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With the recent appearance of Ubuntu 20.04 and its extended family of distributions, I thought it would be a nice time to see which advances in hardware support have been taking place in the background. A new version of the Linux kernel (5.4), and various desktop managers, made me wonder if support for my HP Spectre x360 laptop was available. This 2-in-1, convertible or flip-screen laptop – depending on what you choose to call it – has been giving entire satisfaction with the 18.x and 19.x Ubuntu family as well as Linux Mint 19.x. Specifically, this unit has a high-density screen resolution at 1920×1080, which is a tad too much for a 13-inch diagonal screen. But screen resolution can easily be reduced to 1600×900 in all recent versions of Ubuntu, so this is not an issue. The tactile aspect of the screen has also been working well, though I have used it little since the laptop has quite a nice touchpad – precise, and with good feeling. So there was just one single niggle at the back of my mind: for the life of me, I was unable to use the laptop with its screen completely folded back, ie, in tablet mode. It could get there – sort of – but I needed to flip the screen orientation by hand, and the keyboard stayed active, which was a bit of a bother when holding the computer up by its back.
When Focal Fossa rolled around, the first version I tried out was Kubuntu – with excellent results. Startup times were severely reduced (with a very minor tweaking of systemd):
graphical.target reached after 3.115s in userspace
The Plasma desktop was beautiful as always, and even my Wacom tablet was recognized directly with new drivers that came with the kernel. So life was good… but not in tablet mode. No dice there.
Some days later, I tried Ubuntu 20.04 itself. This proved to be something of a letdown. It may be a matter of opinion, but I find this version of the Gnome desktop much better than in the past, but still not quite on the same level as KDE/Plasma. Graphical target times in the 20+ seconds do not compare well for Gnome. Perhaps I should mention this was using the very same laptop and booting off the same internal SSD drive in both cases.
However, something strange happened when, for some reason, the computer got tilted on its side. This was purely by accident, but the end result was interesting: the screen rotated by 90 degrees. The desktop was now vertical, with Ubuntu’s traditional dock now occupying one of the longer sides.
Further examination showed that the screen did, indeed, respond to changes in the physical orientation of the computer, rotating to one side, to the other, or even going completely upside-down if the laptop screen was folded in “tent mode”. Furthermore, once the screen had been folded back, the laptop’s physical keyboard and track-pad were automatically deactivated. Now, some readers may be tempted to laugh at their screens, since this is well-known behavior for such convertible laptops. However, it should be stressed that this particular machine has never suffered the indignity of running Windows, and that previous versions of Ubuntu do not seem to have offered easy out-of-the-box handling of tablet mode screen orientation.
So there I was, faced with a quandary. Kubuntu had been really good to me, but could not handle the tablet mode I really wanted to try out more completely. Ubuntu, on the other hand, was dog-slow, and did not suit my appreciation of things working well, fast and efficiently. It was then that a chance comment by our esteemed editor Ronnie came to mind: Ubuntu Budgie might be worth a try. The desktop environment in this distribution is known to be more responsive than Gnome, though using the very same GTK libraries. Perhaps – just perhaps – could tablet mode be made to work in Budgie?
And indeed it could. Exactly as with Ubuntu, the Budgie desktop manager responded instantly to rotation, and the keyboard and trackpad were deactivated when the screen was flipped over backwards. Tada! Now, I had a very nice 13-inch tablet, with a decent processor, memory and storage space – but which I could, at will, flip back into a normal laptop mode and resume a more productive workflow with the standard keyboard.
There are some advantages to the vertical screen. A complete A4 page may be viewed with some comfort, for example, when reading a PDF file. The vertical screen can also be of use when doing text editing: in this case, too, being able to see the complete page does come in handy. However, an external USB keyboard would be needed, since the laptop’s own set is tilted up by 90 degrees.
Finally, there is naturally the option of using Budgie’s (and Gnome’s) virtual keyboard application, called onboard. This can be configured to take up a strip at the bottom of our now rather narrow screen, which is advantageous since it leaves quite a large space available for our main applications – unlike most tablets. However, responses are not quite as sharp as with a physical keyboard, so my impression is that most users would actually prefer flipping the screen back to laptop mode and using the unit’s physical keyboard when needed. That being said, onboard does have a very nice theme that mimics the appearance of IBM’s Model M mechanical keyboard.
All in all, I am very happy with progress achieved in the 20.04 crop of Ubuntu and sister distributions. Using a laptop in tablet mode and various other small tweaks may seem rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things. However, they do unlock features already present in the hardware, thus that I have paid for. So this is definitely a step or two in the good direction for GNU/Linux as a desktop operating system.