How Well does Pop OS! Support Touch
How Well does Pop OS! Support Touch
Recently switched from windows 10 to Debian 12.5 bookworm since I have a unique setup (Nvidia 2070S GPU, 2 1080p monitors, Dell Canvas, and TV) and the default inclusion of Nvidia proprietary drivers and years of Wacom support have made everything workable (nearly out of the box!).
However, touch still isn't great. It works well in Xournal++ and decently in Krita, but struggles everywhere else as a mouse input.
I'm considering hopping to Pop OS! once a stable version of their much anticipated COSMIC DE launches since I love the upgrades over GNOME.
Anybody running a pen display similar to the Dell Canvas on Pop OS! that can speak to it's support for pen and touch input?
Your best bet may be to boot from usb and see for yourself how well your laptop is suppored out of the box.
I have a thinkpad yoga, and when using wayland (Fedora 40 Gnome), the stylus is unusable - it stops working after few seconds of drawing and I have to reopen the app. In X it works fine.
12That idea of booting from a USB is golden.
5
I not sure if this helps you at all but I use Pop!_OS on a Thinkpad with touchscreen. On it I do A LOT of PDF work, including forms and signatures. I have had no problems at all in four years of it being my main system.
Note: I do not use pressure sensitive stylus inputs like the Wacom or iPads use.
5I agree with this from using Pop on a Surface Pro 8, much more casual usage though: mainly web browsing, watching shows, light gaming and scrolling through PDFs/CBR files. Just using a cheap/non pressure sensitive stylus too
3This is about COSMIC Epoch, not their current GNOME.
GNOME or KDE ar far more advanced, while COSMIC Epoch may be cool and clean at the core, it still has like 5 years or more to be equal
2Yeah, OP should probably add "Rust-based" or specific Epoch to avoid confusion.
like 5 years or more
They're really good & extremely dedicated devs with lots of experience working on it, so I think that's a little bit of an underestimation, I think it's within the possibly of getting there within 5 years, maybe not exactly 1:1 ofc. However, they've really put in a lot of thought into base of the project, and in my experience having a strong well designed base can propell future development forward much faster than initial estimates. Even now, they've been smashing mile stones much faster than expected and if they keep their current trajectory at a steady rate I believe it's possible the meet some level of parody within a 5 year goal. Ofc, anything can happen so only time will tell. Also, considering the fact that they're not having to deal with the X11 tech debt...
1
It will be usable but not great. Gnome on wayland will be much better.
3This.
Their core design is awesome, but they are basically rebuilding a strange modified GNOME from the ground up in pure Rust.
Some GNOME components are reused, like gvfs, but the compositor and more are all self written.
It may have no touch support at all.
Try KDE Plasma, it is really awesome.
2KDE isn't as good on touch screens. Gnome is designed to be convergent and the UI has finger friendly buttons. Pop OS cosmic gnome (the desktop that currently ships with pop) is gnome based but it on X so touch input devices will be problematic
3
Depends on the desktop used.
1No toca los PopOS!
1