Plasma Active - Ultrabook touchscreen

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 09 October 2014 15:51:19 Caio Ferreira wrote:
> Hello gents,

> I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 14 Touch-80C4000EBR, which came with
> windows 8.1. I'm a linux user since 2002, currently using openSUSE 13.2
> (beta) but I was relly exited to see Plasma Active running in this
> touchscreen ultrabook.
> 
> I've seen a lot of things about plasma active running in some tablets, but
> nothing about touchscreen notebook. I'm just sending this message because I
> can see a big "market" on touchscreen notebooks as no other linux DE works
> properly with touchscreen.
 
> Why not to create a distro with plasma active? (suse studio is a great tool
> for this purpose) (yes, there is a old one:
> https://susestudio.com/a/abQj83/plasma-active#discussion)
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Caio Ferreira

Hi Caio,
(btw, why are you so sure there are no ladies in the Plasma Active team? ;) )
You are right, convertible laptop/tablets such as the Ideapad Flex are indeed 
a prime target for Plasma - though not for Plasma Active alone, but for the 
combination of Plasma Desktop in the laptop mode and Plasma Active in the 
tablet mode.
Plasma Active was explicitly designed for pure touchscreen use, so it's what 
should be used in tablet mode when the keyboard and touchpad are hidden.

Being able to seamlessly switch between the different shells when the device 
mode is changed has always been the goal of Plasma. However, in the Plasma 4 
times, this didn't work smoothly yet.
This will change with Plasma 5, though. The thing is that the port of Plasma 
Active to Plasma 5 is not finished yet. As soon as it's done, it should work 
in any distribution that ships Plasma, so it makes most sense to pick it up at 
that point.

Another reason why we don't see widespread adoption of Plasma Active in 
regular Linux distributions yet might be that it was developed based on the 
mobile-focused Mer platform and packaging it in other distributions turned out 
not to be trivial. This will change with the Plasma 5 version, too, since at 
that point Plasma Active is just a regular shell package like Plasma Desktop.

So, tl;dr : If you want the optimal experience with Plasma on your 
convertible, either wait for the port to Plasma 5 or help make it happen 
faster by contributing code / money / whatever to its development ;)

Best,
Thomas