It's been a lot of years that we've been able to run an OS without installing it. Some are even intended to be run that way. There's literally no reason at all to be "hesitant" about firing up a live environment from usb to find out how it runs.

The easiest way to find out is to boot up a live image and test on your hardware.

I'd recommend using Fedora Workstation, it was a great experience back when I myself had an HP ENVY "fliptop". Anything with GNOME as its desktop environment should be perfect.

Why not just test it from a bootable stick? My one one experience with a touchscreen was very positive (Plasma on Manjaro).

I have a touchscreen laptop, and GNOME is 100% the most polished desktop I tried on it. IMO they have the best touchscreen implementation I've ever seen (even better than windows): the mouse pointer is separate from the touchscreen "pointer". So if you tap the display somewhere, your mouse won't go there.

I have a Thinkpad with a touch screen running on Gnome and it's nice but I find I only really use it when scrolling on a website.

A lot of things work like pinch to zoom too.

KDE Plasma handles the touch screen fine on my PineTab2.

It works in LxQt too, but only in portrait mode (which is the default for this device). I keep meaning to look up how to tell it to rotate the touch coordinates along with the display, and I keep not getting around to it.

But the main issue I've run into is that most GUI apps for Linux are...let's just say they're not designed with touch input in mind.

Yes. Dell 7391 2in1, works great. I have Fedora KDE on it and I flip it into tablet mode and use it on the couch.

I run a Lenovo X1 Yoga on PopOS and the overall experience has been great. Touch screen works well and the only complaint I can make is that the on-screen keyboard could be a little easier to deal with but it isn’t bad at all.

https://youtu.be/UaCwLjIf3sU?si=1xdDBZyt2gNAG_bO

But if it is a capable machine, you should try Zorin OS.

I've been using linux as a daily driver on my convertible for almost two years now. I started with using Manjaro and Gnome which worked really well, I especially liked the gesture support, but I heard kde also has good support for that. I switched to a tiling WM a couple months ago because I don't use my touchscreen that much (still works great with it though). I suggest going with any distro you like and using Gnome. All in all I'd say touch support is great. The only issue I ever had was when I used a second monitor the touchscreen wouldn't get mapped to the internal one automatically, but that was easy to fix

I have no personal experience with it but I see Nobara mentioned often, especially in regards to the Microsoft Surface Tablets. Hopefully someone else with more experience can chime in on it.

I had the Envy's cousin, the HP Elite DragonFly (also a touch/flip), and it worked great under Linux (Arch + Gnome). All gestures worked out of the box and was pretty smooth too. HP touchscreens are generally pretty standardized so I reckon your Envy should work fine too. Just use whatever distro you're comfortable with, most distros should work fine.

A couple months I came across a cheap convertible that I bought to tinker with and try out Linux with touch interfaces. The bottom line is that it's very lacking. Gnome and KDE have some stuff for touch interfaces to make it kinda work but it's definitely not suitable if you wanna use the touch stuff as your main navigation mechanic. I see a lot of people recommending Gnome in this thread and each time a similar questions come up, which I simply cannot agree with. Nautilus doesn't even offer a way to right click. KDE's on-screen keyboard is kinda spotty when it comes up. All in all it's still pretty rough without mouse and keyboard. If you want to go full tablet mode you'll be light years away from the experience Android can give you. Personally I settled for fydeOS, which is a ChromeOS fork.

Plasma and GNOME support it, although in all honesty UI wise Windows might win for touch. They've tried very hard since Win8 after all.

This doesn't answer your question, but Pop!_OS isn't abandoned. They're just updating it only based on Ubuntu LTS versions, because they're working on a new desktop.

I run Linux Mint Cinnamon, latest version, on a GPD Pocket 2 with absolutely no issues. The touch screen, although it is a small one, works perfectly.

I have an Asus vivobook flip, which also has a touchscreen. I daily drive pop OS, which works great with my touchscreen, altough the mouse sometimes dissapears and you need to drag it to the top bar to make it reappear. Screen rotation also works quite good by the way.

I use popOS on a 2-in-1 laptop with touch and stylus input, it works fine.

It works great for me on Arch with Hyprland, even though that really isn't designed with touch in mind. I think there are some programs that provide touch gestures generically (egg something comes to mind?), but I've never needed them. I'm sure if you go with Gnome or something it would work great, so long as the touchscreen is recognised properly (I've never had issues, but that doesn't say much about if you would). I'd just get a live USB with whatever you would install, and see if it physically works. If it does, I'm sure there's a DE/WM that fits the workflow you want.

The touchscreen on my Thinkpad P1 gen4 with Fedora works well.

I don’t particularly use it, but it worked out of the box when I was testing it after I got it.

I have an HP Envy and it has honestly been a dream with any distro I throw at it. I find KDE to have better touch gesture support than Gnome, but I have been running Gnome for a while now and it hasn't bothered me at all.

I actually have an older HP envy x360 (AMD chipset). Works like a charm with linux (everything out of the box). The touchscreen is fully functional, but I don't really use it. I don't dig that at all 😅

One thing that bothers me is that it is impissible to update the BIOS firmware without at least a Windows VM.