Ubuntu Tablet PC (Toshiba Satellite u925t)

Ubuntu installed pretty easily on my Toshiba Satellite u925t.  I loaded Ubuntu 13.10 onto a USB stick and it installed without any issues.  The laptop wasn't as aggressive with Secure Boot as my Acer laptop was.  All the hardware that I use worked out of the box.  I tested Wifi, the touchscreen, the mouse pad and the camera.  I did not test Bluetooth, but I do see the icon on my system tray.

While the touchscreen is pretty accurate, I did run through a bunch of customizations to increase the sizes of tool bars and other things.  Having larger handles is just easier.  I use Onboard as my on screen keyboard.  I launch the keyboard on startup.  I keep it hidden, but I allow it to pop up when it detects text input.  I also keep the touchable icon on the bottom left of the screen.  I use the "Small" layout, which is the closest to what I want.  I wish the hide button was a regular key in that layout though.  I don't always want the keyboard to show up and I found it annoying to long-press the Enter key to bring up another popup to hide the keyboard.  I have not figured out a way to configure Onboard to not show the keyboard when I'm in laptop mode.

I installed Google Chrome, but I found that Mozilla Firefox is much more touch friendly.  Google Chrome strives to have the same look and feel across all platforms.  This means it ignores the size changes I made to make the toolbars and scrollbars larger.  I installed a few Firefox Addons that allowed me to scroll using a drag gesture and to long-click to open in a new tab (there is no way to right-click in tablet mode and the u925t's touchpad does not right-click very well).  As always, Flash blockers are essential to preserve our battery life when browsing the internet.  I installed Genymotion to allow me to run Android apps.  I will dive deeper into Android-on-Linux in a future post, but overall it runs ok.

I configured the power button to put the laptop into suspend mode when pressed.  This makes the laptop feel more like a tablet.  I increased the Unity Panel size to 54 pixels.  I haven't figured out a way to right click while in tablet mode, though.

Overall, I have very happy with this setup.  I spend most of my time in tablet mode.  I go to laptop mode when I blog or when I program.  I believe that this style of operating system is the future.