Hi Anthony, On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 08:24:24PM -0500, Anthony Carrico wrote: > On 12/17/2014 05:50 PM, Forest Bond wrote: > > I'm wondering what sort of issues you are running into? > > Unfortunately, I haven't been keeping notes. I assumed some WM would > just work, but apparently Linux is lagging in this area, or my config is > just bad, or my Arch-fu is lacking. > > I'm going to grab that computer... I actually had a bunch of things > running on different virtual terminals. Not to pick on KDE, but it looks > like plasma-next happens to be up front, so I'll just play around a little: > > [...]
Okay, yeah, sounds like you are facing what I would say are the expected problems (i.e. as opposed to driver issues, calibration issues, etc.). Most current-generation desktop user interfaces are not designed with touch input in mind so e.g. buttons are too small/close to the edge of the screen, right click is required to access critical features, etc. Also, handling common touch gestures (drag panning, pinch zooming) requires each application to implement support. This is subject to the usual problems of the open-source world -- immature and fragmented supporting infrastructure, from the kernel, to the X server, to the libraries/toolkits. As usual, the burden of sorting this out for users ultimately falls on the distros, who are for the most part not well equipped to face the challenge. So your experience will vary a bit from one distro to the next. Ubuntu did do a lot of work to try and be touch friendly as far back as 12.04, but to say this effort was a success on the desktop would be a stretch. I haven't tested newer versions much but I would not guess the situation is a ton better. You would probably have a much better experience if you installed the tablet version but that is not a process that is geared toward end users (not that you are a typical end user but expect it to be a lot of work) and if I had to guess there's probably a good chance your hardware would not all be supported (this is only speculation, I haven't really played with it). So long story short, I would say in the next few years the Wayland transition will make this situation a lot better, but as usual, by the time it's working you'll be using features that have been common on proprietary OS's for 5 or 10 years already, and it will still be buggy. ;) Of course most of this is based on a 2012 era understanding of touch support on Linux. Maybe there is an imminent miracle that I am unaware of. Thanks, Forest -- Forest Bond http://www.forestbond.com/ http://www.rapidrollout.com/
