Kde neon unstable on BQ Tesla2 tablet

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Last week I installed KDE Neon unstable (plasma 6 beta2) on my BQ Tesla2 tablet.

First things first: thanks for included bootia32.efi on the iso. The BQ Tesla2 has on of these intel 64 bit baytrail processors with a 32 bit uefi.

Good things:

  • It installs and boots in a working plasma environment.
  • maliit keyboard works in sddm after enabling the virtual keyboard in settings.
  • maliit keyboard follows the theming colors.
  • All touch related stuff seems to work, also the swipe gestures.
  • It’s tablet friendly
  • You don’t actually notice it’s “unstable”. If you wouldn’t know, you should think it’s plasma 5.27.

Things to improve:

  • maliit doesn’t follow the system keyboard layout. The system keyboard is azerty but maliit is qwerty.
  • Random freezing and black screens. Maybe this is a issue of the weak tablet. Although the system monitor doesn’t indicate overload.
  • Focus to text fields. This is very annoying on a tablet as when you open a app with a text field, the virtual keyboard pops up.
  • It seems you can’t go in “add widget mode” when you enable the setting: tablet mode always on. You can select to enable a widget but then it freezes. The rest of the desktop doesn’t freeze, only the “tweak mode”.
  • The return of the full screen launcher/menu.

KDE Neon stuff:

  • For some reason, the tablet goes in suspend during boot and shutdown. I already dissabled suspend in systemd, but it keeps doiing it.

I’m happy with the result. Thanks for all the great work and I’m looking forward to the stable release!
Only one suggestion. Is it possible to add wiki page about plasma on tablets. For example how to configure maliit keyboard and the multi touch gestures?

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Thanks for the report!

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After reading the recent blogpost from Nate about bugs, I thought I should post a update about my tablet experience.

So after a month I don’t encountered any big problems. The only things I could say is that my tablet became a lot more sluggish after updating to RC2.
In that regard, ‘Discover’ takes ages to load. Is there a app that just search for updates and install them so it’s not necessary to open ‘Discover’?

Because I wanted a better ‘read faster’ browser experience, I installed falkon-browser. Because it’s under the KDE umbrella, I thought it would be a better match than firefox, but it seems it isn’t. I had a lot of “dead” screens (systems hangs) and wayland crashes. So back to firefox…

As a last point: please bring back that fullscreen startmenu.

And thanks for all the great work! :+1:

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You can use apt directly on the command line (or via the pkcon command), or use Muon Package manager or Synaptic for full package management tasks with a GUI.

There are quite a few alternative launchers available, so it should not be too hard to find a full-screen one that you might like :slight_smile:

I used to have a couple of convertibles that had this same Intel Atom SoC. Aside from the 32-bit EFI on a 64 bit system, which was fairly easy to remedy, I did need to add intel_idle.max_cstate=1 to grub for these not to lock up, but not sure if this is still valid today.

But with (I assume) the normal 2Gb of ram and sloowww emmc storage, any web browser from today is going to be painful once you have more than one tab open :smiley: . It definitely was painful for me, but became quite usable on a slimmed down Plasma 5.5/5.6 - no indexing, no Akonadi, plus other tweaks. Back then Plasma was a bit slimmer, though reducing the background processes was a big help on this quite anemic platform.

Kudos for getting Plasma running on it :+1:

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Don’t get me wrong. Plasma 6 works ok, just wanted to point out that rc2 is less responsive than rc1 on this weak cpu.
I already did some tweaks to make it more responsive. Disabled a few background tasks, enabled mglru and installed system76-scheduler (this is a real game changer). I also tried the xanmodkernel, but this was a disaster. Althoug xanmod works ok ok on my other baytrail tablet running manjaro with plasma 5.27.

Regarding the c-state issue, this one is already solved a few years ago.

I already looked for another fullscreen menu, but this tablet is a test environment for plasma6 so I don’t want to put to much time in configuring it.

I will take a look on muon package manager. Thanks for the tip!

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Hi,

I did a test (Virtual Machine) with the last kde neon iso image, congratulations to the dev !

Operating System: KDE neon Unstable Edition
KDE Plasma Version: 6.0.80
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.0.0
Qt Version: 6.6.1
Kernel Version: 6.5.0-17-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
...

The task bar panel configuration is well design, the UI looks good, the UX is user friendly.

The system settings is rebuild, why not, the new organisation is not a labyrinth for the old kde users :slight_smile:

Can’t wait the KDE 6 version !

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