When I tried Gnome on my Pinephone a few years ago I was actually surprised at how good it was. Made me really sad that they hadn’t put the resources used to develop Phosh into polishing Gnome. Maybe it’s even better now.
Or you could see if you could just configure KDE to your liking.
You can probably slap KDE on it and call it a day. Plasma has become less resource-intense in since about the 5.0 version (and remember to turn Akonadi off if you don’t use it).
Using it right now. No virtual keyboard. If it’s supposed to be for mobile, how could they not include an on-screen keyboard? Do I have to install one?
Might be a bit too heavyweight for your tablet, but both GNOME and KDE have tablet/touch modes which activate automatically if they detect touch input but no mouse. If auto detect doesn’t work you can turn it on manually in Settings -> Workspace Behaviour -> General Behaviour -> Touch Mode in KDE. Not sure about GNOME.
I’m using KDE right now. No virtual keyboard. If it’s supposed to be for mobile, how could they not include an on-screen keyboard? Do I have to install one?
The login page has the option of an onscreen keyboard, and that works nicely. But it was absent when trying actually use the desktop. My hope is for the keyboard to pop up whenever I click inside a text input.
Try and see if the settings application shows the onscreen keyboard as enabled or not. Should be in All settings- Virtual keyboard. If it was working on the lock screen it might just need some setting to change. Are you on X11 or Wayland? That might also be a factor, if it stops once it switches display servers.
gnome on postmarketOS works well on my pinetab. There’s been a lot of improvements for gnome mobile in the past year. I’m not sure about getting postmarketOS on your device. There might be something or you could try Alpine. Maybe any other distro with gnome, but i think pmOS has specific packages with the latest improvements for gnome mobile.
Only in a very loose sense. MacOS has some BSD userland and a custom kernel with some bits and pieces taken from BSD (and the also-related Mach). Android has an actual Linux kernel, which I can plainly see when I build it from source.
In any case, my comment was meant only as a light-hearted way to point out that Android has the portability that OP would need to get a usable OS on a tablet.
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When I tried Gnome on my Pinephone a few years ago I was actually surprised at how good it was. Made me really sad that they hadn’t put the resources used to develop Phosh into polishing Gnome. Maybe it’s even better now.
Or you could see if you could just configure KDE to your liking.
Modern Gnome should in theory be able to adapt to any (reasonable) display size. So anything with recent enough repos would be a good fit
Do you have the tablet specs?
It’s an AAVA Mobile INARI10-WLAN-1 QC Intel Atom Z3795, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD They’re on eBay right now for about $50. No OS.
You can probably slap KDE on it and call it a day. Plasma has become less resource-intense in since about the 5.0 version (and remember to turn Akonadi off if you don’t use it).
Using it right now. No virtual keyboard. If it’s supposed to be for mobile, how could they not include an on-screen keyboard? Do I have to install one?
Might be a bit too heavyweight for your tablet, but both GNOME and KDE have tablet/touch modes which activate automatically if they detect touch input but no mouse. If auto detect doesn’t work you can turn it on manually in Settings -> Workspace Behaviour -> General Behaviour -> Touch Mode in KDE. Not sure about GNOME.
I’m using KDE right now. No virtual keyboard. If it’s supposed to be for mobile, how could they not include an on-screen keyboard? Do I have to install one?
Which distro are you on right now? It should have it, at least there is one on mine. Think it’s called maliit-keyboard.
The login page has the option of an onscreen keyboard, and that works nicely. But it was absent when trying actually use the desktop. My hope is for the keyboard to pop up whenever I click inside a text input.
Try and see if the settings application shows the onscreen keyboard as enabled or not. Should be in All settings- Virtual keyboard. If it was working on the lock screen it might just need some setting to change. Are you on X11 or Wayland? That might also be a factor, if it stops once it switches display servers.
gnome on postmarketOS works well on my pinetab. There’s been a lot of improvements for gnome mobile in the past year. I’m not sure about getting postmarketOS on your device. There might be something or you could try Alpine. Maybe any other distro with gnome, but i think pmOS has specific packages with the latest improvements for gnome mobile.
pmOS was my first thought, but it’s only built for two x86 devices and a lot of features aren’t working.
I know you’re asking about linux, but just pointing out that you can try android x86 on it, just in case you don’t know about the project.
It’s technically linux. :)
It’s Linux like macOS is BSD.
Only in a very loose sense. MacOS has some BSD userland and a custom kernel with some bits and pieces taken from BSD (and the also-related Mach). Android has an actual Linux kernel, which I can plainly see when I build it from source.
In any case, my comment was meant only as a light-hearted way to point out that Android has the portability that OP would need to get a usable OS on a tablet.
MacOS is actually a registered Unix.
That would actually be ideal, but last I heard a lot of things weren’t working. I’ll have to go look it up again.