A bit ago I did a bit of an experiment with an old surface tablet, where I threw some linux distros at it to see what the experience was. I tried Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Fedora, and all were extremely janky to downright broken. On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland, with some apps like Firefox just not popping it open, to others ignoring input. X had trouble with screen rotation. Fedora wouldn't let me past the login screen unless I connected a keyboard, which was compounded with a bug that was causing the screen to lock every sixty seconds. Manjaro ended up lasting the longest, but at that point I had just given up trying to fix things and reverted to using the Surface as a laptop with a touch screen.
I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display servers, my experience left me with the distinct feeling that I had gone way outside of the bounds of the target user of these applications. Maybe I just had bad luck. Hopefully if this is truly an under-served side of the Linux desktop experience, a successful product like this will help push the ball forward on improving support for this niche. I wonder how much the popularity of the Steam Deck is pushing the KDE team to improve touch screen support as well.
I just bought a ThinkPad X1 Tablet Gen 3. Everything works great, the on screen keyboard is actually functioning properly and appears on demand every time. Screen orientation is handled properly and promptly. The only let-down so far is battery life, but I need to make some adjustments to help there.
I'm running the latest version of Fedora workstation, under wayland too.
This thing is the only truly repairable tablet I've encountered so far, 8 screws and the display pops off, no glue, no can opener required like a Surface Pro. 9 screws to get the heatsink off (they're all captive) and you're at the full size NVME SSD.
I love my X1 tablet gen 1, but I need to repair the screen on it. Not sure if it's still true for the gen 3, but the gen 1 had a lot of modular parts you could add, like an extra battery that also gives you an HDMI port. Plus, I had this ridiculously nice solid carrying case.
What’s the battery life for you? You didn’t specified. Is it bad compared to tablets or compared to that same device with Windows installed? What the bad is exactly, is it 3–4 hours, is it 10 hours?
Idk how recent you tried this but I had the entirely opposite experience with an old Asus transformer mini (which has similar detachable keyboard shenanigans as the surface). Ubuntu had some issues rotating the screen but Fedora worked out of the box. The only complaint was that sometimes you had to coax it to bring up the on-screen keyboard, but everything else, from screen rotation to the gnome finger swiping gestures worked really well in both laptop and tablet mode.
Maybe its microsoft using a particularly strange hardware stack or just luck.
>On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland, with some apps like Firefox just not popping it open
Did you check if FF was actually running in wayland mode? Not trying to blame you, the current situation is pretty dire. The only reliable way of finding out if something is actually using wayland is running xeyes and seeing whether the eyes move above the target window.
> The only reliable way of finding out if something is actually using wayland is running xeyes and seeing whether the eyes move above the target window.
In Firefox all you have to do is navigate to about:support and check verify that Window Protocol shows wayland.
"Wayland" works fine, but as soon as you start mixing X11 and Wayland apps, it starts getting complicated due to different levels of functionality support for the two APIs.
I started running into them pretty fast when I added a 4K monitor to my Ubuntu 22.04 system and enabled fractional scaling. All of my Wayland apps look fine, and all of my XWayland clients look awful, blurry and obviously scaled. Working one by one to switch them over to native Wayland has been a hassle for various random reasons, most notably:
* Slack: works from the icon in the taskbar, but when auto-started at login does so in X11 mode
* VS Code: works fine when run from Terminal, but when launched from taskbar icon shows up as a different "app" in the taskbar. Launching from the terminal starts in X11 mode
* Zoom: requires more setup in order to share screen. The Zoom UI for screen sharing doesn't work so it's not obvious how to stop sharing screen. It also freezes or crashes all the time for no discernable reason, including locking up when joining some meetings three times in a row and then succeeding on the fourth time.
So if you're not really leaning into what Wayland offers it works fine, but even just fractional scaling has been a four-month hassle to get things working as expected.
I've been using fractional scaling and only native Wayland apps since May 2021 (on Fedora) though I don't use Slack, VS Code or Zoom.
As you know, "native Wayland" means the app has been modified so that it can talk to the graphics hardware using the Wayland protocol.
Emacs is the hardest of my apps to persuade to talk Wayland protocol because Fedora's "emacs" package was compiled without the code that talks Wayland.
To persuade Chrome to talk Wayland protocol, I start it with specific command-line arguments, which used to cause bugs, but I haven't noticed any bugs for months.
I suspect this is largely because the Microsoft Surface products contain a lot of proprietary hardware components that aren't not well supported by the kernel. KDE and friends have pretty good touch screen support, but it's all for naught if you have no drivers.
I am using a Surface Go 2 with Arch / Wayland / Gnome. I use the Linux surface kernel and all of the hardware works except the IR camera and webcam. Overall, it is a good experience. I love using it as a notebook with the pen and Xjournal++. Battery life is 7 hours or so.
The OSK pops up when I need to. There is a Gnome extension to make it work better like adding ctrl, alt and cursor keys for instance.
I also use Gnome extension to force apps to open maximized.
I use it primarily as a tablet at home and a travel laptop for work. I am quite enamored with it.
I'm using Debian Sid with KDE Plasma Wayland on an acer 2-in-1 laptop/tablet. It works fine, Firefox needs to be started in "wayland" mode. The on-screen keyboard could be better, but it does pop up predictably. Screen rotation just works.
edit:
Touch controls also work, including gestures. It has a pressure sensitive stylus, which also works OOB.
Surface lineup is a weird one because Microsoft uses a non-standard firmware, but even still the support on many devices are great. I have a Surface Go 3 and despite the poor processor it flies on Fedora and I use it daily to do light tasks. Perhaps try with linux-surface kernel?
As someone who just this week tried to put Linux on a Surface (laptop 4), I can categorically say I'm not going to try that again. Totally broken, not even booting properly.
I remember working at an IT desk and trying to help a poor college student with their Surface Tablet, it would immediately thermal throttle just opening Microsoft Word, the whole unit slowed to a crawl. I helped them remove the bundled antivirus trial crapware and turn off a bunch of startup junk, but between the performance and the uncomfortable keyboard and trackpad it seemed like a miserable device to use for any serious purpose.
>I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display servers
Probably close to zero. Gnome/KDE devs daily drive desktops/laptops and for phones/tablets they don't run FOSS Linux devices but also iOS and Android.
Desktop Linux is already a niche market, and FOSS Linux tablets/phones is even more niche. The only "Linux" built and polished for touch from the ground up is Android but I put Linux in commas for good reason there.
>I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display servers
Phosh, Plasma Mobile and SXMO are DEs for phones and tablets, so they support touch fine. I run Phosh (also on pmOS) on my phone and have none of the problems you described. GNOME is also making its own GNOME Mobile.
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Now, for your specific hardware: I don't know how old your "old surface tablet" is, but I run postmarketOS on the very first Surface RT and it works fine. It uses the kernel from [1] and requires a one-time semi-complicated procedure to bypass Secure Boot and switch away from Windows [2], and even then it has some issues with CPU scaling etc not supported. So I won't recommend it as a general-purpose Linux tablet, but it's good enough for what I use it for.
>On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland
It's a Tegra 3 chipset so I don't run a wayland compositor on it (it would need CPU rendering), just Xorg with i3. I haven't tried an OSK inside i3, but the OSK at boot time to enter the disk encryption password (unl0kr) works fine.
If you do run wayland, wayland-native programs should be able to auto-launch the OSK because they will invoke the input-method protocol, and xwayland programs probably won't. This is the behavior I see on my phone running Phosh - firefox and foot (terminal) showing wayland windows trigger the OSK (squeekboard), whereas chromium using xwayland does not. But even then, chromium does respond to the OSK input when I manually trigger the OSK.
>X had trouble with screen rotation.
The grate kernel supports reading the tablet's accelerometer sensor, so I just wrote a script to listen to iio-sensor-proxy signals and run `xrandr` to rotate the screen accordingly.
My point was more towards the 2-in-1s and tablet PCs, not really phone or 'true' tablets. Devices that have been pretty popular over the last decade, like Surface Pros (I had used a Pro 2 and Pro 3 during my experiment) or Lenovo Yogas.
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Didn't really consider postmarketOS. I haven't played with installing mobile operating systems on desktop hardware in a long time.
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Yeah I think what screwed my testing was applications that were using xwayland without me noticing. The stable firefox snap at the time (which is preinstalled on Ubuntu), uses it apparently. I have only used Xorg before, as I've never felt the need or desire to step into the tarpit that's migrating to Wayland.
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Neat workaround for your tablet, glad it works well for you.
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End of the day, I'm sure that I could have puttered on it and eventually got it all working (aside from the hardware on the surface that appears to be completely locked down), but it's a pretty poor showing out of the box. YMMV and all that, and I hope that more investment in the space makes it a better experience in the future.
Phosh and SXMO at least (not sure about Plasma Mobile but probably it too) generalize to running on large screens with external keyboards etc, so they should work for such hardware too, so you can try them if you are still interested.
> I wonder how much the popularity of the Steam Deck is pushing the KDE team to improve touch screen support as well.
Works like a charm on my OLED touchscreen laptop. I am actually surprised by how better KDE looks compared to windows or macos and how stable it is (KDE version 5.27.4 that is).
I have a surface with Ubuntu and the Surface Kernel (https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface) , and it works really wonderfully. I will say, before installing the Surface Kernel, it was very janky.
I plan on putting MX Linux on an old Surface Pro tablet, probably in a couple weeks when I have some time. Any gotchas you encountered that I should be aware of?
interesting because I have been running archlinux on a surface pro 7 and it works flawlessly appart from the camera. I use the linux-surface kernel, instructions can be found here: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installa.... Highly recommend it!
I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display servers, my experience left me with the distinct feeling that I had gone way outside of the bounds of the target user of these applications. Maybe I just had bad luck. Hopefully if this is truly an under-served side of the Linux desktop experience, a successful product like this will help push the ball forward on improving support for this niche. I wonder how much the popularity of the Steam Deck is pushing the KDE team to improve touch screen support as well.