This is kind of a separate thing to my other thread talking about random input hiccups, since man, there’s a lot going on in the 2-in-1 world. I’m so baffled that the talks about them have been quiet, probably due to the AI mess maybe? No clue. Anyway!
I initially was surprised how well linux handles touchscreens now! I only tested MX, Devuan, and Cachy, to be fair, so it’s not a big sample size. But, still, it’s rad to be able to do all of these fancy touch things now!
Nonetheless, I did run into several walls now. I’m currently stuck on how to even begin to recognize the “tablet mode”, because I can’t fold my laptop without random keypresses at the moment. It’s a tad annoying. It’s made even harder too, since I’m on MSI and not one of the typical Lenovo or even Dell series. I ended up with it mostly due to a big sale, but, hey. At least most of the other features work!
Speaking of, if you’re an ex-tablet user (Android & iOS), I do think 2-in-1’s are a good choice. I’ve been told to expect horrible pen jitter, lag, and so on when drawing… and I have no problem with any of that. The only slight annoyance is a lack of some form of palm rejection, and for now making that sort of thing is so out of my depth I’m not even going to try. Apparently libinput has something to handle that, but from what I’ve seen it’s… for touchpads only. Bummer.
Either way I really believe that with time, this tech will get much better. It’s already so much comfier to draw on such a big screen! And being able to also do all other normal desktop things (gaming, code, writing…)! That’s all I have to say about the topic, unless anyone’s got any questions/insight!
Not all of them. Surface Pro devices from M$ require a specific kernel, as I learned after installing MX on a Surface Pro 5. Reading about the kernel did not make me sufficiently excited to bother changing anything. Not a problem, as I more than happy with my Cintiq 16.
Isn’t that kind of outdated info now, though? I read that Surfaces’ are now natively much better supported than they used to be.
I’m using a more niche MSI, so I saw very little about support for this little beast. Still, I wanted to give it a shot, and I ended up not having to adjust anything, really. Only thing is I switched to arch w/ wayland out of the box, because I was just… genuinely too lazy to do another arch setup all by myself LOL
It can’t be too outdated, since I just installed MX on the Surface 5 last week. I was surprised the touch didn’t work, because most of the distros I have tried work just fine on Lenovo and HP laptops with touchscreens.
The newer kernel, from what I read, is a bit quirky with Surfaces. Not willing to test it though.
Ahh I see I see! I wanted to avoid buying a Surface because I just don’t trust Microsoft to make a good long-lasting device, honestly. MSI I have good experiences with, but bad experience with a specific store that sold it to me lol. Definitely recommend picking up one, though. I ended up with an “AI focus” one, but it just works nicely as a solid art device.
I recently got this Lenovo 2-in-1 laptop and for me the drawing experience has been great. I’m running Krita on Fedora KDE Plasma and almost everything worked right out of the box. I disabled touch painting but I still use an ‘artist’s glove’ (old sock with holes lol) because I often like to rest my palm on the screen when drawing/painting precise strokes and it was triggering the pop-up palette sometimes. Gesture input mostly works fine, even multi-finger swiping/pinching, but not tapping though.
I did install InputActions to map three- and four-finger taps to F7 and F8. Two-finger worked but as soon as I did a three- or four-finger tap it would register as a two-finger tap. I think this was because KWin hijacked three- and four-finger taps. So in Krita it would always ‘undo’ no matter how many fingers were used. After installing InputActions I just bound ‘redo’ and ‘full-canvas’ to F7 and F8 and now everything works like a charm.
I did run into the same issue that you mentioned, where it would not correctly recognize when I was in tablet mode. But the fix for that was to copy a proprietary sensor hub firmware file from the pre-installed windows installation and paste it somewhere in /lib/firmware. After that it magically started to recognize my physical screen orientation (portrait vs landscape) so it could rotate the screen with it. Before, it would disable keyboard only when the screen was completely folded back. Now it detects when I fold the screen past a 180 degree threshold so it can disable the keyboard earlier.
It might be worth looking into if there is a similar fix for your system since it’s just one file that needs to be copy-pasted.
One thing that I do find annoying is that the pen that came with the laptop (Yoga pen 2 if I’m correct) has a dedicated eraser button that cannot be remapped to anything else. I did find a tool that can remap the button but I think it conflicts with my InputActions setup so for now I’m not using it.