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?
When I tried Gnome on my Pinephone a few years ago I was actually surprised at how good it was. Made me really sad that they hadn’t put the resources used to develop Phosh into polishing Gnome. Maybe it’s even better now.
Or you could see if you could just configure KDE to your liking.
I just loaded up Debian 12 with Gnome. It gets me 90% of where I need to be. I’ll make a different post about the remaining 10%.