I bought a little x86 tablet for $50 with no OS on it. Surprisingly, it works great. I loaded Mint 21.1 (with XFCE) on there and everything “just worked”! But as you can imagine, everything was very tiny, and using the touch screen was mostly impossible.
Before I go heavily modifying my Mint XFCE installation, and wind up with less-than-optimal results, I wanted to ask if there’s an x86 Linux distro for tablet/mobile?
I just tried Debian 12 with Phosh, and am surprised how bad Phosh was. It couldn’t even size apps properly. For instance the address bar of the web browser is hidden by the UI Toolbar. So you can open the browser, but you can’t use it. Same for most other apps.
I might try an absolutely clean install and see if it makes things better, but does anyone know of any Linux DE for mobile that will run on an x86 tablet?
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.
You need to install the maliit keyboard.
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.