Reach out and touch a desktop
A little while back one of our readers e-mailed me and asked if I would experiment with the commonly used Linux desktops and report on how well they worked with touch interfaces. This is unusual territory for me. I generally do not like using touch interfaces, though I have worked with them on and off for over a decade. I tend to find navigating by swipes and finger presses cumbersome and unpleasant. I suspect part of the problem is my fingers are somewhat large, the buttons I am aiming at are often small (by comparison) and I dislike seeing finger prints on my screens.
Still, I own a laptop that features a touch screen and so I loaded up several desktops on the device and experimented with each one in turn. The laptop is a de-branded HP with Intel video drivers and an approximately 15-inch screen. During most of this trial the laptop was running Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 (LMDE 2), which is based on Debian "Jessie". Prior to starting this trial I had the Cinnamon, KDE 4 and Lumina desktop environments on this laptop. I added LXDE, MATE and Xfce. I attempted to install GNOME Shell as well, but ran into dependency conflicts, which I suspect relate to already having Cinnamon on the device. To work around this I downloaded a copy of Fedora and ran GNOME Shell from the live environment. Since Unity is not available in the software repositories of Linux Mint Debian Edition I downloaded a recent release of Ubuntu and used Ubuntu's live environment to test Unity 7.
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