A distro with the Gnome desktop is where I would start. It has the best touch gestures and on screen keyboard. Gnome’s keyboard still could use some work however, and I would recommend you install “improved osk” if you intend to use it a lot. Cinnamon will work fine but it’s not as fancy…at least since I have last used it. (Its been a few years.)

I used to have some 2 in 1 HP x360 that I initially had Linux Mint on and it did work well. But then I tried PopOS out on it and I had to switch it over to that because of the touch screen gestures and an on screen keyboard that would automatically pop up when you activated a text field. I wouldn’t recommend PopOS right now if you want the latest and greatest Gnome updates, as it is a bit out of date since they are focusing on creating their own desktop. It’s still a solid choice though.

i have arch linux running on a surface pro 6

laptop specs: core i5, 8 gb ram, 256 gb ssd

linux setup:

• arch btw
• linux-surface kernel
• gnome (Wayland)

the touchscreen is working very smoothly

I’ve had a couple touchscreen portables that run Linux. I virtually NEVER use the touchscreen on the traditional notebook style portables, which are an Asus Zenbook from the mid-2010s and a Dell Latitude 7390 from 2017 or so. Both run Debian/XFCE. The desktop environment isn’t really designed for touch interaction, and the screens have pretty low resolution and terrible multitouch support. It works.for the odd button press, or to advance slides during presentations. It’s just not a great experience. Plus, both of those screens smudge like the Devil, and just collect fingerprints & dust.

The third portable is a Lenovo Carbon X1 slate, one of the generations from late 2019. It has a Wacom 3000x3000 touch display built in, and a multifunctional stylus. I run Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon on that one. Its on Mint 18 or 19, so take the next bit as how it was a couple years ago: the touchscreen experience in Cinnamon is functional but a little.clunky. Touch interaction is responsive, accurate and smooth. Writing with the stylus takes some getting used to, but taking handwritten notes and diagrams in Xjournal or an app called Write was okay. I never got the hang of calling up the on-screen keyboard in fewer than a couple.of taps, but once it was up it worked fine. Its terrible for coding or commandline interactions because the special character layouts were more iThing-like.than Android but it did work, even if slowly.

One thing I did struggle with was screen rotation. I had to download and tweak a script that called some xrdb or xrandr commands when the orientation changed. Kludgy, but it did work and it got the job done.

I imagine newer versins of Cinnamon have improved on all this in the last few years. In fact, I was going to make a project this week of reinstalling that system on the latest LMDE to see if I couldn’t make better use of it now that we’re back in the office a few days a week. I was getting the hang of the digital notepad, and now I kind of miss it.

(Why reinstall? Dumb decisions on my.part when sizing the slices I used for boot and root. Gotta blow it all away to make it right.)

Happy to answer questions if I can.

I’ve owned a Thinkpad A485 with touchscreen for years and had several Linux distros on it including Manjaro and Linux Mint which I am currently using.

Never had any issues, touchscreen always works out of the box without me having to do anything extra. In fact, with a few distros, I’ve had issues with certain wireless mice, but my touchscreen always has worked. So I’ve actually had slightly better luck with the laptop touchscreen than some external mice lol.

Now a qualifier: I rarely use the touchscreen, and when I do, it’s always just to click something or scroll on an article or file list. I don’t do any special gestures or fancy touch functions, so I can’t speak to support from that perspective.

Using an xps17 2019. The touch screen works ok, but it stops working after closing the lid. Using EndeavourOS with Wayland btw.

I’ve read that latest Microsoft surface devices have proprietary touchscreen implementation so it can’t be included in main Linux kernel

thus, you need to install a customized kernel for that, read up linux-surface for that

aside from this, I think every laptop works just fine under Wayland

I’ve been using fedora on a surface go 3 and it’s been a good experience - auto rotate works and osk mostly works. In general Gnome seems to be the best DE for touchscreens, especially if you use it in tablet mode a lot. You’re gonna at least want something up to date and probably using Wayland, so I wouldn’t go with mint.

One option is to use something like Fedora or Arch for both PCs, but use a different desktop environment (gnome on the 2-in-1, kde on the desktop).

This has less to do with distro, and more to do with Desktop Environment choice. Anything on Wayland is great with touchscreens. I’m on Plasma, and it’s pretty fantastic.

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I don’t have one but my cousin has one and I tried to use it back in fedora 35-36 I think. Not a good experience. Maybe it’s better now

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I actually just went through this exact situation in the last month and I switched to LMDE6 on my 2-in-1 lenovo touch screen. Auto rotation didn’t work right out the gate, but iio-sensor-proxy fixed that. In general, I’ve noticed that the touchscreen default setting for some apps (eg, firefox) treats touches as a mouse click, so rather than scrolling it would select text. But I’ve found this AskUbuntu fix worked for me. Been a good experience since then.

I have an Thinkpad X380 Yoga running stock Fedora with GNOME and it works pretty damn well. The pen works and it recognises the buttons, the auto appearing keyboard works and so does the auto rotate. Basically very few problems at all, I don’t use it all that extensively outside of GIMP though.

I have an Acer Swift 5 and Linux Mint/Cinnamon. It worked from the start, no issues ever.