sado1

My personal workaround is a smartphone book case with a spot for the debit card.

I’m as skeptical as you are, but at least they automatically preinstall a few useful gaming apps by default, ie. LatencyFlex.

I think the beginning sets the context - a history of business models related to Unix, and later Linux + Open Source software. It’s important to learn from it.

It also shows that the challenges of the clash between capitalism and software freedom are constantly evolving, and presents how our battles were won (or lost) in the past.

Oh, and as for the touch UIs, not much luck if GNOME doesn’t work well enough. KDE can be made to run well with touch input, but for me it needed some work to configure it. But I liked it afterwards.

There are Mobile Linux UIs (which might run better on tight resources) but I am afraid they might not be good for multitasking on a tablet screen.

Mobile Linux distributions for smartphones might offer some hints on how to tackle your problems - these apps are created in a convergent way, which makes them work well on laptops, tablets and PCs alike. Look for an alternate file manager, for example, to replace Nautilus. Check out https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/

Maybe it’s obvious, but how about Kodi?
It has support for CEC (for utilizing your TV’s remote through HDMI), of course there are other input options as well.
There’s plenty of plugins to support online video services. Needs some work to configure them, and sometimes it requires maintenance when a plugin stops working, but I was in general happy with the way it worked while I used it for a few years.