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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

I've been a happy KDE user for years, but I recently discovered that Gnome is surprisingly good on a tablet. KDE is usable, but feels about as touch-native as Windows does. Gnome is easily as good a tablet experience as an iPad.

There's only one fly in the ointment: Gnome's onscreen keyboard is both terrible and difficult to replace.

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GNOME on touchscreens is in a weird place -- everything it needs to be perfect is right there. But there are a handful of pain points and weird bugs that make me think none of the developers are actually using it on a touch device. The OSK is the worst offender.

I still prefer it over KDE on my 2-in-1/convertible laptop, though. Despite the jank it also irons out a lot of the pain points that more traditional desktops have with touch, and is clearly made with it in mind, even when the execution is iffy.

Indeed, Gnome jettisoned everything for a touch-based interface, but is not actually usable as one. For example, there’s no video player that works well with touch even though at least three cosplay with large round buttons and no menus. Believe it or not, they require keyboards for essential functionality and taps are not recognized or broken.

Using phosh on a starlite btw. Web players work well however! No thanks to gnome.

Maybe of interest: One of our recently-elected community-wide goals is to improve the Input story, and we started a new on-screen keyboard project called Plasma Keyboard in context of that. It's a bit experimental and a very early effort, but maybe something promising for you to track in some way.

I'll try it out. I have both Gnome and KDE on my tablet, but haven't taken much time to try to customize KDE to be a good tablet experience.

Much better than the Gnome OSK despite signs that it's early (I got some transparent flickering over the panel).

I'd like it to have more punctuation and special characters available as long presses on letters, and for it to have a terminal mode with arrows, tab, ctrl, etc....

This comment was typed on plasma-keyboard.

Thanks for the feedback!

We have an experiment for the "extended layout for tablet mode" bit parked somewhere, stay tuned.

What tablets do you recommend?

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