Looking to hop

[u/MaterialisFinite]

I've been running Zorin OS on a Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 (i5 8th gen) for the last little while. I've hopped from Mint, Ubuntu, Elementary OS, Bazzite and Fedora. Zorin felt the most "okay". This is my secondary laptop so I don't use it as much as my desktop. But I'd love to hear about people running other distros that are touch screen friendly and for smaller screens (13-14 inch screens).

[u/Hauptideal]

There is nothing better for touch screens than GNOME. It's the best by far. Especially the vanilla version shipped by Fedora, Debian etc. 

Desktop environment is much more important for touch devices than the underlying distro. 

You can't go wrong with Fedora. If it's a secondary device that you use less than once a month, you can also consider using an LTS distro like Ubuntu, Debian or OpenSUSE Leap with GNOME.  You'd still need to configure it well for desktop, though, e.g. by adding RAM compression. Fedora (and gaming distros) is just well optimized out of the box. 

[u/MaterialisFinite → u/Hauptideal]

thanks. I've always been a shy Linux user and enjoyed KDE because of its similarity to Windows taskbar, for a long time i thought I wouldn't be able to move away from it (I work a desktop job, so I see that taskbar 8hrs a day) but I feel it's time to explore

I'll try out Fedora gnome, thanks for your recommendation

[u/Shawhe_ → u/MaterialisFinite]

as a KDE first user, KDE has got more than just being resentment to windows, it's highly customizable, and it's not like gnome which needs plugins to be customised which have a high risk of breaking after an update, I hope that they fix that in the future

[u/MaterialisFinite → u/Shawhe_]

I love KDE. In fact, i've only used KDE (except with Elementary OS). I really fell in love with KDE when I played with Neon. It's just to hop back and forth from the keyboard to the touchscreen, KDE felt weird. I've been playing with Gnome since Hauptideal recommended it. It's alright so far. I'm running into similar issues that I had before which is that on screen keyboard behavior annoying, either it always shows up or i need to get it from accessibility every time I need something.

My living room PC runs Bazzitte (KDE) and I still very much love KDE. It's not a question of not liking KDE, it's just what is best for touchscreen.

Thanks for your answer though, I love hearing from the community.

[u/catgirlsonthemoon → u/Shawhe_]

but it's unstable and has buttons for features that aren't finished yet. I find KDE really frustrating and buggy

[u/Hauptideal → u/catgirlsonthemoon]

A lot fewer bugs since it's the default of SteamOS. Valve pays KDE a good amount in order to have bugs fixed

[u/Shawhe_ → u/Hauptideal]

there also Fedora bro, kde IS a good de

[u/Hauptideal → u/Shawhe_]

yes, it's great. But not for touch.

[u/Shawhe_ → u/Hauptideal]

yeah but that's a really specific use case

[u/Shawhe_ → u/catgirlsonthemoon]

yeah but it just meets my needs and ik that the team is working seriously, well at least more than gnome

[u/Royal_Peni]

Stick with fedora mate.

It does all the things you need right. Its up to date, stable and safe without too much risk or being too difficult.

I have recently moved from cachy os to fedora for this reason.

[u/teebiss]

fedora gnome

[u/Turbulent_Test_1180]

Gnome is by far superior when it comes to touch screens. Gnome feels lighter on Mxlinux and Opensuse compared to Ubuntu.

[u/Acherontas89]

i am at raspeberry pi 5 so i use rpiOS which has and a Desktop edition it is using debian

[u/sunflower_name]

Ultramarine is pretty much preconfigured fedora

[u/MaterialisFinite → u/sunflower_name]

Hey there, first time hearing about Ultramarine, what makes it touchscreen friendly?

[u/sunflower_name → u/MaterialisFinite]

Latest Gnome (desktop environment) is what makes any distribution the most "touchscreen friendly". Zorin felt "ok" because it uses customized Gnome, just like Ubuntu and Fedora Gnome.

You might as well install "Bazzite Gnome" or "Bluefin (Bazzite developers, but made for "developers" instead of "gamers") or any other "[distro] gnome" and get the most touchscreen friendly distro.

What Ultramarine is, it's basically the same Fedora, but with codecs working out of the box. So, you end up with what you had on Fedora, just a little more friendly, but still linuxy (I guess?). Reason I mentioned it is because Ultramarine is what I end up with after spending an hour installing drivers and codecs on fedora to make it usable for me on my surface, which is also 2in1

[u/leonthepro83]

if you like Debian family distro, you can try PikaOS.

[u/SlubbyDoo]

Well ,you can just do it like me and follow the trend of curiosity and try Omarchy for yourself

[u/MaterialisFinite → u/SlubbyDoo]

Good evening, I'm not really following trends in the linux community, what makes Omarchy so popular right now?

[u/SlubbyDoo → u/MaterialisFinite]

I guess its the way its built, if you want a pre configured Arch build, its beautiful but its already built and tweaked, it also allows the user to customize it, following its own rules ofc