere. Instead it’s just Ubuntu with the Unity DE and no automatic on-screen kb.
Pop! OS - I really like this, and might start playing with it more as a laptop OS as well. I truly love KDE Plasma, but I also find Pop!'s DE really intuitive.
Zorin OS (Edu) Loved this, left it installed. Their built-in Windows App compatibility (wine + PlayOnLinux) comes pre-configured to provide a surprisingly refreshing user experience. On a fluke, I wanted to see if I could run my mixer app on the tablet, and starting with nothing more than downloading the installer .exe file from Mackie’s website, Zorin prompted me all the way through to a working app. Friendliest wine experience I’ve ever had, by miles.
Anyone have anything else they’d like to recommend? I’m always interested. Did I not give a popular distro a fair enough shot? I admittedly didn’t invest a huge amount of time stress-testing each distro beyond initial setup and config from within the tablet-specific interface. I was mainly testing for out-of-box tablet experience, especially in regards to basic setup like joining wifi and attempting to browse the web, which shouldn’t require a hard kb connected IMO.
Edit 2: Fixed copy/paste edit issue, no new info)
I have a tablet running fedora with gnome. While it works for me I cannot recommend it at all for something I’d give to someone else.
On the surface gnome looks useable as a mobile DE, but the reality is that it requires several gnome extensions to get it in a useable state (I’m talking having a reliable way to copy and paste). Those extensions are not necessarily updated at the same cadence as gnome or fedora so my ability to consistently use the device in a predictable manner is gone if I install the latest updates when available (and after years of training users to install updates when available someone you give the tablet too will click the update pop-up).
Regarding drivers, the only thing that doesn’t work on mine is the camera. I’d recommend trying out a few choices on a live boot and seeing just how much effort you have to make it useable.
Yeah, I’ll definitely burn a few ISOs to usb to live test. I’ll be sure to update my post with the chosen winner once I pick one.
In my experience, both GNOME and KDE’s pure touchscreen experience are not good as Android or ChromeOS for now, and not even close to Windows 10.
GNOME has its onscreen keyboard, although not bad actually.
I haven’t been using GNOME for two years, so maybe there’s some improvement?
My suggestion is give ChromeOS a shot (Brunch Framework), if you don’t mind Google things.
hmm, anything Google is usually not my first choice, but thanks for the suggestion! If I’m not happy with other options I might give chrome a shot anyway. Thanks!
Maybe ChromiumOS Flex? But its probably not available as install medium (with drivers, DRM, hardware acceleration, …) anywhere.
Also its just for
- Chrome(-ium) and Webapps, a lot of Google
- Android Apps (not all)
- Linux in a Container in a VM. Nice to setup but overkill and then no RAM advantage
Basically GrapheneOS vs. AOSP. AOSP is also very hard to use.
I’d go with Pop or a gnome distro. Pop has pretty good gesture support.
interesting, thanks!
Should be possible with the pop gnome extension, without the need of using their Distro
BlissOS https://blissos.org/
While I agree that it is the best tablet experience, I think that’s strething the definition of a distro pretty hard lol
It’s literally a distribution of an operating system that uses the Linux kernel, therefore a Linux distribution.
It’s, for example, not a Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD.
you will likely find that most people will disagree with that, the general consensus of a “Linux distro” is that gnu/linux stuff. Personally I would consider it distros in which the apps would mostly use the general linux runtime stacks since musl based distros I would still consider a general linux distro. Android uses it’s own distinct runtime, for the vast majority of usage, and although using things like termux we can get close, how android is setup it lacks a good chunk of things that can only be resolved with a chroot/proot
I don’t need to find people in agreement, just as I don’t need to find out whether people agree with the Earth being round or flat. Sometimes a fact is just a fact.
If you want to argue whether something like Alpine Linux that builds upon musl instead of GNU’s libc is a Linux distribution or not, please take that discussion there. I merely wanted to give OP a suggestion what should work best with his laptops.
I think it’s worth keeping in mind since when people ask for something, they generally want something specific. in this case they asked for a distro, so there is a non insiginificant chance they wanted a “generally agreed upon distro”
Quote: “I’d still like them to behave somewhat similar to Android tablets for less techie users.”
Also OP gave a positive reply.
Can you leave me alone now with your wrong notions of “there is no Linux if it’s not GNU/Linux”? I’m not interested in discussing that.
Afaik they use a pretty outdated version of Android (11?). They are the same Devs as Waydroid btw.
So it may be comfortable and made for tablets, but very old, only really essential security updates etc.
Visit the website and you no longer have to guess.
Yes, Android 11. Their Android 12L (some LTS version?) Is pretty new.
That “prerooted with kernel su” is interesting. It for sure is no secure OS…
Looks interesting, I’ll check it out!
Just a note: there are a few on-screen software keyboards for X out there that aren’t tied to a specific DE, like xvkbd and svkbd. They might be worth trying if you find some distro that works well except that the default on-screen keyboard sucks. (No idea if there’s any equivalent for Wayland.)
Great idea; thanks!
Note:
X11X.org is nearly entirely dead.
I have a Microsoft Surface tablet and Fedora with GNOME works pretty well on it. I usually use a stylus or the magnetic keyboard with it but when I do use the touch screen I dont encounter issues. I use PaperWM on top of GNOME and it makes it all so easy to use.
each one of them has issues, I cant in good conscious recommend any atm
That’s a shame. I have a few promising leads to look into; I’ll update this post with my findings and chosen winner once I pick one
It sounds like you have a few devices, so I would recommend trying out this testing distro with MauiShell. There is a testing iso under the heading “Downloads and Sources” in this most recent blog post about its development progress.
Might want to check out Ubuntu Unity. It was made more Netbooks(when those where a thing) and Touchscreens. But as another poster pointed out Bliss looks really nice for this use case
I’ll look at that, thanks! I put Bliss on one and I’m not really happy with it yet. Just trying to type my wifi password had the UI wigging out on me, had to use a usb kb just to type the pass. I’ll look into Ubuntu Unity tho, thanks!
Take a look at my post from several months ago: https://feddit.de/post/1892175
In the end I went with fydeOS since the touch experience with both Gnome and KDE was too lacking out of the box.
What version of Android is FydeOS using, how frequent do they do Updates? Does it use Secureboot, etc?
Fedora Silverblue from ublue.it
Automatic updates, they install Software as Flatpaks, GNOME is good for Tablets.
As the RAM is very low, maybe regular Fedora Workstation though. Or you layer all the Packages as RPMs, which is also totally possible.
Depends entirely on how many things these tablets should do.
- webbrowser: Brave or Firefox
- drm video: available in both
- social media: easy as webapps with chromium/brave
- youtube: freetube
- signal, other messengers: flatpak best
In general Flatpak apps are often working better, on Ubuntu and Fedora base for me. Arch may be something different, but no way unless its controlled like on steamOS. Immutable Arch with tested updates would be great.
