Hi all,
I’m back on Fedora, this time with 43 on my main machine. Now I’m working out the best way to deal with my secondary machine, a Lenovo X380 I call Gilligan (my little buddy). It’s one of the Yoga series with a touchscreen and I mainly use it with SumatraPDF as an ereader.
Here’s what I’m trying to work out…
My wife and I are about to drive across the country from Kanata, Ontario to Vancouver Island and I’d like to use Gilligan for any online stuff I need to do along the way.
However, with Windows 10 security updates being at an end, I don’t want to be exposing a machine running a vulnerable OS on strange WiFi in motels, etc. With that in mind, I’m thinking about having both Fedora 43 and Win10 on this little machine so I can go online with F43, but switch to Win10 for ereading (offline, naturally).
I see two choices:
install F43 and set up a virtual machine running Win10, or
dual boot.
Which do you think is the better way to go? I can see downsides to both as well as advantages. Has anyone done this type of thing?
Ditch Windoze and find a good ereader for Fedora.
Justification: dual booting brings in too much complexity to deal with in a fun way. You can get it to work, but why bother.
A VM would be easier if it works on your tab, but again, there are so many PDF readers for Fedora.
Papers is a good one, there are many.
First check Fedora works with your second ‘tab’ screen and runs as you want it to.
One other thing I should have mentioned…
From what I’ve read, touchscreen for Linux isn’t as mature as it is on Windows. From my own experiments with two-finger zoom on various distros, I’d have to agree. That’s the only reason I’d like to keep Windows 10 available. If not for that, I’d be ditching it.
Last time I tested Fedora on the X380, I used F42, Debian 13, and a few other flavours. I don’t know if F43 actually improved touchscreen support or if I just didn’t spend enough time playing around with it, but I now have a complete solution. I don’t have to juggle two OS’s to get both an e-reader and Internet access.
I did some more testing today and found that touch support is far better than I’d experienced in the past. Since that was the only thing tying me to Windows, I decided to give it the boot and go with just F43.
I tried all the suggested ereaders, but the one that best fits what I need is Okular. In presentation mode, I can swipe to turn pages and that was the big stumbling block. It’s forward only, but it’s a start, a bit awkward, but usable.
On my new Laptop I run both, dual boot and Winboat.
Winboat is my preferred option but I don’t know how much grunt your laptop has. If you use Winboat, then don’t enable file sharing. That will keep your security tight.
I don’t recall, but I’m talking about the ones that were mentioned in this thread. If it’s really important, I suppose you could go looking for them, but here’s my final word on ereaders on a touchscreen in F43:
I was wrong about Okular. It’s not cut out for ereading.
Instead, I use Calibre’s ebook viewer. Now I can go backward as well as forward which is handy for those times when I ask myself, “Did I read that right?” I use full screen in portrait mode, but resize/reposition the reader to take up just the middle half of the screen when in landscape mode. It’s about 95% the same as using Windows 10.
One little thing, though, I had re-download my books. I’d been reading them in PDF format on Windows, but Calibre’s viewer only handles ePub. Oh. And another caveat, converting from PDF to epub doesn’t work well in Calibre (or maybe anywhere; I don’t know) so that’s why I had to go fetch them again.
Note: In case anyone’s curious why I just now getting around to replying to individual comments… I just finally figured out how to quote what I’m replying to.
Funny because this is what I was going to recommend. I use it because with Calibre I can edit it with highlights and notes.
In a pinch. . . I have just used Firefox too. pdf files open and are editable, epub files just need a extension. Firefox can do a lot for local files too !
