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by dTal 1893 days ago
>about 1-2 years after the new laptop model has been released, almost everything works fine

It depends on the category of device and what feature you want. I recently got an X1 Tablet (the 2-in-1 version of the X1 Carbon), and it barely works on Linux; there's a veritable zoo of inscrutable bugs that render the device very annoying to use (for example, Plasma's night mode disables when you re-attach the keyboard). It's clear that the FOSS ecosystem as a whole places little priority on touchscreeny things, either on the device end or the software end; the overlap between people hackish enough to fix weird bugs and people who find 2-in-1 tablets compelling enough to hack on is evidently smaller than with normal laptops.

1 comments

This matches my experience with a 2-in-1 Thinkpad. Obscure bugs (WiFi driver periodically crashing when Thunderbolt is connected) still there after 2 years now.

I think the best bet is going with as much of a run off the mill device as possible. In my experience a separate tablet works much better than a 2-in-1 compromise anyway. When your sole input device is a touchscreen, UX is (unsurprisingly) massively better with a touch-first UI compared to a mouse-first UI.

The problem isn't the "compromise" - the problem is there is no touch-first UI on Linux. That's the point. I can detach the screen and use it as a "seperate tablet", but it still sucks.

Android, on the other hand, is strictly improved by the addition of a hardware keyboard.

> there is no touch-first UI on Linux

If you’re still looking, you could check out JingOS. I haven’t tried it personally but it seems to be basically an iPadOS desktop environment for Linux.

No thanks; it's a closed source GPL-violating fork of Plasma Mobile with heavy (and sketchy) marketing.