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?
I know you’re asking about linux, but just pointing out that you can try android x86 on it, just in case you don’t know about the project.
It’s technically linux. :)
It’s Linux like macOS is BSD.
Only in a very loose sense. MacOS has some BSD userland and a custom kernel with some bits and pieces taken from BSD (and the also-related Mach). Android has an actual Linux kernel, which I can plainly see when I build it from source.
In any case, my comment was meant only as a light-hearted way to point out that Android has the portability that OP would need to get a usable OS on a tablet.
MacOS is actually a registered Unix.
That would actually be ideal, but last I heard a lot of things weren’t working. I’ll have to go look it up again.
I was hopeful, and gave Android x86 a shot. It froze solid when attempting to find wifi networks. Oh well…
Too bad :(
I looked at your other comments. You had problems with kde, but did you use the standard desktop kde or plasma mobile? If you didn’t try it, I’d suggest giving plasma mobile a shot.
Another suggestion is to use a distro with wayland, so you can run waydroid and have the option to use android apps.
I tried Plasma Mobile. The issues I’m having with various distros is that the UI is not for mobile, or the hardware doesn’t work. I need to find a mobile-friendly distro I want to use, and then get my hardware working. It’s quite a PITA, and I’m surprised things are still this primitive. I think part of the problem is that the touchscreen shows up as a generic two-button mouse, and I don’t know if there are linux drivers for it.
Interesting, because plasma mobile is designed for phones. The linux mobile ecosystem is still too immature, unfortunately.
Did you have any luck so far with some os and gui combination?
Okay, maybe I didn’t do it right. I downloaded KDE Plasma Neon. I guess that’s not mobile. I seem to remember KDE didn’t have the proper network drivers so I couldn’t download anything. Is it possible to install Plasma Mobile over something like Linux Mint?
Yes, it’s possible. This link has a list of desktop distros supporting kde mobile at the bottom of the page: https://plasma-mobile.org/get/
I’m installing the Manjaro image right now. It looks promising. At least the on-screen keyboard and wifi are working.
The Manjaro image is promising, but fairly messed up. Icons are off the side of the screen, etc. Overall this looks good. I might try one of the other plasma mobile distros.
When you get your tablet ready for usage, you definitely need to post here, so we will know the conclusion of your saga :D