Test Driving Gnome3 on a Tablet (Surface Pro 3)

I have been using Kubuntu/KDE on my Surface Pro 3 for a while. I decided I wanted to try Ubuntu/Gnome3.

Trust the Gnome

The Gnome3 team has designed a specific kind of workflow. I'm going to do my best to follow that workflow as much as possible. Trust the Gnome!

Performance

Performance was fine on my Surface Pro 3. I have an i7 processor and 8GB of RAM. The desktop idled at about 1GB of RAM in use. I think this desktop would run well on most machines, but might be a stretch for really low end devices like Raspberry Pi. By the numbers, KDE provided slightly lower CPU/RAM utilization, but the difference was inconsequential for me.

Touchability

Obviously I'm intending to use this primarily as a touch device. From this perspective, Gnome has a vastly better user interface. Double taps, tap and drag, and other gestures work far better and far more often in Gnome than in KDE.

Buttons and GUI elements are easily tappable, and once fractional display scaling was enabled I was able to fit a decent amount of content on-screen and still manipulate it effectively.

The default apps are well configured for touch screens. The file explorer was a particular pleasure. One exception was Firefox, which was not configured for touch at all. The recipe to fix that is widely available online. I suspect Canonical hasn't enabled touch in Firefox because Mozilla still considers it an experimental feature.

To enable 2 finger scrolling, add MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 DEFAULT=1 to /etc/security/pam_env.conf, then open about:config in Firefox, then set dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled to 1, then reboot.

Suggestions: None. This category is excellent.

On-Screen Keyboard

Gnome has the best on-screen keyboard integration of any distro I've ever seen. Called the "caribou" keyboard (or perhaps forked from that project), this keyboard pops up any time you touch a text field with your finger. It looks clean and sharp and is a joy to tap on.

The joy is short lived, however, when you realize the keyboard is missing the control and alt key. Apparently that "isn't the purpose" of this keyboard. I wonder if the Gnome3 team will add this feature another day.

The keyboard had the following hiccups during my testing:

1. It would sometimes push windows up and off the screen, which sometimes created problems. No workaround.
2. It would cover the text input field in google hangouts. Workaround was to "pop out" the chat.
3. Sometimes it would not appear when desired. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and it shall be summoned.
4. It was supremely annoying when using finger taps to set the cursor in a text document. The on-screen keyboard shouldn't appear if I have a keyboard active. The workaround is to temporarily disable it with the "Block-Caribou" shell extension.

There is a temptation to use the onboard keyboard instead, but this is a non-starter. The activities view and the general process of switching workspaces causes the onboard keyboard to wig out. It is likely worth installing and configuring the onboard keyboard just in case you need the control and alt keys, but for the most part this will not be a better experience.

Suggestions for Improvement:

• Add control and alt keys.
• Add a setting to prevent pop-up keyboard from repositioning windows
• Add setting to block Caribou Keyboard when a valid physical keyboard is available.
• Add a setting to get rid of Caribou entirely, for users that don't want it.

Pen Input

Gnome3 doesn't do anything special with pen input, as far as I can tell. That said, pen input works fine with no interference from the desktop environment. I was able to use apps like Xournal++ and Krita just fine.

Window Management

I love Gnome Activities. Tapping the super key drops you into an "activities" view, where you can tap on any window to bring it to the forefront. You can also start typing and the "activities" view will instantly change into an application launcher.

Shuffling windows around the screen and across workspaces is handled in a familiar way. You can dock windows left and right with super+{left/right}, maximize and restore with super+{up/down}, and move to the next workspace with control+shift+{up/down}.

I miss the ability to drag a window to a corner and turn it into a quartile.

Suggestions for improvement:

• Linux Mint Cinnamon edition has a peculiar window adjustment algorithm that will quartile windows if you use the super and arrow keys in the right context. I really think everyone should mimic that feature. (Example, super+right to move window to right half, then super+up to move window to top right quartile).
• Windows dragged to corners should turn into quartiles.

Screen Rotation

Bonus points to Gnome for getting reliable screen rotation right! Nothing but compliments here.

Settings

I found the setting offerings to be anemic. For example, I couldn't find a setting to change the two finger scrolling to be "down is down." I also couldn't find a setting to to set the inactivity lock screen timeout.

Even though the offerings in the settings menu was fairly limited, I also found it hard to navigate. In KDE, the settings menu is searchable, so even though there are a galaxy of options available, you rarely find yourself lost in the menus.

There also seemed to be significant errors in the keyboard shortcuts settings. For example, "move to workspace below" was listed as super+page down. This key combination didn't work, but control+alt+down did.

Suggestions:

• Add searchability to your settings menu
• Figure out what's wrong with keyboard shortcut settings

File Explorer

Touch input works well enough most of the time. Every once in a while the file explorer stops responding to touch input, which is unfortunate.

There seem to be some "hidden" features, but over time I think I would learn to love this file explorer. For example, I saw no button to directly edit the current path, but control+l allows me to edit the path directly. Of course, this means the path editor is only available if a keyboard is plugged in.

The features I need are hidden in there. I was able to map SSHFS and SMB drives easily.

Since I am accepting "the Gnome workflow," I have to say I really like this file manager. Learning to do things in the way they were designed to be done is annoying at first, but ultimately quite pleasing when it all comes together.

Suspend

I'm pretty sure this is more of an Ubuntu/Canonical thing than a Gnome3 thing, but suspend works really, really well. My only objection is it is a bit too easy to wake the tablet by pressing any key. The surface pro 3 has a capacitive "windows" button on the frame that wakes the tablet if you look at it funny.

The suspend/resume cycle is fast, almost as fast as on android.

Battery life persisted extremely well in the suspend state. My tablet has 2.5 hours of battery life (I have battery failure). Suspending the tablet overnight (8 hours) cost only 1 hour 40 minutes of battery life.

Account Integration

By logging into your accounts using GNOME3, you can get your calendar to sync and add your cloud storage to the file explorer. Email has to be set up separately in thunderbird.

The calendar integrates with desktop notifications, which is a nice bonus.

Stability

Ubuntu froze, crashed, but mostly recovered once during this test when I was trying to sync Thunderbird.

When my wifi failed (known issue on the SP3, I've now fixed it), Gnome remained stable. In KDE, frozen wifi would also freeze the taskbar elements, so Gnome wins here.

Recommended User Modifications for Gnome3 on Tablet

1. Obviously, the user is responsible for sorting out hardware issues like wifi.
2. Install the Gnome-Tweaks tool and adjust as desired
3. Install the onboard keyboard to use as a backup. Install the block caribou shell extension just in case the keyboard is becoming a hassle.
4. Create a CLI symlink to the GUI GVFS mountpoints. mkdir -p ~/mounts/; ln -s /run/user/$UID/gvfs/ ~/mounts/gvfs. This will make it much easier to access remote locations mounted via the file browser.
5. Install Xournal++ to take advantage of the pen input. Its the best writing system we have on Linux except maybe the OneNote browser app.

Frustrations

After a week of testing, I keep running into the following problems:

1. Touch stops working. Rotating the screen sometimes brings it back, sometimes it doesn't.
2. File browser intermittently fails to accept touch input.

Surface Pro 3

If you're curious about the Surface Pro 3 as a linux device, here are my general impressions:

• 12 inches is too big for a tablet.
• The form factor makes for a particularly lightweight and portable laptop, but it is also difficult to use in your lap.
• While I've gotten Wifi to be very stable... It isn't 100%. After the device sleeps, wifi often fails until the device reboots.
• Gnome3 is the best Linux touchscreen environment, but it isn't good enough for me to ditch other proprietary options like Android, iOS, and ChromeOS.

Conclusion

Compared to KDE, Gnome3 offers a much improved touchscreen experience. Compared to Android, iOS, and ChromeOS, Gnome3 leaves much to be desired. While I will always prefer FOSS software, I don't think I'm ready to switch to Gnome for my tablet of choice.