Touch Screen Laptops ... what has been your experience using a Linux Dist.?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| TxtEdMacs Apr 21, 2017 5:16 PM EDT |
Unfortunately I am looking at a very compact laptop that seems to come only with touch screen capability, which raises the price significantly. Moreover, additional pain is afforded by the unnecessary (for me) of them making Windows OS not an option and other "enhancements" that could not be seen as bloatware per se. However, personally they are of no use, but I am certain they also raise the price. So if possible I should like to know how useful the enhanced set of touch motions have been to others under Linux. I should also mention I have found one fairly recent article on how to add some of the touch features on a Linux machine, but it is chilling to see other questions seeking aid lack any response. I would appreciate learning of your experiences, since if I make this purchase I might not be able in many situations be able to use an external mouse as my preferred supplemental input device. Thanks in advance. |
| seatex Apr 21, 2017 6:10 PM EDT |
Even if it has a touchscreen, you don't have to use it. I wouldn't. |
| mbaehrlxer Apr 22, 2017 3:57 AM EDT |
sure you can ignore the touchscreen, but the question is if there is any benefit from it. i used to have a touchscreen laptop many years ago. rarely used the touchscreen feature though. the screen could wrap around making the laptop turn into a tablet. it's nice for scrolling, and i remember it allowed me to cheat in a game that just wasn't written with a touchscreen in mind. :-) other than that... btw: i also just ordered a very compact laptop with a touchscreen. i'll see how much i use that. it doesn't have a touchpad, so i might use the touchscreen for scrolling. greetings, eMBee. |
| caitlyn Apr 22, 2017 4:51 PM EDT |
I use a convertible, which can act as a netbook sized laptop or as a tablet. I find the touchscreen feature very useful for some things and not so much for others. I think it is very much worth having. I've had mine since early November and I've really enjoyed it. It made a wonderful replacement for my old netbook both because it's so much faster and more flexible. The keyboard is very usable, an area where HP was also strong in the netbook era. My HP is an Intel Atom SOC based device. I originally had to use a special kernel respin plus some recent patches to make everything work. With the 4.11 release candidates that's mostly unnecessary as everything I needed is now in the mainline kernel. The one remaining issue is that it has a 32-bit EFI but boots into a 64-bit OS. The processor is a quad core 64-bit chip. Debian has an image that works. Developer Ian Matthews (Linuxium) was creating custom kernels and now has moved on to a respin script that allows the hybrid 32/64 bit boot. It works on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and probably most any Debian or Ubuntu derivative with a little tweaking. It works well. I just posted this to the newswire: http://linuxiumcomau.blogspot.com/2017/04/creating-personali... I'm working on adapting his code for the free RHEL clones. Oh, and yes, everything works as it should. |
| TxtEdMacs Jun 24, 2017 6:13 PM EDT |
I will not burden you with the random walk away from my choice of a machine mentioned at the beginning of this thread. But this is what I have ended up with: a used third generation i5, 8G RAM, no hard drive & no OS desktop for a faction of the price of any of the laptops that l considered. My Samsung 850 EVO 256G SSD was moved from the circa 2007 HP laptop (running 2 versions of Linux Mint) to the desktop that now runs Debian 9 only solving many of the operational problems we were having. Far superior in both performance and price. Thanks for the input. |
| mbaehrlxer Jun 24, 2017 10:48 PM EDT |
not a bad choice, if a desktop works for you, it's always preferable. they are cheaper, live longer and have more power. greetings, eMBee. |
| JaseP Jun 27, 2017 2:12 AM EDT |
I have a Dell A6 laptop with 8GB RAM,... Has a touchscreen... Everything works just fine out of the box (had to disable UEFI secure boot though, due to AMD video drivers being unsigned). I run Kubuntu 14.04 on the machine... KDE has some wonkiness with touchscreens, but the touchscreen works great in the browser. I rarely use the touchscreen though... |
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