I still find it funny how some technological 'upgrades' just don't do things as well as older tech. In university I had a touch screen laptop with a pen - the finger touch wasn't as good as now (pressure I think, rather than capacitative, and none of the fancy tricks like two finger) but the pen just worked great for me for writing. When touch screens became fashion for laptops for a while that sounded great... but they couldn't at all do the job I lost in my stylus-input Toshiba. And, as a Toshiba, it was decent generally as a not too expensive laptop.
I was lucky that about the time I got it, Linux support was coming out for Wacom tablets. (Which is what was integrated in the screen, I guess.) Incidentally, Xournal turned out way better than any of the programs I had on Windows for writing/drawing and for annotating PDFs. Including Microsoft Office's "One-somethingorother" (I forget the name now.) The Office one was so unexpectedly clunky, and also less powerful. Ah, shame I don't have much use for Xournal these days with no pen input screen. ...Oh, except every time I have to fill in a pdf form, if it's not set up or not set up right. Xournal is more clunky for that task than I'd hope from a pdf annotator, but it just works when other things don't.
I still find it funny how some technological 'upgrades' just don't do things as well as older tech. In university I had a touch screen laptop with a pen - the finger touch wasn't as good as now (pressure I think, rather than capacitative, and none of the fancy tricks like two finger) but the pen just worked great for me for writing. When touch screens became fashion for laptops for a while that sounded great... but they couldn't at all do the job I lost in my stylus-input Toshiba. And, as a Toshiba, it was decent generally as a not too expensive laptop.
I was lucky that about the time I got it, Linux support was coming out for Wacom tablets. (Which is what was integrated in the screen, I guess.) Incidentally, Xournal turned out way better than any of the programs I had on Windows for writing/drawing and for annotating PDFs. Including Microsoft Office's "One-somethingorother" (I forget the name now.) The Office one was so unexpectedly clunky, and also less powerful. Ah, shame I don't have much use for Xournal these days with no pen input screen. ...Oh, except every time I have to fill in a pdf form, if it's not set up or not set up right. Xournal is more clunky for that task than I'd hope from a pdf annotator, but it just works when other things don't.
... Sorry, nostalgic rant over.