Arch Linux

Daethorian

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2010-10-21

Posts: 17

Touchscreen tablet for the power user

Today, I ordered a Lenovo S10 3t. It's a pretty small netbook with a rotatable touchscreen, so you can flip the screen over and transform the netbook into what essentially is a tablet. I checked the wiki and found that the touchscreen works out of the box.

I am a power user preferring tiling window managers and I am currently enjoying StumpWM, which is awesome (no pun intended). I realise that the whole touch thingy is at the other end of the usability spectrum than tiling window management, but I still can't help to wonder if one can configure the touch interface to be more power user style.

Are there any recommendations on software you would install? Are there any specific window managers that bind well to touchscreens? Or, am I doomed to be bloated inside KDE or GNOME to get anything at all? Does anyone have experience from using touchscreens with Arch?

Do note that most of the time (aka, while at work), this netbook will use an external 23" display and a full size keyboard, and I will probably use Stump or something like it when connected. The touchy setup would be mostly when I wander the world out in the IRL.

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Touchscreen tablet for the power user

What apps do you intend to use?
I think neither KDE nor Gnome is suited for touchscreens unless you mean sth like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(des … vironment) .

A similar discussion http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@suckles … 00674.html Have you tried ChromeOS?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_(des … vironment)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_(window_manager)

Last edited by karol (2010-12-13 16:48:32)

toxygen

Member

Registered: 2008-08-22

Posts: 713

Re: Touchscreen tablet for the power user

I have an HP Tm2 convertible notebook/touchpad, and I use kde 4 with several useful plasmoids - on screen keyboard, a small rotate script i made (along with the "rotate" button on the side of the screen mapped to an alternate script that rotates the other way).  i use it mainly for reading cbr/cbz files and other books (finally a good pdf ebook reader!).

as far as typing, i dont do much other than for web searches, and sometimes typing out commands in a terminal, and the keyboard plasmoid works well enough.  the news on kde's end is that they're either going to implement a tablet pc -plasma interface or modify the existing netbook-plasma to include touch gestures.

i really dont see a tablet pc in linux currently being used for any sort of power usage though, considering X doesnt have very good support for tablet features, but what it does have is enough for what i do.

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"I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here:
Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE pill?"