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?
Do you have the tablet specs?
It’s an AAVA Mobile INARI10-WLAN-1 QC Intel Atom Z3795, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD They’re on eBay right now for about $50. No OS.
You can probably slap KDE on it and call it a day. Plasma has become less resource-intense in since about the 5.0 version (and remember to turn Akonadi off if you don’t use it).
Using it 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?
Now that I’ve looked it up, apparently you do need to install one. I’ve looked up the settings menu where there’s one virtual keyboard already installed for me, but couldn’t find any toggle for it.
Searching for “virtual keyboard” on the Discover store yielded me some results. I’d try it here if my laptop had touch screen, but it doesn’t. You could try “CoreKeyboard” or “Virtual Keyboard Toggle”.