this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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I put a similar amount of money into a used fujitsu T935 a few years ago for the same reason.
It was great for this, so I'd recommend looking into used 2in1 laptops. With linux and TLP you can easily get enough battery life out of pretty much anything.
is linux compatible with pens? and most important, is it usable enough? Like I used Ubuntu for 3 months, and ArcoLinux for like 5 months but i always ended up returning to Windows because I practically never did anything productive with Linux. U know i don't want to spend money and don't get any support
Pen support on linux is amazing. On the T935 it worked without any setup and was much better than on windows in terms of input lag and turning the touchscreen off/on properly.
I used Xournal++ and while the UI is a bit small on a 13" 1080p screen, it worked perfectly.
Now I remember another thing you should probably look out for: Don't get anything with a higher resolution than 1080p. Fractional scaling on linux is basically not a thing, so the resolution determines the size of any UI.
I used to use Xournal++ too but Rnote is much better
I've owned both an X220T and a first generation Yoga. Each has different pen technology, but both worked out of the box on all apps on Linux.
Rnote is a good app for handwritten notes on Linux. Xournal++ used to be the one recommended, but the UI is not great. I still use it occasionally to mark-up PDFs, since I don't think Rnote is quite there on that feature yet.
Nothing quite compares to OneNote for organizing notes, however, since it has built-in OCR and you can search your handwritten notes. Unfortunately, there is no Linux implementation of it that supports inking. I've seen people say that OneNote 2010 works through WINE, but I couldn't get it running. I also tried an Android emulator to use the Android version, but it didn't work with my high DPI display and crashed a lot.
I had a little trouble with a convertible and it's touch screen, where it wouldn't disable the touch screen when the pen was near the screen, so my palm always made xournal.scroll away.
Turns out there's an easy fix: the software responsible for touch and pen handling (libinput) does support disabling touch when the pen is near, it just couldn't figure out which 2 devices belong together. A minimal udev rules file and a reboot fixes it, but the IDs depend on the hardware.
Fortunately it has since been fixed upstream, so udev rule hacks are not needed anymore unless you run a distro that runs ancient (~2 years, but it varies) packages, like latest openSUSE Leap.