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by wfraser 4609 days ago
The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...)

I'm excited to see what comes of the Ubuntu tablet distro, but at the same time, they were the ones who made Unity, which isn't really good at anything. So I'm not super optimistic either.

Windows's "metro" UI is obviously touch friendly, but even the desktop can be made touch friendly-ish via its DPI scaling, which I think works pretty well. I haven't been able to get that same usability out of any Linux desktop environment yet. (If someone has, I'd love to know about it!)
3 comments
vanderZwan 4608 days ago
> The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...)

I hope Jolla and Sailfish will help in that department.

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ewzimm 4608 days ago
KDE is further along than Unity but still needs a little development to be perfect:

http://plasma-active.org/

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wfraser 4608 days ago
Wow, thanks! I didn't know about that. I'll try it!
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peatmoss 4608 days ago
Does this mean that the surface pro 2 is a good choice for those of us who don't mind Unity?
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wfraser 4608 days ago
Yeah, from a technical standpoint, it runs pretty well. There's still at least one hardware compat issue to be resolved (when I last tried Ubuntu Saucy beta, the wifi didn't work), but it was very performant, and looked nice.
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peatmoss 4608 days ago
That's good to know. No wifi would be a pretty big buzzkill though. I like the idea of replacing my Mac/iPad combo with a single device. It sounds like the high-DPI screen would be a reasonable replacement for my iPad (a.k.a. PDF journal reader) but I'm far too invested having a competent Unix-like environment on the computer side to live in Windows. Ubuntu's "convergence" tablet vision cannot come quickly enough.
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