My cousin gave an old acer switch that she wasn´t using, its extremely underpowered with 2gb of ram, an old atom and 32 gigs of storage. I tried ubuntu with gnome because thats what i use on my main laptop and while it has amazing touchscreen support it barely runs. I then decided to try lxqt and it runs great but the touch support is really bad. Does anyone know a DE with a good balance between performance and usability? xfce doesnt really seem to have good touch support either and tbh i really dislike it.
You can give KDE/Plasma a try
I can definitely vouch for Plasma, the Steam Deck comes with it and it’s great
Is plasma more lightweight than gnome?
Oh yes, by several metric tons. I’ve used both, calling GNOME lightweight would be hilarious.
I love plasma and it’s my go-to desktop, but it’s also one of the heavier ones and I’m not sure it’ll play nice with just 2GB of RAM. Maybe XFCE or something even lighter like LXDE/LXQT.
Trinity might be a little easier for touch as well, though I haven’t personally used that one in years
The idea that plasma is very heavy weight is an outdated one. You should give it a try.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/359051/what-are-the-system-requirements-for-kde#:~:text=By connecting the pieces of,Integrated graphics (GMA 3150)
You should try reading again, including the part where I indicated “it’s my go-to desktop” (as in, what I use in the majority of machines).
I also have an old acer with 2GB of RAM. While it can run KDE, a standard install with such will not run very well. Been there, tried that.
(Also, if you read the article even the dude mentioned apparently moved to XFCE)