GNU/Linux distro suggestions for hybrid touchscreen laptop?

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strypey
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se unió: 05/14/2015

Hi folks, a friend of mine has one of those hybrid touchscreen laptops. What GNU/Linux distro (if any) would you recommend to use on such a device, to allow the user to make use of the touchscreen capabilities in full freedom?

Magic Banana

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se unió: 07/24/2010
nadebula.1984
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se unió: 05/01/2018

Lomiri (formerly Unity) is being packaged by Debian.

chaosmonk

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se unió: 07/07/2017

I recently set up a Thinkpad X61T for a friend. I ended up going with GNOME. It's a little slow on the older hardware, but works alright, and it's pretty touchscreen friendly. In the accessibility settings, I enabled the on-screen keyboard, which pops up automatically when the dash search bar is focused.

The only issue I ran into is that the touchscreen did not work when using GDM, so I had to switch to LightDM. Unfortunately, screen-locking does not work in GNOME with display managers other than GDM. However, it could just be this specific and rather old model that doesn't work GDM, and might not be an issue for your friend.

Magic Banana

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se unió: 07/24/2010

Unfortunately, screen-locking does not work in GNOME with display managers other than GDM.

I use LightDM and GNOME Shell on Trisquel 8. I can lock and unlock the screen, for instance using the button the top-right menu. If I remember well, screen locking used to require GDM on Trisquel 7.

chaosmonk

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se unió: 07/07/2017

Screen locking might still work with LightDM for the older versions of GNOME in Trisquel 7 and 8, but with current versions it does not. For a while, Ubuntu patched GNOME to keep screen locking working with LightDM, but they eventually gave up and now use GDM as their default display manager. Currently, Ubuntu's patch at first glance *appears* to restore screen locking functionality with LightDM, but the screen isn't actually locked. Ctrl+Alt+F7 returns to the session with no password needed. The various GNOME Shell extensions that supposedly make screen locking with with LightDM have the same problem.

nadebula.1984
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se unió: 05/01/2018

I also helped someone set up X61t, but I chose to KDE since he wanted to run Krita "natively". The performance was just okay. The memory usage was about 500 MiB when the Plasma desktop environment started up, whereas the X61t computer had 8 GiB of memory.

I did the hardest job of modifying X61 series for him: twisting the screws securing the WLAN card and turbo memory card. I also gave him an original SXGA+ screen which provided barely enough resolution for modern applications. I also kept one SXGA+ screen for my own use, but I've been unable to find an X61t from the dark market...

strypey
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se unió: 05/14/2015

Looks like the PineTab is capable of being a hybrid touchscreen laptop, and Pine64 will be opening pre-orders for the developer version very soon:
https://www.pine64.org/2020/05/15/may-update-pinetab-pre-orders-pinephone-qi-charging-more/

It will be interesting to see what OS are available for PineTab and whether they involve any software freedom compromises.

nadebula.1984
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se unió: 05/01/2018

It seems that PineBook and PineTab still come with non-free boot firmware, so I'm not quite interested in either.