How can I get a better touchscreen experience?

General system Newbie
1

Hello. Reddit has given the impression of KDE working well with touchscreen laptops.

But it turns out the experience is kinda poor.

What’s missing is: hinge and gyro sensor support, input devices control.
Additionally, I can’t long-press on the touchscreen to right-click nor find a setting to enable this.

I’m an avid user of the convertible concept featured on my Lenovo Yoga (1470) where the keyboard can fold away and on windows, which enables auto-rotation and gyro while disabling the trackpad and keyboard to prevent accidental input.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

2

Do you mean automatic orientation? Also you should switch to Wayland to get most of the “touchscreen perks” of KDE. Install plasma-wayland-session, log out and choose Plasma (Wayland).

3

i do see minor improvements with plasma-wayland-session yes :+1:

But also, you seem to have missed the second half of the message.

4

Yes I did :man_facepalming:
Are there any other problems now?

5

I still do not see any awareness of the hinge or gyro sensors, no control over input devices and no “long-press touchscreen to rightclick” - the thing that did improve was click-drag behavior.

6

Did you try installing tools likeiio-sensor-proxy inotify-tools lm-sensors
Have you looked at the Arch Wiki for more information?

7

only lm-sensors. Have added the others now but i dunno how they can be utilized.

After installing the others and digging a little more I found Xournal++ which seems to cover my needs for sketching/taking notes.
(I had dismissed Arch Wiki’s “tablet-pc” page as the title seemed to only cater to the “MS Surface Go” and other devices where your basically not supposed to have a keyboard connected)

After installing detect-tablet-mode-git I do get the keyboard disabled in tablet mode.
I haven’t figured out how to add the trackpad to the same events.

Apart from that, I haven’t found a solution to these issues:

  • adding “long-press to right-click”
  • auto-rotation is not enabled or the gyro is not working (lack of driver?)
  • the cursor itself does not follow touch input, which sometimes gives weird behavior
  • having global awareness of touch (i.e. drag just selects text in FF instead of scrolling the page)
  • minor oddity: auto-rotate-lock button is detected and could probably be remapped to do something useful, but it’s output is really strange. I do not know how to log what it does.

For the auto-rotate, i do see a C script that could be used but I can’t figure out what device to point it to.

For auto-rotate-lock button, an educated guess from libinput list-devices is that this button is part of “Ideapad extra buttons”
Additionally ls -lh /dev/input/by-path lists VPC2004 which seems to be some kind of Lenovo standardization of various things. It’s not related to the above issues, but still quite useful.

8

Good luck …I think this really something you’ll have to figure out on your own. I’m not a touch screen person. I like using a mouse even on laptops. Touch pads and gestures and all that i just don’t care for. Use the Arch wiki and google and trial and error. You may get some things working or you may not. :man_shrugging: