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Comment by Tendor95 | Hacker News Reader

Assuming you don't consider something running the linux kernel to be linux (ahem, android)

>It is the World’s FIRST Consumer-level Linux Tablet.

ExoPC 2.0 came out in 2010, running MeeGo, which was a linux tablet that shipped with an OS maintained and hosted by the Linux Foundation.

>It is the FIRST Tablet powered by JingOS – the World’s FIRST Linux Tablet OS.

MeeGo, MaeMo, and the associated tablet OSes from that era shipped over a decade ago.

>It is the FIRST Time you can use a Linux-based Tablet as your daily driver.

To be fair, the ExoPC was a huge piece of crap.

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I worked on this [1] Linux tablet 20 years ago, and we had working versions, but it doesn't really count as they weren't put into mass production. I don't know how many were built in the end (I left to co-found a webmail service). Sometimes it's depressing how long it takes for something to actually come to fruition. The screenshots in [1] are our custom UI based on NanoX [2], and an Opera port for the web browser screenshot (it worked). I wanted a production version for years after I left...

[1] https://linuxdevices.org/freepad-norways-alternative-to-swed...

[2] https://github.com/ghaerr/microwindows

Don’t forget all the Chrome OS tablets (yes, I am willing to call these Linux tablets), like the Lenovo Chromebook Duet.

Don't modern ChromeOS systems let you run Linux desktop applications?

They sound pretty much like they are Linux systems that beginning to let down the facade.

Yes, that’s my reason. Also, it’s rather easy to run your favorite Linux distribution on ChromeOS devices compared to Android hardware.

Awesome, I saw that you had to add in a little defensive comment and felt I should back you up.

> yes, I am willing to call these Linux tablets

They run the Linux kernel out of the box and can run standard Linux applications.

Pinetab should be usable before this ships, I'd bet.

The pinetab is not good enough to be anyone's daily driver

Considering how many people on the Pine64 forums and messaging groups are claiming to use their pinephones for their main phone, I suspect the Pinetab could be. The number isn't high, but it's higher than I would have guessed before (and after) I bought and started playing with mine.

I'm not saying it's a good experience, but some people have lots of patience and very few (phone-requiring) responsibilities.

Who are these people? I have a pinephone and it is nowhere near ready to be my main phone at all. It can't even make phone calls reliably.

It's a cool thing to play with but it is nowhere near to being a main driver.

> Who are these people?

People on the Pinephone forum. Simple survivorship bias.

Judging from the videos I've seen, the Pinephone is for tinkerers for now.

It's 2021 and people still don't care about boot security of their devices?

And the JingPad is currently vaporware. I'm not saying that either works today; I'm betting on which will exist and be usable first.

> MeeGo, MaeMo, and the associated tablet OSes from that era shipped over a decade ago.

To be fair there was no touch OS then - it was mostly stylus driven at the time. I don't think any of them had implemented multi-touch gestures for example, but please correct me if I am wrong.

Maemo did not, since its primary devices all used resistive touchscreens without multitouch support.

Meego had multi-touch support, though it was only used at an application level (e.g. pinch to zoom in browser, maps, gallery etc).

I miss both Maemo and Meego. I had a Nokia N900 that was great and then an N9 that I loved even more.

Meego did use edge swipes in the OS which felt advanced at the time.

I think this speak to market demand? There's just not a lot of use of this thing.

I've thought about using an iPad as dev machine (obviously it's not linux, but ssh+termux is basically the same) because of the form factor and battery life. But M1 chip solved that problem to me.

I just don't see why you want to run linux on a tablet, what else other than the command line draw you to linux? It's certainly not windows X. Tablets are just not very friendly to interact when the subject is a terminal.

Even though it was a failure the Jolla tablet exists in the wild in very low numbers. It's running Sailfish OS which is a fully linux mobile OS that can be used as a daily driver. I was a backer of that kickstarter, and I'm sad they didn't work it out to do a full release.

I'm pretty sure my Nokia 770 was from before 2010. I still have it around my room someplace.

JingPad is certainly not the first Linux tablet - there have also been: WeTab, BQ Aquaris E10, PineTab, JooJoo and more.

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