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janandonly

I am happy to see projects that make Linux look beter or more user friendly.

But to truly catch up with iPadOS one needs to recreate not just the UX but also powerful features that it comes with

* can the Photo app recognize faces? or landscapes ?

* can the Notes app do OCR on pictures and PDF’s?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25805137

* is there an iCloud like function that synchronizes in the background?

It is not just the UX that makes 70+ year olds be able to work with an iPad, it’s the whole package.

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For me personally, I don’t care if it’s got all of Apple’s bells and whistles, what I personally want is:

- A tablet OS that looks approximately as nice as iPadOS and works approximately as well. With a Springboard-ish homescreen/app paradigm.

- The ability to run a terminal

- The ability to run apps in full screen and swipe between them

- Access to the most popular handful of apps (Chrome, VS Code, Slack, Discord, Zoom, etc.)

This already looks a lot nicer than a lot of “pretty” Linux distros I’ve seen, I’ll be curious to read the reviews next month.

This. I use my iPad Pro as a glorified Netflix, YouTube, and sketching machine. It’s hardware is good and lays there under utilised.

If a tablet could get close iPad in usability and hardware and yet open it up to have a full terminal and ability to install local Linux apps. That’d be a great productivity tool, and an excellent mobility device.

What’s really difficult IMO is getting the development environment right, plus the app store. Without that, it’s nothing but another bit of eye candy.

Isn't the app store and development experience exactly what people keep complaining about for Ios?

No, non-Apple users are complaining, Apple users generally like the experience.

Well in my experience people who don't complain about the App store never used any other app store in their life. For what I know they even think that the app store is Apple's invention.

Because it actually is... Android Market was introduced months after App Store. Obviously programmers know that fundamentally it's extension of some ideas from the Linux world, but that is very irrelevant to the users, and the basics of "download an application from a registry" are not what makes the great App Store experience.

>> even think that the app store is Apple's invention

> Because it actually is...

It most certainly isn't. Based on personal use, Nokia's Download![1] comes to mind.

Looking at an archived page[2]:

>* Browse, preview, buy and download direct to your phone

>* Read descriptions of offers from popular brands and local providers

>* Test free trials of some content and applications before you buy

>* Choose from the latest selection with regular updates

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download! [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20061209073944/http://www.nokia....

Today I learned that the app stores for Windows CE/Pocket PC, Symbian, J2ME, BREW, Blackberry never existed.

I had three Windows Mobile devices and 5 J2ME devices and not a single one had app store. Why - there wasn't any mobile internet connectivity back then, the Java devices didn't even have wifi. Apps were loaded over USB, downloaded as JAR files. Apps were normally bought on eshops od vendors.

> Apps were normally bought on eshops od vendors.

So there were app stores.

Sorry but that experience is absolutely incomparable. It was more like buying software on CD except you got a file. That's not what App Store is.

Opinions don't change historical facts.

That's not opinion, this has nothing to do with App Store, you can tell by the first look. App Store never was about the UI for downloading apps itself, that's just the front face of the App Store service that moderates and verifies content, sets standards and quality requirements. Not even Android Market/Google Play is close to App Store, though closer than random web shops shipping JARs.

Devs complain about XCode, but the libraries/frameworks are great. Publishing to the app store is pretty easy, and there are hundreds of millions of potential customers, which are there because the curation of the app store is good (enough). If you want to know what happens when your IDE is OK-ish, but the other aspects fail, look at Microsoft's presence in the mobile phone market.

If Microsoft kept WP 8 compatible with WP 7, just adding the C++ support game studios were asking about (NDK style), without rebooting the whole thing into an incompatible mess across mobile, tablets and desktop, it would have had much more developer love.

But Sinosfky and his supporters had to push their anti-NET agenda, followed by clever decisions like killing C++/CX as well, and here we are.

Its linux. All sorts of apps could run on it. Plus most of the apps these days are going cloud and PWA. That well could be of a huge advantage.

Plus its by China. Once this device goes mainstream among people as a laptop replacement, expect Linux to come up with a huge number of Chinese apps.

I don't use any of this on an iPad and I miss every day some functionalities : a convenient terminal, a fully fledged text editor, a complete and free photo editor ...

Frankly whenever I use iOS (these days mostly on an iPad, since I switched phones to Android a few years ago), I miss that I don't have root privileges and full filesystem access.

Everything you mention would be possible if those were given :-(

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