Linux on touchscreens: KDE wins! (+Tuxedo InfinityFlex 14)
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Tuxedo InfinityFlex 14: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-InfinityFlex-14-Gen1#specs
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:52 Sponsor: SquareSpace
02:06 Infinity Flex 14
08:30 KDE Plasma for touch
13:40 GNOME for touch
17:53 Conclusion
The device I'll be using is a review unit of the Tuxedo Infinity Flex.
It's a 14 inch device, with a 16:10 aspect ratio, and it's entirely foldable.
The laptop is powered by an Intel core i5 1335U, so 10 cores, 4.6Ghz.
Because this thing weighs 1.5kilos. The touchscreen is a non glare 14 inch, 1920x1200 display. It's 400 nits, so decently bright, and supports 100% of SRGB.
As per the battery life, you can expect about 6h of video playback on that 55Wh battery.
In terms of build quality, the thing is very solid, mostly aluminium, with rigid hinges, that once set, simply don't move.
The laptop part of it is also really good, the touchpad is smooth, doesn't rattle in place, and the click is firm and nice. The keyboard has good key travel, solidly sized keys, and it doesn't make a huge amount of noise either.
The webcam and mic are, as usual, pretty bad, they're laptop mics and cameras, they just aren't suitable for anything other than basic video conferencing.
The speakers are decent, they get loud enough, and while they don't have a lot of bass they don't distort unless you're listening to something really high pitched at max volume
Let's conclude on the I/O, here you get a barrel charger plug, HDMI 2.0, one USB A 3.2 gen 2, a thunderbolt 4 port, and a USB C 3.2 gen 2 port. Those last 2 do display port 1.4 and power delivery so you don't NEED the barrel charger, USB C works fine.
On the other side, you have a webcam and mic privacy switch, the power button, next to a 2 in 1 card reader for micro SD or a SIM Card, a USB C 3.2 gen 1, and a 2 in 1 headphone jack.
The Plasma experience on a touchscreen is actually really, really good. The desktop automatically scales itself with bigger padding, bigger icons, more spacing in most KDE / Qt apps, the system tray icons also get bigger and easier to hit, and window buttons also get larger
I could drag windows to a screen edge or to the top, and they'd resize, I could grab a corner of a window to resize it, I could long press a folder in the file manager to get advanced options, I could long press on the desktop to customize it, I could even pinch to zoom inside the file manager or in the image viewer to zoom in and out, although it wasn't free form zoom, so not super smooth everywhere.
Only adding widgets to the desktop was not really doable, as I couldn't scroll the widget list, it instead started a drag and drop operation of whatever widget my finger caught.
The onscreen keyboard that's preinstalled here is called maliit, and it works, it has language switching, an emoji board, and it automatically pops up when you're in touch mode, if any app has a text field pre selected, or when you touch a text field yourself.
KDE plasma even works with the same gestures you have on touchpads, so 3 fingers up shows the desktop grid, 3 fingers sliding down show all virtual desktops and the window spread. 3 fingers left or right also switches between virtual desktops if you have multiple ones.
GNOME is on the surface, well suited to touchscreens. Everything is already well padded and easy to touch, and generally, it works fine. It does ask you to double click a lot more than KDE.
You can still use gestures here, 3 fingers to bring the activity view, 3 fingers from there for the app grid, or 3 fingers left and right to switch desktops. Pinch to zoom works better in the image viewer than in KDE, but it doesn't work in the file manager.
You can't drag a window to the top or side of the screen to tile it. You can't swipe anywhere in the app grid, you have to aim between app icons.
The onscreen keyboard is fine, and works well, but doesn't appear for KDE / Qt apps, only for GTK apps.
Generally, inside of GTK / GNOME apps, things work ok, you can scroll, tap, change settings, open menus, move windows around, but the functionality is still more limited than inside of KDE in my experience.
I did encounter an issue where sometimes, nothing is touchable inside of a GNOME apps, nothing works. It's infrequent, and not easily reproducible, but it happens, and it basically makes the entire desktop unusable until the app in question crashes.
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