$270 Spark Linux tablet is powered by KDE Active Plasma | Hacker News Reader

$270 Spark Linux tablet is powered by KDE Active Plasma

geek.com

108 points11031a37 comments

That is really freaking cool. And it might be the thing that spurs me to switch to KDE across the board. I run Gnome on my F12 desktop now, but have been reluctant to upgrade to Gnome3... KDE, OTOH, I've always liked, but I shied away from it in the past since there were some bits of software I used that didn't have native KDE support (purportedly because of the KDE libs being GPL'd).

Now, KDE is under the LGPL, this tablet looks pretty cool... and I'm thinking that it might be a good time to go head, bite the bullet, and make KDE my standard environment. I really need to upgrade the OS on this laptop anyway, since F12 is like a bazillion years old now.

Based on the performance shown in the videos I have some serious reservations about an X/KDE tablet with only 512MB.

I think the fragmentation of X11 video acceleration is partially responsible, as well - it's really hard to write a reasonable driver for every X acceleration technology (which is in good part why Intel keept pushing for MeeGo to use Wayland instead).

The lead developer of Wayland works for Intel.

And why do you think he's the lead developer? :) Not out of the goodness of his heart, I should imagine.

Mer can run on Wayland as well, as soon as there will be drivers for the given GPU.

The videos are far from indicative of the performance of the device that'll be shipped because it's totally different hardware. The tablet in the video is an x86 Atom based device and the one they'll ship will be an ARM tablet. I really hope that'll be better cause the tablet shown actually has 1GB RAM.

Additionally, it looks like the ARM Mali-400 GPU in the Spark tablet will get an open source 3D driver soon:

https://gitorious.org/lima

Cool. I thought this wouldn't be out til FOSDEM.

The performance seemed lacking, but more importantly, while watching the demo the concept of an "activity" confused me -- I assume its similar to the notion of an app, but it was hard to tell as the "activity" was represented as a desktop -- overall fairly confusing.

It doesnt look ready for prime time but its exciting to see the FOSS community working on it; who knows, in a few years it might be able to garner the same eminence as xbmc has in the htpc space.

Activities in KDE are workspaces more or less, a combination of applications and data that you use for a specific set of tasks. They were introduced on the desktop in KDE 4, but (imho) they still feel rather awkward.

You'll be seeing a lot more tablet focused rollouts in X over the next 6 months to a year, as XInput 2.2 that has support for multitouch in a standard way was recently merged. Fedora 17 and Ubuntu 12.04 both plan to include it, and Ubuntu has a fairly developed touch and gesture recognition infrastructure.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAzM...

The whole "activity" thing tends to get confusing, even in desktop KDE. It's a nice concept on paper, but badly in need of intuitive appeal.

http://blip.tv/file/get/Chani-activities46160.ogv That video may help you, like had helped me.

There was a lot of nice things there, but .. I'm still confused :D

That. tablet. has. really. jerky. performance.

I don't think that tablet is Spark. I suppose it is the WeTab.

This is very good news. We desperately need an open source alternative to the closed platforms which play along the DRM censorship technology.

My dream Pad would support "dual view" modes in the sense that it could be used as a Pad and as a classic PC as well. Which means: Put the Pad on a table, connect a keyboard and mouse and use it as a classic PC for Software development and Office.

The first mode would require the touch GUI (KDE Active Plasma) while the second mode would be best supported by the classic KDE desktop. Wouldn't that be nice to have?

I'd like to see a Meego tablet instead! It's probably more mature too..

MeeGo is dead. This runs on Mer[1] which is a continuation of MeeGo, combined with Plasma Active[2], the KDE Tablet UI and apps.

[1] http://merproject.org/ [2] http://plasma-active.org/

I see they've changed the UI but it still mostly looks like a desktop interface shoehorned onto a tablet.

Beyond basic stuff like a web-browser I'm not sure what other software you could run on here.

Apache/Nginx, python and all those programs and emacs.

What more do you need? ;)

> What more do you need?

Not a tablet anyway, it seems.

Kidding aside, I believe you've nailed the problem with this tablet's UI: it seems designed by people who don't see the point of a tablet. They understand it as "a laptop without a keyboard".

We've seen that before with Windows CE, designed by people who saw smartphones as underpowered, keyboard-less computers, with a stylus as a poor substitute for a mouse (they even had a right-click button on some styluses IIRC). They "adapted" the Windows UX into a phone as an accessibility issue, although it was to support challenged hardware rather than challenged users. And indeed, Windows CE felt as compelling as Windows with sticky keys, high contrast, big fonts and a Braille reader.

I'm afraid this tablet's UI deserves the same success against iOS devices as Windows CE experienced.

Good analogies are rarely seen as this one.

All this just goes to show that for most products there is room for improvement in UX.

It's running on the Mer Core http://merproject.org and I wonder why developers aren't given credit for in in the article.

i might be interested in this if it is $27.0

I like the idea and the hardware, but the article was really offensive to me.

I design hardware for a living. To rephrase, I design hardware for money, aka PROFIT. So when I read something like "at the end of the day you are just passing along profit to the device makers." like that is somehow a bad thing, I'm not only irritated, I'm mystified.

I've been in the market for a tablet, but it won't be this one.

That annoyed me too, but why punish the maker for the reviewer's sins?

The actual quote is:

"Android tablet options abound, and Google’s operating system is as open as you’re going to find on a retail shelf. At the end of the day, though, you’re passing profit along to the Android device makers."

Isn't that more of a swipe at Google/Android than at device makers in particular? Ie, presumably he feels that Android and their makers don't contribute back to the software community, whereas this device does?

(Personally, I think he's wrong in that assertion, but I still don't think this is a swipe at hardware guys at all)

Are any Android tablet manufacturers selling enough to make a profit on the tablets?

The Asus transformer has done pretty well, and is almost certainly profitable (cf, http://www.pcworld.com/article/235925/asus_transformer_table... though I suspect those numbers are a bit high). I don't know how many of the other models would have to sell to reach profitability, but I'd be shocked if the cheap shenzen tablets were unprofitable (why would they keep going if they weren't?). Not to mention the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire.

The others don't seem to be selling as well, but that has to do with a very poor quality->price ratio (cf, any Acer tablet). Anyway, I think the argument that Android tablets aren't selling has been vastly overstated. There was a huge line for these things on Black Friday in the US for example.

You might be correct, but that money doesn't go only to Asus or Motorola or Acer or Samsung. There are tens of other components in the tablet that are made by other companies (touch screens, cpus, DRAM, usb controllers, LEDs, gyroscopes, network controllers, etc). Each one of these companies needs money to survive and spend more on R&D and innovate even more. This ultimately leads to more competition, and reduced prices, which reflects back to the consumer.

I think it's a very naive point of view. Not all corporations are evil.

I think they were trying to set up a mindset. Imagine you're a staunch supporter of FOSS. You want your money to help open-source developers. Android is open source, but the money spent on the tablet goes to the hardware makers (who are not open source developers). Instead, you could get this tablet which has its profits sent directly to KDE to continue developing software.

You're picking on the point of "hardware makers gain a profit" and missing out the point of "that money could be going to KDE instead". It's not meant to be as offensive as you're making it out to be.

To rephrase, giving money to the Red Cross is a good way to go if you want to donate, but if you want they majority of the money going to causes you actually believe in you can pick a more direct charity.

That is the REVIEWERS opinion not the hardware maker. You missed the target for your angst.

It's not that you're passing along profit to device makers. After all, that's what purchasing this device will do. It's that you're passing along profit to device makers who take these hundreds of millions of lines Free Software and then lock/jail the user into the device, refuse to meet their GPL obligations in a timely manner, refuse to provide upgrades, refuse to allow the user to develop their own upgrades, and basically give the finger to the thousands of Free Software developers who have developed all this software - with the intent of giving users freedom in their computing platform - upon whose work they are profiting.

I get offended easily as well, however I will buy the devices that suit my needs best. Right now I have a Playbook. Developing for it is extremely annoying, but I have to admit it works really well. No Android lag, which was a deal breaker when I got it.

If I could have something that runs my *nix stuff out of the box or almost out of the box, worked decently and wasn't too expensive, I'd just ship immediately. This isn't even close to that, at least not so far.

Device makers and software developers all want their share. That's only natural. However when I'm wearing my user clothes I cannot be thinking about that all the time. Now I develop SaaS and also, as a user, running my own stuff easily is a big plus. I've been in the hardware and software fences and I can understand the fight. You have to admit software devs got the short end of the stick in this particular market more often than not. If you're not Google, Microsoft or similar.

This looks great, and now all the people complaining about Microsoft's locked firmware have a place to take their wallets.

like what we need is yet another convoluted home screen shenanigans.

just focus on getting regular gnome/kde/whateverwm on those things and be done with it.

most devices lack drivers even when proprietary.

the touchpad has a chip for hdmi from the usb port that webos doesn't have code to use

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