[Note: I'm somewhat ambivalent about where to post this. I'm putting it in the General Help forum, because it's a list of specific problems, many of which I've solved, but some of which I haven't yet. I hope this will be helpful to others, as well as helping me find some better solutions. I chose not to put it in the Mobile Technology forum, because touchscreens are becoming more common on mainstream laptops nowadays.]
I've installed Ubuntu 18.04 on my Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 and am using it without a physical keyboard or mouse. It's clear that touchscreen support was not a goal for this release, since many things are broken in very obvious ways, but I have been able to find enough solutions and work-arounds to arrive at a satisfying experience for my limited requirements - this is a secondary device that I use only for web, email, light text editing, and consuming media stored on a samba server. Perhaps there are better desktop environments or distros for this, but I'd like to keep my laptops, servers, and this tablet running the same software, as far as possible.
I'll start with issues of interest to anyone running Ubuntu 18.04 on a touchscreen and finish with issues specific to this particular hardware.
System
(1) A single tap in the Dock bar on the left side of the screen acts like two taps. If you click on the "Show Applications" icon in the lower-left corner, the expected page of application icons appears momentarily and then disappears. If you click on a program icon in the dock, you get two running instances of the program.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...k/+bug/1725384
This a very obvious bug, but it can be worked around. When you get two instances of a running program, close one of them. For the "Show Applications" icon: tap-and-hold until the application icons appear, then slide your finger up into the dock bar, then release.
(2) The on-screen keyboard is incapable of entering capital letters and many of the special characters.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/135
This another very obvious bug, but it can be worked around by replacing the default on-screen keyboard (caribou) with a better alternative (onboard).
sudo apt-get install onboard gnome-shell-extension-onboard gnome-tweaks
In gnome-tweaks, choose the "extension" tab, and turn on Onboard Indicator.
You can customize onboard's appearance and behavior, using Onboard Settings, which you get when you install onboard. The most important tweak is the keyboard's size, which you adjust simply by grabbing an edge and dragging.
(3) There is no way to right-click or middle-click.
You can try:
settings / universal access / click assist / simulated secondary click - ON
This is supposed to convert a long click into a right-click, and it works under certain circumstances, but it often does nothing.
Not being able to right-click or middle-click is another major usability issue on touch screens, but onboard also provides a work-around for this. In onboard, near the upper-right corner, there is an arrow button. If you tap it, it exposes a number of additional arrow buttons. You can use these to simulate right-click and middle-click. This is cumbersome but reliable.
(4) The window buttons (min/max/close) are tiny. They are hard to hit with your finger, and it is easy to hit something else unintentionally.
I have not yet found a perfect solution to this. A very helpful partial solution is to increase the horizontal space around the window buttons. Create or edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and add lines like this:
Code:
headerbar button {
margin-left: 10px;
margin-right: 20px;
}
To activate it, log out and log back in again or, on a physical keyboard, type ALT-F2, then the letter R, and then hit Enter.
If there is an easy way to enlarge the actual icons, or there is a theme better-suited to touchscreens, please let me know about it.
(5) Scroll bars are tiny and hard to operate with your finger. You can enlarge them by creating or editing ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and adding lines like these:
Code:
scrollbar, scrollbar button, scrollbar slider {
min-width: 35px;
min-height: 50px;
}
If you prefer tap-in-trough to advance only one screenful at a time, create or edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and add the following two lines:
Code:
[Settings]
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = false
(6) The top bar is tiny and hard to operate with your finger. Since I use this very rarely, I'm willing to trade the inconvenience for the vertical screen real estate.
The thing I would use frequently in the top bar is the Activities button, which pulls up a window and workspace switcher. On the Dell 7140, the physical button at the bottom of the screen accomplishes the same thing, so I don't use the Activities button in the top bar.
(7) Many things are too small, both for viewing and for finger-tapping. These preferences vary from person to person; here are the choices I made:
gnome-tweaks / fonts
scaling factor - 1.33
window title - Ubuntu Medium 16
interface - Ubuntu Regular 14
document - Sans Regular 13
monospace - Ubuntu Mono Regular 13
settings / dock / icon size - 56
terminal / preferences / unnamed - custom font monospace regular 14
(8) Occasionally, the top bar becomes unresponsive to touch events, and sometimes the whole screen becomes unresponsive to touch events. When this happens, the system remains responsive to the physical button at the bottom of the Dell 7140, which pulls up the Activities screen, and tapping it gets the touchscreen unstuck. This might be a serious problem on other hardware.
Applications
(9) Thunderbird - can't touch-scroll the overview pane. I switched to evolution, which works well. Wish its icons were a little bigger, but they are usable.
(10) Firefox
touch-scroll:
add the following line to
~/.profile and log out and log in again:
export MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1
navigate to about:config
set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.33
(do NOT make it smaller than 1.0, unless exactly -1.0, which uses the system size)
avoid right-clicking:
install the
Tap To Tab firefox extension - double-click on links to open in a new tab
to open bookmarks in new tabs automatically:
visit about:config
set browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInTabs to true
After doing these things, firefox works great!
(10) In many programs, you can navigate menus with the touch screen, but when you tap to make a selection, nothing happens. Some programs that exhibit this bug: evolution, aisle riot solitaire. I have no work-around for this, except to use a physical mouse. For my use cases, I can get away with not using menus in programs that exhibit this problem.
(11) Synaptic's authorization pop-up disables onboard, the on-screen keyboard, so it is completely unusable. You can either plug in a keyboard or use apt-get from the command line.
Hardware-Specific
(12) [Dell 7140] MicroSD card reader doesn't work, but there is a work-around.
create /etc/modprobe.d/sdhci.conf, containing a single line:
options sdhci debug_quirks2="0x4"
update-initramfs -u -k all
https://www.0xf8.org/2016/01/workaro...version-4-1-8/
(13) [Dell 7140] Suspend doesn't work, always results in a reboot. Didn't work in Windows 8 or Ubuntu 16.04 and still doesn't work. No workaround that I know of.
https://www.dell.com/community/Table...d/td-p/5079009
(14) [Dell 7140] Headphones are ununsable. No workaround that I know of.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2390372
Conclusion
The above may sound like a nightmare, and it certainly was more effort than I would have liked, but it has resulted in a system that does all I need and does it well. I've only been using it for a few hours, so more issues may appear, but I'm quite happy with it, for now.
Adv Reply
Originally Posted by AlpineCarver
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