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.
I’ve been using gnome fedora on my surface. What drives me nuts is the keyboard resize when it starts putting suggested words above the keyboard. Makes typing a pain in the ass. I can live with everything else, I just want to turn off the word suggestions. I cannot find a setting to disable it.
I didn’t know it can do word suggestions until I read this comment. A web search suggests this functionality is provided by the ibus-typing-booster package; you could uninstall it or look for settings related to it.
I appreciate the lead. I struggled to find things that worked (admittedly didn’t look very hard). I’ll check it out tonight.