Asus will release a 17“ foldable OLED laptop
theverge.com
theverge.com
Less street cred than the featured gizmo but available now and likely a heck of a lot cheaper.
I currently have a portable screen, keyboard, flat mouse and foldable laptop riser with my laptop in it's bag - though haven't used them altogether in public for fear of being "that guy".
Brand name: INNOCN, they also have some with an integrated wifi so you can connect using the wireless display options of Windows (win-K for Miracast)
I still have a cheap Lenovo 1366x768 external. Not great but better than nothing and I can't afford 4K OLED goodness right now :'(
Android, iPad, Windows, they all have monitor extending software and have for at least a decade now.
Saves you the need to by a screen if you've already got a tablet lying around somewhere.
Approximately one eternity. Desktop Linux still doesn't support:
- Using different DPI on a different screen in a multi-monitor setup (common case is when you connect a low-dpi monitor to a high-dpi laptop)
- Color depth of more than 8 bits per channel
- Color management in general, needed for wide-gamut displays
- Any kind of HDR functionality
And hardware that has these features that Linux can't make use of due to a series of unfortunate architectural decisions has existed for a long time.
Linux definitely does support this.
I use this exact feature with Gnome and Wayland daily to combine a 4K XPS13 with a 27” 1440p monitor.
I just set one monitor to 100% and the other (4k) to 200%. In fact I think that choice was originally made for me but you can change it.
When I first started using it a couple of years ago you'd get old artifacts when moving a window from one monitor to another. e.g. the mouse pointer could be the wrong size.
Over the years, like many things on Linux, it's got more polished.
Now it just works.
Missing from that:
- Gnome actually does the scaling in the compositor, not in the X server itself.
- Most desktop environments should be doing all that for you. At the time I wrote that (over 2 years ago), in Gnome you had to go in to an advanced settings menu and enable "experimental fractional scaling"; I'm not sure if that's still true today.
- Some things pick up the DPI from the XSETTINGS protocol, not from the XRDB. Specifically, parts of Java's AWT/Swing do this. But other parts use the XRDB. And they conflict with eachother. When I last looked at Swing (April-ish 2020) it was impossible to get it to do the right thing on X11 (I was working on a patch, but then I had some life disruptions and never came back to it).
If you want something custom I guess I'd suggest looking at what Fedora uses out of the box.
I'm running on an all Intel XPS13 9370 if that helps.
Isn't this supported by Wayland (and AFAIK it has for a while now)?
This effect makes it look like the entire system is color-managed when in fact the opposite is true.
[1] Any profile that has been created with gamma ramps has to be used system wide and specified in color-managed applications, because the standard color transforms in the profile are calculated to be correct when the gamma ramps are in place. If you skip either step, you'll get wrong results.
Wayland (proto) supports 16bits per colour. (Much more than HDRs 10 bit) https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland/blob/6741dafbf7a5...
It’s up to the compositor to enable them.
Even 10 bit support is another issue. A few composers have alpha support recently, but it isn't something you can expect to use.
I was considering buying a X1 fold, but reviews saying windows support was bad (probably since windows X never launched) and no linux support even on the horizon made me hold off.
I never thought of that and now I want it really bad. I kind of do this everyday, but with a macbook and manually.
I like it. People bandy terms like “infinite” about too freely.
Because Apple invented it with the PowerBook 100 series and no one has come up with anything better?
That doesn’t mean there isn’t something out there. PC makers have tried. Apple tried. Nothing has stuck as well.
This may be the thing that does it. We’ll have to see.
That said I kind of doubt this thing works. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets delayed. If it doesn’t I bet it has serious problems like the first Samsung folding phones did.
Whether this is THE new successful design or not, I can’t imagine someone hitting it out of the park with the first try.
No, I think it's because laptops have 2 primary things going for them:
1. They're portable
2. They're all-in-one (primarily, there's still the charger)
I agree with the GP post, the folding screen seems more like a novelty at this point given it forces you to sacrifice (a) an included keyboard and (b) with the keyboard separate, you are limited to the places you can actually use the laptop (I know I'm probably rare but I actually use my laptop on my lap on the couch).
I think that's also why tablets are successful, they're even more portable and they're still all in one. I think a portable computing device that doesn't satisfy those characteristics is going to have an uphill battle.
Obviously other people made things that look like laptops before. It didn’t take people long to figure out the screen goes on top and the keyboard goes on the bottom.
But other than that things weren’t exactly standardize the way they are today. Much of the time the keyboard was near the bottom of the case instead of the top, so there was no wrist rest area. And then you had the problem of the mouse which was just starting to get popular. Some laptops had a little tiny joystick/control pad thingy next to the screen in the bezel. Some, like Compaq, offered a track ball that would mount onto the side of the computer. Or people put a little tiny track ball up next to the screen. One very creative company had a little tiny pop out mouse.
But Apple was the first one to put the keyboard near the back, giving you wrist rests upfront, and put the trackball (later trackpad) in the middle of the front. The layout practically every laptop uses today.
The only real serious attempt at changing things I’m aware of would be machines where you can either turn the display around to use it like a tablet, or remove the keyboard all together like the Surface.
My daily driver is a tablet style x86 computer plus a Lenovo bluetooth keyboard. I feel so bad for people on laptops. It is so so so excellent to be able to raise my display up to eye level at a coffee shop or office (with a tablet arm, or just pile of whatever), and have my bt keyboard wherever I want.
The built-in folio keyboard is fine for couple hour sessions on a sofa or what-not, if there's not a good place for mounting the arm. But the gooseneck tablet arms are quite flexible & capable, so often I can find something to mount onto & don't need the folio keyboard.
In general, I find it kind of condescending to assume we're all doing it right already, to rule out change. I don't think many people have tried other ways of working. I field ~2 questions/hour about my setup most places I go- people see it & are blown away, they have to know. It's obviously much better, far better ergonomics & freedom, to separate the screen and keyboard. The conventional laptop form factor makes one stare semi-near-by where your hands are, and that coupling either a) leaves your hands weirdly high up or b( your eyes lowered / neck craned. The typical laptop is quite the usability compromise.
If this laptop is priced right, it'll be an instant-buy for me to replace this old boy. I might even start carrying around a small Bluetooth keyboard so I can get an even bigger screen sometimes. Being able to decide whether you want smaller, more portable devices and/or huge screens to dive into seems to be a trend with most foldables; I can't wait to see it (hopefully) become an option in laptops, too.
I don't look at the keyboard. There's a few spots you can touch-anchor with on the LYB (both with fingers and e.g. wrists) so you don't really have much problem with drift, which was my main issue at the start. It's a slightly different stance than the typical only-fingertips-touch one I use on "real" keyboards and you need a little bit of the muscle memory you have on e.g. hitting multiple physical keys at once and making sure they register in the correct order, but I type roughly 120WPM on touch and ~130WPM on tactile. The convenience factor for the former makes it so much more worthwhile for on-the-go writing IMO.
I think that we will be seeing quite a few mechanical problems with various foldable devices.
For myself, it isn't particularly compelling to have a foldable laptop. A foldable phone/tablet would be more my speed.
I have to hand it to Apple, they have been pushing the bounds of what we expect from consumer/pro-sumer displays. I expect this will be out of range, but decent screen specs are starting to become more available across more price points, and that's great. With really good computing hardware being the norm, competing to offer a good display on your laptop is a great feature. More and more companies, like Asus here, are being forced to respond, are having to up their game.
Tricks like this here that Asus is pulling- of making more screen real estate available in a more compact form- that's really really a nice trick. It's almost certainly- alas- going to come at that exotic price point, not be the across-the-board competition I just spoke of. But I'm still excited to see it.