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)
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.
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.)
BlissOS https://blissos.org/
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.
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.
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.
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.
