I mostly use KDE, but my experimentation and internet consensus point to Gnome being the most polished overall experience on a touchscreen. I’m mostly satisfied, except for the keyboard.
There’s no number row. There’s no second layer available by long-press. There’s no setting to change either. There doesn’t seem to be a great solution for using a third-party OSK like Onboard, especially on the lockscreen where convenient access to those special characters for those strong passwords we’re surely all using might be of use.
The only option that works reliably seems to be a keyboard built as a Gnome extension. This falls pretty short of the feature set Onboard offers.
If I wanted minimalism to the point of hampering usability coupled with barriers to customizing my experience, I’d buy a fucking iPad… except those do have good thrid-party keyboard support. I don’t understand what the Gnome team is thinking here.
Which distro do you use? Those maintainers are the ones who decide what settings and apps are default in the final distro. It sounds like there is a keyboard and it’s just not yet the GNOME default.
Just like ubunru chooses to use a task bar which is not default in vanilla GNOME.
This is Arch, and I think its Gnome install is pretty vanilla. The OSK is definitely Gnome’s default.
The OSK in Gnome is built into Gnome. Which sucks both because it makes it hard to switch to something better and it makes it impossible to use it outside of Gnome.