> How is ubuntu support for touchscreens these days?
GNOME supports multitouch gestures, and the GTK4 toolkit is overall very touch-native. It strikes a nice balance between overpadded and touch-accessible, IMO: https://www.gnome.org/
(some of the newer Libadwaita widgets that GNOME is using: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/main/wid... )
> How does it compare to an ipad in terms of fidelity / responsiveness
With Wayland, it's borderline identical.
> GNOME supports
I've heard that there's *support* -but is the experience of having a touchscreen on an ubuntu device actually usable and good?
For example some random GUI app you're likely to use on ubuntu is the experience not broken?
I guess Chrome is the first thing that comes to mind.
My only issue with Chrome on touchscreen was the lack of 1:1 scroll/zoom gestures. As a Firefox user it was something that I got used to, but I just updated Chromium and apparently that's been fixed now too.
Besides that, it all works about as well as you'd expect it to. You can drag the window around by the tab bar and tap-and-hold to pull up a context menu.
>With Wayland, it's borderline identical.
Come on lol. I have a couple steam decks and both are really clunky.
Most applications are not built using GTK4 nor Qt6 for that matter.
On my steam deck the keyboard never pops up by itself so I have to use a key combination and it feels like I am moving a ghost mouse around the place (rather than proper touch screen support)
I ran gnome on the deck for a while but anyway the on-screen keyboard provided by the gnome sucked so bad that I gave up (sucked as in, it groups all the keys around the center of the screen tightly together and very small)
I also have an M1 iPad Pro. No comparison because those issues simply don’t exist on iOS.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm running it on the desktop with a drawing tablet, Magic Trackpad and oodles of apps, and it's not noticeably different from the stability of iPadOS.
My touchscreen laptop is closing in on being a decade old (i7 6600u) and the worst thing I can say about the experience is that it VSyncs down to 30fps during more taxing animations (just like my iPad does).
There is a whole section on touchscreen annoyances from the Linux Surface project: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installa...
> Any gesture functionality is dependent on the software you are running. This includes both, the application (e.g. Firefox) and the desktop environment (e.g. GNOME). The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
I love Linux but no need to embellish the current state imo
I am glad that it is working really well for you though
> There is a whole section on touchscreen annoyances from the Linux Surface project
Taking a quick look, all of the things they list are basically reiterating what I've already said vis-a-vis Wayland:
> The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
Yeah no. All of this depends on everything up to the application.
A gtk2 application will have no support for anything. A GTK3 application running on xwayland will have poorer support as well. And anyway most applications just treat the touchscreen as an invisible pointer as it says there.
Just to give an example of some basic thing that doesn’t work reliably: you can’t reliably use a long press gesture. In most apps that will be equivalent to holding the left click (aka does nothing but a long click). On iOS you will get a contextual menu to select/format text or whatever. (You can find a real report of this issue here: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/s/crLHZhHkuM - “how do I right click using the touchscreen?” from barely 6 months ago)
Your claim that this is an equivalent experience to an iPad is just false.
I’ve been around long enough to remember setting up TouchEgg, the situation is better now but still not equivalent at all.
Anyway originally I wanted to reply to provide balance to your take so casual readers wouldn’t install Linux on their tablets and expect iPadOS. I think that has been sufficiently achieved by this comment chain, readers can choose which side to take :-)
Cheers!