I've gone with super terminal heavy setups for years. If I want to dip my toes into a more GUI oriented setup what's your rec? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/archlinux@lemmy.ml

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I've got a refurbed thinkpad yoga in the mail. It's a stylus oriented laptop so I need to change the software I use to be more clicky.

For years I've favoured stuff like netctl, xrandr, xbacklight etc etc over GUI alternatives and usually gone for very minimal WM setups (e.g. dwm).

For obvious reasons this would be actual hell with a stylus in tablet mode, but it's been around 15 years since I last had a clicky linux setup and I'm really lost as to how to set one up on arch. What do you folks recommend for laptops?

EDIT: update for wayward souls. Went with plasma, less works nicely out of the box but gnome hung occasionally on a 2019 yoga x1. There's a lot about plasma I would say is annoying but configuring it is vastly easier than gnome.

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[-] mellejwz@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I'm the same, I love using the cli for many things, but it's just no go on my Surface Go 2 if I want to use it as a tablet. I'm using KDE Plasma on Arch Linux, and it's pretty awesome in terms of touchscreen support. I also tried Gnome, but it has a nasty backspace issue in the on screen keyboard. When you use backspace it's like you press the left arrow key and then backspace, leaving half of the characters. Otherwise it's great.

It takes some time to get everything working right though. I didn't know how to get the on screen keyboard to work (Maliit), which is pretty important if you plan to use it on a tablet.

Another important thing is to use Wayland, as that greatly improves touchscreen support over Xorg.

So personally I'd suggest KDE, but Gnome is also really good if you don't mind the backspace issue. Or am I missing something that would fix that?

this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023

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