gnome is honestly good as is

Tbh I think the official Ubuntu should be a good choice for that. GNOME should work pretty well with a touchscreen, at least last time I checked. Also, even on some lower spec hardware it should be fast enough.

I think that, if your tablet is actually from post-2010, your processor should definitely be capable of x64 (you specifically wrote x86). But maybe you also just used x86 as a general term for like x86-x64 CPUs.

Maybe it would help to tell us your specific CPU model and maybe RAM, just to be safe.

I have an older x86 tablet that I tinker with. The DE I have found to work the best with touch only is KDE Plasma Mobile. Reliable and works similarly to Android.

GNOME has been surprisingly unstable, like an update might ruin some touch capability and make the tablet unusable. It also had weird quirks like not being able to move some windows around, or the cursor some how getting stuck and needing to plug in a mouse to move it again.

Currently I am running EndeavourOS with plasma mobile installed from the AUR which works really well the only thing that sucks is when there is an update for the DE and I have to build the package, which takes a while on that tablet.

Whichever distro you pick, go with the KDE version, then install "plasma-mobile" from the repos.

Hear me out.. Can you make it a Chromebook?

Linux based, touch-friendly Android apps, full Linux apps. Has a full desktop Chrome but if you run Firefox Android Nightly you get a full tab interface, too.

We've got some old Lenovo Duet 3 tablets that run pretty smooth still. ChromeOS was meant to be light weight.

Does Android support x86? Might be worth a look. Yes, I know it's not strictly Linux, but it's certainly designed for tablets.

Mobian has an amd64 image available. If you are looking for a "tablet" tablet experience rather than just desktop gnome with an on screen keyboard then that is going to be your best bet.

In terms of DE I would stay with GTK enviroments because GNOME circle has created a pretty extensive environment of apps that feel native there. Both PHOSH and GNOME mobile offer basically the sane experience so you should try them both and see, which you like more in the details

https://mobian-project.org/

Edit: here is the install guide: https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/x86

@HiddenLayer555
@plasmamobile runs on x86 I think. #POSH is a #GNOME / #GTK fork for mobile. I believe GNOME 40+ is mobile friendly now.
You also have the #Unity continuations:
Unity8: https://lomiri.com by @ubports
Unity7: https://unityd.org

unity from ubuntu would have been perfect since that is exactly what it was designed for; but it's not a thing anymore.

if the tablet has low specs; i would go with a minimalist distro like damn small or puppy linux.

Should be plenty fast enough to handle Gnome or KDE. I think you'll also want ZRAM because presumably your RAM won't be much and your storage will either be slow or limited. Either way, it wouldn't hurt to enable.

I think both DEs are very touchscreen viable, with the possibility that you may have to configure a teeny bit, like adding a virtual keyboard

kDE Neon project might work ymmv.

What type of device is it? If it's a Surface device there's a few distros that include the Surface Kernel add-ons, if none of the ones with it included suit you, you can compile the add-ons into the kernel for any Linux distro.