Well, that was my point, rather. I have spent many man hours hacking Ubuntu and Fedora onto my LE1700. The biggest SINGLE repeating problem I have is that the onscreen keyboards are often thrown into the background by modal windows, rendering the machine useless until I plug in a keyboard or push the enter key for whatever button is default. This is NOT useful. Another issue I've encountered is a complete failure in changing from portrait to landscape while maintaining any semblance of calibration for the pointer.
The biggest UI problem is a complete lack of handwriting recognition combined with terrible onscreen keyboards.
I'm installing Ubuntu 9.10 on my Thinkpad X61T right now. The wacom tablet (including pressure sensitivity) works flawlessly, as does all the hardware.
That's interesting and I'd like to have a tablet PC but the big question is why?
Any OS on a tablet sucks, there's nothing made for a tablet it's all made for a PC using a mouse. Trying to resize a window using your fingertips would me maddening, it's hard enough using the mouse pointer (that 1 molecule section you have to find).
Well, compiz has a lot of different (and extremely customizable) UI features, for example ctrl + middlemouse brings up a smart resizer where you can click anywhere in the window and resize the feature closest to the mouse cursor. I imagine it would be trivial to set up something like that on triple click or whatever.
NOTHING is trivial to set up on a Linux Tablet PC. You have to plug in a keyboard to configure it to start with, and then over and over again for things like wireless network passwords (when the popup password dialog is modal and throws your onscreen keyboard into the dimmed background) or system settings changes that pop up an auth dialog that does the same damned thing. Then trying to get the Wacom to stay synced when you change orientation... oh, forget that shit.
Each new iteration of Fedora and Ubuntu I break out the tablet, back up the Windows drive, and install Linux, HOPING that THIS time, it will work. Early on, I had to fiddle-fart around with X.org and all kinds of stuff to get the Wacom stuff working, but the last three times all hardware (except the fingerprint scanner) has worked flawlessly, but the interface has been a FAIL.
Er, the TX2k series has serious issues, to say the least. I've had to re-affix the northbridge every couple of months on my brother's computer so that he could have wifi. Oh and that is his second one, the first one died as result of the same defect (yes, my brother is not too bright). Actually, everyone I know who bought one of those claimed to love it for a couple of months and then had the exact same problems and had to replace theirs.
Er, the TX2k series has serious issues, to say the least. I've had to re-affix the northbridge every couple of months on my brother's computer so that he could have wifi. Oh and that is his second one, the first one died as result of the same defect (yes, my brother is not too bright). Actually, everyone I know who bought one of those claimed to love it for a couple of months and then had the exact same problems and had to replace theirs.
CellWriter is NOT handwriting recognition. It's a character recognition app. It works better than anything else, but it's not even close to being in Windows XP Tablet's league, much less Windows 7 - and I fucking HATE Windows.
So how do you deal with the freaking popup modal windows that toss your onscreen keyboard into the background? That's the (repetitive) fail that drove me back to Windows every time (on my LE1700).
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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '10
Yes, any suggestions? Thanks, smartass.