I didn't want to water down my previous thread, so I'm offering this up an a secondary discussion point.
My old (circa 2014) Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga has been gathering dust for the past year+ (since I retired). It came with Windows 10 Pro, but it's not able to be "upgraded" to Windows 11. I made it a dual/triple boot machine by "side installing" Linux Mint and MX Linux. All three OSes are past their "expiration dates," so I'm now thinking of scrubbing the whole machine and installing a single Linux distro. Since I already said it can't be "upgraded" to Windows 11, here are the specs, as best as I can find them.
The Yoga is a touchscreen "convertible" computer, that can be entirely flipped to being a fat 11.5-inch tablet, or stood up tent-like. It's powered by an Intel CELERON 1.8GHz CPU, has 8GB RAM and a 256GB 2.5" SATA drive. Wiping the computer also removes the Lenovo ThinkPad Advantage software, so firmware updates and the like will no longer be possible. Hey, it's an 11 year-old machine, so we can't have everything, right?
As I understand it, most Linux kernels these days support touchscreens. So, with the meager CPU, I'm looking for a Linux with touchscreen support, gyroscopic ability (for changing the orientation of the display) and usability both with the physical keyboard as well as onscreen tactile operation.
I booted the machine with a fresh copy of EasyOS on a USB stick, and the touchscreen is recognized and operational. I haven't yet set up the persistent system (it's resident on the USB stick), but as a first check, so far, so good.
Any suggestions as to which distro I should be looking at? Indicators are that GNOME and KDE are the best at touchscreens, but I'd rather hear from real users than paid online shills.
Well, the deed is done. I've installed Ubuntu MATE 24.10 on my old Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga. I'm still researching remoted desktop (RDP) clients, but I think I'm done with the interface. I don't really like a cluttered desktop, but I've gotten used to having some system information available to me, so I've added the my-weather-indicator and conky, and configured them to my satisfaction. Here is a sceenshot of my desktop.
And have you been able to get the screen to auto-rotate when you physically reposition the device to tablet or tent orientation?
I have a Lenovo Flex 3 Ideapad with an 11 inch touchscreen, more of a netbook than a laptop. The touchscreen works well, but despite much research I wasn't able to get UM to recognize and respond to the accelerometers, so auto-rotation never happened. Also, the touchscreen isn't Wacom compatible, so you can only use a finger or a passive stylus with it.
I've read that Gnome can auto-rotate if your hardware is supported by the kernel, but I didn't find any definitive evidence that MATE has that ability. I suspect it doesn't.
To address that, I've written some bash scripts to make my laptop more usable in tablet and tent modes: screen rotation, generating a right click or double click with the stylus, managing Onboard's auto-show feature, and a couple other handy utilities. I plan to post them here, but I'm not quite finished and I have some other time commitments, so that post probably won't happen until mid-May.
When the time comes, perhaps you (and/or others) would try the scripts and let me know whether they work well for you.
Thanks, I'd love to give the scripts a try! The touchscreen works as well as I imagined, and I've enabled the onscreen keyboard for use when I'm in tablet mode (the keyboard is then on the bottom). The screen does not auto-rotate, either in portrait mode or in tent mode. Not having portrait mode doesn't bother me, and I'm not sure I'd use tent mode, but in either event, it falls short. Still, my driving factor was touchscreen, and there it works reasonably well.
One thing I haven't been able to do (but I've seen a script online that purports to do this) is have a different background on each desktop. That was a feature I liked in Linux Lite, but that's the Xfce desktop. MATE apparently doesn't have that feature. Too bad, I use it on my Mac, and with different backgrounds I know immediatey which desktop I'm using.
