Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live

But, having accidentally installed Plasma Active on my laptop in updating to Kubuntu 12.04, I can somewhat relieve you of your fears: it's not the same. Going back to a more usual (useful on that hardware) desktop was not too much more than changing from an invasive theme to another that suited better. It left some niggles to clean (fonts, menu bars TOO LARGE etc.) Importantly, it still had all the keyboard shortcuts I had set.

So in the case of KDE Active, it does indeed seem to be a presentation layer that adds touch stuff, but does not remove other ways of interaction that are well established on pc hardware. I don't have a tablet to install it on, but had I a pc with a touchscreen, I might well reinstall it to try it out there.