Really interesting to see that so many are using Gnome…
I am really unsure which one to use.
In Gnome the usability with the touchscreen feels better. Good virtual keyboard, etc. But as the resolution of the screen is a bit to high to me, I’d like to set it to around 115%. 200% is way to big, and fractional scaling looks strange in some applications (and can only do 125%). I like to set it to 1,15 for the font-scaling, but this is set to all displays. So using it with my 38” monitor everything is much to big. That’s annoying….
Plasma in crontrast gives me all the settings I’d like to have. But it is not as touch-friendly as Gnome. I have some damn flickerings in the bottom most pixels sometimes and the virtual keyboard is a pain.
I’d like to use Plasma on my big screen and Gnome on my internal screen.
A few days ago i implemented a virtual keyboard for the lockscreen in DankMaterialShell dots for quickshell. It solved my problem with unlocking my Framework 12 on Niri in tablet mode. If you don’t want to use someone else’s dotfiles, but just want to take the code of the virtual keyboard to your config, then you can find all the changes in this pull request
I’m struggling a lot. I would love to use GNOME, but I discovered that global trackpad scroll sensitivity can’t be changed and is way too high and when I set traditional scroll direction it also swaps orientation of gestures which are alone complete deal breakers for me. So I’m trying out KDE but on the other hand it’s way too much customizable.
Note: I ain’t no Linux guru, I’m mainly MacOS person. I believe there are solutions to my problem, but until those solutions are not 5 minute fixes I ain’t gonna spent hours figuring it out.
Touchpad speed:
Yes, there is configuration that affects pointer speed, but it seems to have no effect on scroll speed with two fingers
Scroll orientation:
Yes, but my issue is that changing the orientation of scroll also affects three finger gesture for multitasking view. I want to have two finger swipe down to scroll down AND three fingers up trigger multitasking view. But I was stuck with two fingers swipe down to scroll down and three fingers swipe down to trigger multitasking view. As I still spend 70% time on Macbook where I am used to the gestures I find it really hard to get used to other gestures on secondary device.
I’m using MATE with XMonad as the window manager. I like having the Gnome 2 panel on the left-hand edge of the screen, and the Gnome keychain for ssh keys.
Well I think Bazzite is also usable for non-gaming-PC (and I already thought about installing it on my FW12). You just can throw steam out of Autostart and ignore those five gaming-packages. Therefore you have an immutable Distro with VM-support.
Haven’t used Mac OS for over 10 years, so I’m not the best to give hints. But to be comparable, you could prefer Gnome over KDE. Install the “Dash to Dock” addon.
Alternatively there is elementary OS, which tries to be Mac-like. I never used it and I don’t know how well it runs on a FW12.
I’m currently trialing the phosh shell on Fedora 43. Top bar swiping and the lock screen are easier than with Gnome. The bottom bar took a couple of days to get used to swiping up. The biggest issue is the keyboard not automatically unfolding when you focus a text box.
A more minor issue is that it doesn’t seem to load the gnome keyring by default so I have to unlock ssh keys manually.
The osk is a little nicer in phosh than gnome and it pops up when you press the bottom bar. I like the gesture control for the cursor key movment.
edit: can’t input gpg passwords in phosh, that’s pretty much ended it for me as I use `pass` as my password manager.
I solved my phosh osk issue by using the phosh mobile settings to ignore the hardware keyboard. Somehow this means the keyboard still only shows automatically in tablet mode and not laptop mode.
