GROUP TEST TOUCH DESKTOPS

TOUCH DESKTOPS GROUP TEST Graham Morrison and his trusty touch laptop explore the cutting edge of desktops.

On Test Touch Desktops Don’t let your touchscreen go to waste. URL www..com his is a technology that is work best. The third reason is that Version 7.1.2 still on the very cutting edge the touch interfaces of Apple’s iOS Licence L/GPL v3 Tof what Linux desktops can and Google’s Android have shaken Promised touch do – desktops designed to be used up the old launch menu and file enhancements didn’t make with a touchscreen. There are management desktop metaphor, it into 14.04, but does several important reasons why and many newer Linux desktops Unity still do enough? we’re doing this now, rather than have incorporated some of their waiting an indeterminate amount of features already. Gnome time for the technology to mature. Even if they’re not designed URL www..org The first is that it’s fun. New specifically for touching, it’s good Version 3.9 technology, and new ways of to know whether the new style of Licence L/GPL Gnome looks a little like interacting with it, is exciting, and design works with new hardware, Unity, but without the Linux is going to have to find a way or whether touch gets in the way. tablet and to work with touch. The second Which is exactly the challenge we’ve emphasis. important reason is that the set ourselves for this group test. technology is already here, not just We spent a few weeks with our Plasma Active in the form of Android tablets, but multi-boot system playing with URL http://plasma- increasingly in our laptops. Thanks each desktop as we would a active.org to Microsoft’s emphasis on touch desktop in a real production Version 4 for , many new laptops environment. That meant we (from daily) now come with a touchscreen by missed the latest Gnome release Licence GPL default, and if you install Linux on (see p52 for our review), but it also It’s KDE with added touch one of these devices, you’ll want meant we took a pretty ruthless and less KDE. to know which desktop is going to view on whether touch worked. KDE URL www..org “New technology, and new ways of Version 4.13 beta (Kubuntu) interacting with it, is fun.” Licence L/GPL It’s KDE. THE CRUCIAL CRITERIA Our target is the standard x86 PC, rather specifically for touch, the borrow heavily than pure touch devices. We’re using from the full-screen design of Android Android x86 Dell’s XPS 13, as reviewed last issue and iOS. We can also look at Android and as lent to us by www.-net.co.uk itself. The latest x86 release of Android URL www.android-x86.org (thanks Alan!). 4.4 works brilliantly and offers the Version 4.4 RC1 As such, any desktop can be made other side of the touch coin – a touch Licence Apache 2 to work with a touchscreen, but we’re desktop shoehorned into a laptop. For It’s just like the phone and not going to look at every desktop. the others, we’re going to use a base tablet OS, only it’s running We’re going to pick those we’ve found of Ubuntu as this ensures hardware off your laptop. to be the most effective. Gnome 3.x and configuration isn’t the differentiator – Ubuntu’s Unity are two obvious choices, only the way the desktops are designed because while they’re not designed to interact with touch input.

58 www.linuxvoice.com TOUCH DESKTOPS GROUP TEST Installation and Touch configuration input Working at the cutting edge isn’t always easy. You’ve got the touch.

he Android-x86 build has come a long way since we first tried it a Tcouple of years ago. It might initially seem counter-intuitive to install something designed for tablets onto what is essentially a touchscreen laptop, but we really enjoyed the results. It’s like a very fast Nexus with built in keyboard. All the gestures from your smartphone work instantly, from sliding down notifications, or swiping across desktops, to pinch zoom, rotation with no further configuration. It’s tough to write about Android as a legitimate alternative to a more traditional Linux distribution, but if it brings extended functionality to your touchscreen and you enjoy using it, we don’t see the problem. It’s Plasma Active is tricky to install on x86. We used Unetbootin and a recent Kubuntu daily image. still Linux. Second to Android this time is Unity. This is he Plasma Active and Android and it worked amazingly well from there, because it does some sensible things to take desktops we’re looking at are so including both multitouch from the screen, into account the touch input. You can scroll up Tcutting-edge that they can’t be keyboard control and WiFi (an important and down lists, for example, resize a window installed in the way you may be used to. consideration for Android), as well as with three fingers and the cursor is hidden Not only that, you’re going to need a more touch control when needed. when you touch the screen. Those features traditional Linux distribution installed For other desktops, the challenge is alone put it in a different class. Plasma Active alongside for those times when you don’t getting the touchscreen to work well, as is pretty good, as you’d imagine, and KDE is want to be dealing with what are ‘works in most will be able to use touch as a mouse acceptable, but not without modifications. progress’. You won’t have these problems cursor. The best strategy is to find the very Gnome running off both Fedora 20 and with Unity, Gnome or KDE, but it is latest version of a distribution, as this will Ubuntu almost manages it. But only some something you have to deal with when include the latest drivers. This approach window title bars register a touch, leaving installing Plasma Active and Android, as worked for the Haswell XPS 13 for all the certain windows unable to move without both are different to most Linux desktops. distributions and desktops we tried, resorting to the touchpad. Plasma Active is best described as a especially as the XPS 13 Developer Edition remix of KDE for touchscreens. But it’s not originally shipped with Ubuntu 12.04, but just a skin. It takes over the entire system this will also depend on your hardware. and doesn’t work particularly well installed Our touchscreen presents itself to the alongside other KDE Plasma workspaces system as a multitouch (as they’re called), at least not in the way touchpad, which means it works out of the it’s currently distributed. box. But this can also add complications if you’re using a genuine Synaptic touchpad Needs attention alongside the screen. When you combine Plasma Active in general suffers from a these two aspects together, Ubuntu’s Unity lack of love, despite early success, and it’s is the only desktop to have taken both the a struggle to find a working configuration. installation and configuration into As such, installation is best done through consideration, by its nature, with Android Android comes closest to just working. a custom Kubuntu re-spin, or by adding coming a close second. package repositories to vanilla Ubuntu or VERDICT OpenSUSE. We went for the Kubuntu spin VERDICT Android Unity written to a USB stick before committing it Android Gnome Unity KDE to a section of the hard drive. Similarly, we Gnome Plasma Active KDE dropped the USB image of Android 4.4 Plasma Active onto a USB stick booting with Easy2Boot,

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Customisation Usability If it’s not great, just what can Does a touchscreen actually add anything? you do to make things better? ere’s the rub (sorry!) – just our conclusion is that a touchscreen because your hardware has a can genuinely help in some very specific The point of this group test is to see which Htouchscreen, it doesn’t mean cases, and the amount that they help desktop environments have implemented you should feel duty-bound to use it. If is down to the desktop. In Android, for features that best work with touch. But it’s you are going to use it, the desktop has example, a gesture to open the settings also possible to change a great deal about to make it worthwhile. We have used makes a lot of sense. And Unity is how they look and behave even if they don’t touch and keyboard devices for a few obviously working on phones. But that’s support touch. KDE comes out best because months, especially when travelling, and where all the others need most work. there’s just so much you can change. You can dramatically increase the width of the scrollbars making them much easier to grab Android and move with your fingers. You can change Not surprisingly, Android excels at touch. touchpad (it works!). And using the the size of the title bar, and replace the icons After all, input has been designed around computer in this way is quicker and more with much more finger-friendly options. fingers rather than mouse and keyboard efficient than doing similar gestures the A cut-down number of options is also input. But what most surprised us is that it old fashioned way, or even though a available to Plasma Active users. Android is feels very natural behind a laptop launcher such as Gnome Do. As a laptop seriously restricted by not running traditional form-factor. You find yourself , it feels much more Linux applications, but this can be helped a automatically launching apps and swiping mature than Chrome/Chromium OS. little by using an open source repository such through running processes by touching Though we’re loath to use the word, as F-Droid, or dual-booting your machine. the screen, while at the same time using there’s some synergy between the Gnome has plenty of plugins and themes that the keyboard or even reverting to the touchscreen and the keyboard. can help, while there’s not too much you can change in Unity. Plasma Active also has a complete set of widgets that can be added to a specifically designed fullscreen background. These widgets, like the ones you find in Android, Android x86’s cutting-edge are a great way of creating something of the nature means not everything tablet experience with a Linux desktop, and works – Netflix, for example. they work well with touch and the widescreen But the touch experience is form factor. We should also be able to pull second to none. down a task manager in Plasma Active, but in the three different x86 installations we tried, this doesn’t work. Instead, we had to rely on KDE KRunner to launch and configure the desktop. By default, most things in KDE are small. launching an application associated with In Unity, however, swiping down over the This makes them difficult to use from a a file is useful, and KDE is perhaps the top-right corner of the display was enough touchscreen. Clicking on an app to launch strongest desktop when it comes to to reveal the options of whatever icon we from the menu is difficult, for example, configuration options. You can change happened to touch. This was probably a side and resizing windows is almost almost anything about the desktop to effect of touching the icon, but it’s very similar impossible, although moving windows is make it more touch friendly. But perhaps in behaviour to the latest builds slightly easier and is the only mouse because it’s an area the KDE team might running on phones, where you can slide function with any touch advantage feel is covered by Plasma Active, down and horizontally to switch between potential. The single-click option for concessions to touch in KDE are very few. the settings for those widgets running. Unity definitely has the best potential, and we just hope that the work that’s gone into the mobile version isn’t lost on x86 users, even if it’s through a third-party repository.

VERDICT Android Unity Gnome Without customisation, the KDE Plasma Active touch KDE experience is difficult and clunky. You’re better off with a mouse.

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Unity 14.04 Hitting the scroll bars at the side of the resize it using large anchor points or Unity desktop is a problem, as too is maximise and minimise without any Touch resizing a window from the bottom right difficulty. Tap three fingers and you can corner. However, one of Unity’s best switch applications. A four finger tap will features is multitouch support, and this open the dash or bring the launcher back potential works on the screen. Place three fingers from a hidden state. These gestures Can touch help you do more? on a window and you can move it around, transform Unity’s touch possibilities. This is going to depend on what you need to do. Android, for instance, is hobbled by not being a traditional Linux distribution. You can’t install many of the applications you may be used to, and many tasks are impossible. There are no tools for specific kinds of software Most icons in Unity are large development, or 3D animation, or any number enough to prod, especially of other tasks. But there are many everyday when it comes to restarting or tasks such as web browsing, writing words, shutting down your machine. staying on top of emails and playing Angry Birds that are arguably better accomplished on Android that on a Linux desktop. Plasma Active Even the Rotate Screen feature was useful, There are many things to like about comprehensive as Unity’s multitouch as it was a perfect way of proofing pages for Plasma Active. It’s the only big Linux support. The large widgets you can place this very magazine. We’d love to see an desktop, bar Android, to have been on the background can go some way to Android mash-up where you had X11 desktop designed for touch devices, so it has the make Plasma Active feel like Android, and functionality and package compatibility. potential to be the best of both worlds. By there’s a primitive settings dialog that However, touch on other desktops can be default, window management is easy presents its options in large, slidable more productive. Web browsing in Plasma thanks to the large icons and scroll bars, controllers. There’s a customised version Active, file management and app launching although there’s nothing as of KDE’s web browser too. from Unity, and cursor placement in all of them makes a touchscreen worthwhile. Plasma Active has a lock screen designed for touch, so you can easily slide open the screen when you want to resume a session. Android does the same, obviously, but it feels like the right thing to do – much better than Plasma Active has plenty of potential, but a lack of flicking the Caps Lock on the keyboard, which development is holding it is what we usually do to resume a sleeping back from being a usable laptop. The problem with Plasma Active is desktop. that everything is just too half-finished to be useful. Which is disappointing, because when we tried earlier versions actually running on a Gnome tablet, usability was top-notch. The problem Gnome has some of the advantages of changing the theme, and Gnome is really we had then was with performance and Unity, thanks to its launcher and panel. missing the multitouch features of Unity, efficiency, not usability, while running on an Applications and icons are easy to locate, but it’s better than KDE because the ARM CPU. and the application launcher view, along makes more sense from a touch Gnome had a problem where we couldn’t with its containers for other applications, perspective. Thanks to the click zones move the settings windows with the touch is an excellent mechanism for navigating being up against the edge of the top panel, screen. This might have been a hardware to the tools you want to run. It’s difficult to you can also swipe down on the screen to issue, but as we experienced the same close and resize windows without do things like logout or open the settings. problem on both Fedora and Ubuntu, it might be a deeper issue with the different ways Gnome handles window management, or it might be interpreting touch differently.

VERDICT Android Unity Gnome is hampered by some Gnome KDE of the window borders not Plasma Active working in the same way that others do.

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uring the course of this and the the chances are you want to do some previous issue, we spent a serious computing with it, so while Dconsiderable period of time Android is great at certain mobile- with each desktop, doing the stuff that friendly jobs, it wouldn’t be our desert we normally do. We wanted to see island desktop. whether the presence of a touchscreen would change the way we interact with Multitouch FTW the Linux desktop. Thanks to its multitouch support, the We’ve probably written more words issues of resizing and moving windows about Android in this group test than don’t affect Unity, as you can just push Android made a shockingly good, and surprisingly we have about the other desktops, and three fingers across the screen to do productive, laptop operating system. that’s because Android has surprised what needs to be done. The same us by being remarkably productive. configuration can be made to work with hardly worth buying a laptop with a When you pull it out of the CPU- and other desktops, but that requires some touchscreen for. Finally, there’s Plasma memory-restrictive environment of a tinkering. One slight hitch might be Active. The biggest problem we had smartphone or a tablet, and put it onto whether multitouch makes its way to with this was stability, so while some a fully fledged Intel Core i7 CPU with the display server, but considering aspects were better than other 8GB of RAM, it flies. ’s big push on mobile and desktops – such as the browser and Of course, the problem is that it’s only tablets, it’s more likely that touch will settings support – we couldn’t rely on going to be good for certain tasks. In get better rather than worse for future the desktop enough to do any real work. particular, it doesn’t make much sense versions of Unity. Our time was better spent trying to when you can pick up a tablet for very We were able to work with both KDE make KDE look more like Plasma Active. little money in comparison to a laptop. and Gnome, but these desktops were It’s not a stable operating system, and used almost 99% of the time through VERDICT has quite specific hardware the mouse and keyboard, reverting to Android Unity requirements, so it’s not going to be a touch only for cursor placement and Gnome KDE good choice for most people. If you’re occasionally to launch an app or editor Plasma Active using a computer with a touchscreen, in KDE. It’s still better than nothing, but Third-party support Can we make the touch experience more accessible?

here are many things you the shell. It was touch enabled without can do to make any of these any further modification and can be Tdesktops more friendly to latched onto the edge of the screen. touch. Gnome, Unity and KDE can It also has some useful features such quickly improve the touch experience as snippets and typing assistance/ in Firefox by installing the ‘Grab & Drag’ auto-correction. The keyboard can also Ubuntu does a great job at making touchscreen input a extension, for example. This replaces be hidden automatically, and quickly central part of its desktop experience. Firefox’s default action of left-click brought back to life by keeping a text selection with a hand that grabs hovering icon on-screen. real keyboard beneath the display, we and scrolls the web page. It can even We also liked Gnome’s ‘Florence’ found an on-screen keyboard to be add momentum for the full tablet keyboard . It’s scalable, has a almost essential for some tasks. Finally, experience, and there’s simple support touchscreen input mode, and you we’d describe KDE’s own on-screen for page up and page down gestures. can clearly see when you’ve hit the keyboard as functional rather than This extension alone transforms the key you’re aiming for thanks to the useful for touchscreen users. non-Android desktops. Even an on- focus zoom feature. Both Florence screen keyboard can help, when you and Onboard can be set to have a VERDICT don’t want to move your hand down to transparency, so they don’t have to Android Unity the keyboard. get in the way of the remainder of the Gnome KDE Our favourite was Ubuntu’s, which display, and while it may sound slightly Plasma Active can be launched by typing onboard in crazy when there’s a perfectly usable

62 www.linuxvoice.com TOUCH DESKTOPS GROUP TEST OUR VERDICT Touch desktops ouch hasn’t changed our had to check to make sure it was desktops in the way we still being developed. There’s no Unity is still easily the best Linux desktop for a touchscreen. Tthought it might, but touch easy way to install it, and very little input is something developers and documentation on using it. It could 1st Unity users still need to consider. be a great initiative, but unless Licence GPL & LGPL v3 Version 7.1.2 Microsoft, for example, got things there’s some reason for developers spectacularly wrong with its unified to get behind it – such as Aaron www.ubuntu.com touch interface with Windows 8, Siego’s wonderful Spark tablet idea Ubuntu is perhaps the distribution with the greatest motivation backtracking to a more traditional – it’s not going to happen. to make touch a central part of its desktop. And it shows. appearance with each update. The KDE comes next, although a open source community has taken properly configured KDE desktop 2nd Android x86 a more pragmatic and sober for Linux would score higher. This Licence Apache 2 Version 4.13 beta (Kubuntu) approach, which we think has paid result is purely because there’s very off, despite early versions of both little evidence of any changes being www.kde.org Gnome 3.x and Unity seemingly made to accommodate touch. Next We loved Android on a laptop. If only there were a way of installing the applications we’re more used to, it would win. “The Unity launcher, on-screen keyboard 3rd KDE and panel all work well with touch.” Licence GPL & LGPL Version 4.13 beta (Kubuntu) embracing the idea. Touch isn’t comes Gnome. Finding and www.kde.org Just pulls ahead of Gnome because it’s more configurable, and going to change the desktop launching applications is good, as when you make the scrollbars large, it’s very usable. overnight, but nor is it going to be a too is the on-screen keyboard, but passing fad. The technology is there are some gotchas – such as seeping into standard PC/laptop/ some of the windows not 4th Gnome hardware, and Microsoft’s hardware responding in the same way to Licence GPL & LGPL Version 3.9 partners are determined to push for touch control. www.gnome.org more tablet/PC convergence. As Despite our falling for Android Despite looking like Unity, there’s no particular touch such, there’s still a long way to go x86 4.4, we’ve only ranked it consideration in the GUI, but it has lots of potential. for the Linux desktop to be second. This is because Android considered touch friendly. x86 has no crossover with a We had highest hopes for traditional Linux distro. Unity wins 5th Plasma Active Plasma Active, because it seems to because there were no big Licence GPL Version 4 (from Kubuntu daily) be the only mainstream based problems, the launcher, on-screen http://plasma-active.org Linux desktop taking touch keyboard and panel all work well We feel bad putting this last. We’ve used a build on an ARM seriously. But so little has happened with touch, and the multitouch tablet that worked brilliantly, but x86 is lacking love. over the last 12 months that we module makes all the difference. YOU MAY ALSO WISH TO TRY… Any Linux desktop is going to be malleable didn’t make them part of this group test. operating system and we spent a enough to work with a touch interface. They Google recently announced a new considerable about of time getting this to can all be configured to use larger buttons, or Chromebook, the Acer C720P, and it comes work on the XPS 13. As almost everything is place large launch icons in places that fingers with a touchscreen. It’s running Google’s own browser based, touch helps when scrolling will find easier to hit. Mate and Cinnamon, for browser-centric Chrome OS, an OS that falls around and hitting links, but doesn’t offer example, both work well in out tests, as into the same category as Android for being anything beyond Firefox with a touch plugin, would . But there’s nothing specifically non-standard in the way other Linux desktops but it may be worth a try if Android has given touch friendly about them, which is why we are. But there is an open source build of the you a taste of cutting-edge touch desktops.

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