In regards to the tablet, I’m thinking about buying an Amazon Fire HD 8 though I’m open to any and all recommendations.

As for the distro, I’m fine with Ubuntu or Linux Mint (or for that matter anything that you may recommend).

For the ebook reading software, I’m leaning towards using Foliate since it supports kindle, epub, and pdf formats, not to mention that the UI is great and intuitive.

  • krash@lemmy.ml
    111·
    1 year ago

    Of of curiosity, what is it that you dislike? I have Linux on a surface go gen 1 (which works flawlessly) and use gnome for the tablet mode. The only thing that sucks is the on-screen keyboards, but it works surprisingly well otherwise.

    • fart_pickle@lemmy.world
      61·
      1 year ago

      Here’s the list of things that suck in tablet mode:

      • depending on a day virtual keyboard doesn’t type capital letters (it has something to do with flatpacks)
      • there’s no way to decrypt disk without physical keyboard. Same goes for selecting different option in grub (there are some hacks but I’ve never was keen to tinker with it)
      • my 2-in-1 has pretty nice resolution which makes it unusable in tablet mode. I cannot count how many times I’ve missed a close button
      • the ui (both gnome and plasma mobile) is clunky. It feels like early days of touch screens.
      • stylus is one big misunderstanding
      • I’m biased because I’ve been using iPads for may years and for me it’s how tables should work
      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        Well I got a Lenovo Yoga with a touchscreen and I somewhat disagree. I use the Gnome desktop. And it follows most of the design principles you’d have on other devices like Apple or Android. Sure, the high-dpi auto-configuration and -detection may not be there yet. So you’d need to configure it yourself. You can set the UI scaling in the settings app and all the buttons become (for example) twice the size. This works really well.

        The on-screen keyboard has annoyed me to no end. But it got better and maybe most issues will be solved once we switch to Wayland and it’ll pop up at the right moment. (I advise against installing important system apps via Flatpak, this generally leads to issues and incompatibility. And it’s not Linux’s fault.)

        The full disk encryption is a bit of an issue. You’d need to put the key into the TPM module and that’s really complicated. I don’t see a good solution there, aside from putting the device into standby and not rebooting it that often.)

        I don’t think Gnome is clunky at all, given the on-screen keyboard pops up… Auto-rotate works, the button sizes are configurable, the stylus from Lenovo works out of the box. You have a full screen app launcher that is nice… And it’s super responsive on my device.