Comment by bigyabai
17 hours ago
> 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:
You should make sure that you are running a Wayland desktop session [...]
It is important, that your applications run on Wayland as well.
> 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!
This is helpful :)
To go back to the app-by-app comment, I do know that there are like ubuntu tablet and touch setups.
Are there any browsers already setup to be more touch native, or specific browser builds that are more touch native already?