StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet
us.starlabs.systems
us.starlabs.systems
I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display servers, my experience left me with the distinct feeling that I had gone way outside of the bounds of the target user of these applications. Maybe I just had bad luck. Hopefully if this is truly an under-served side of the Linux desktop experience, a successful product like this will help push the ball forward on improving support for this niche. I wonder how much the popularity of the Steam Deck is pushing the KDE team to improve touch screen support as well.
Gnome has on both.
and not repairable at all as Surface itself, being honest.
I'd be far more interested in what experiences people are having with Linux on a proper Surface Tablet.
Did you check if FF was actually running in wayland mode? Not trying to blame you, the current situation is pretty dire. The only reliable way of finding out if something is actually using wayland is running xeyes and seeing whether the eyes move above the target window.
In Firefox all you have to do is navigate to about:support and check verify that Window Protocol shows wayland.
I started running into them pretty fast when I added a 4K monitor to my Ubuntu 22.04 system and enabled fractional scaling. All of my Wayland apps look fine, and all of my XWayland clients look awful, blurry and obviously scaled. Working one by one to switch them over to native Wayland has been a hassle for various random reasons, most notably:
* Slack: works from the icon in the taskbar, but when auto-started at login does so in X11 mode
* VS Code: works fine when run from Terminal, but when launched from taskbar icon shows up as a different "app" in the taskbar. Launching from the terminal starts in X11 mode
* Zoom: requires more setup in order to share screen. The Zoom UI for screen sharing doesn't work so it's not obvious how to stop sharing screen. It also freezes or crashes all the time for no discernable reason, including locking up when joining some meetings three times in a row and then succeeding on the fourth time.
So if you're not really leaning into what Wayland offers it works fine, but even just fractional scaling has been a four-month hassle to get things working as expected.
As you know, "native Wayland" means the app has been modified so that it can talk to the graphics hardware using the Wayland protocol.
Emacs is the hardest of my apps to persuade to talk Wayland protocol because Fedora's "emacs" package was compiled without the code that talks Wayland.
To persuade Chrome to talk Wayland protocol, I start it with specific command-line arguments, which used to cause bugs, but I haven't noticed any bugs for months.
Or running xlsclients
edit: Touch controls also work, including gestures. It has a pressure sensitive stylus, which also works OOB.
Probably close to zero. Gnome/KDE devs daily drive desktops/laptops and for phones/tablets they don't run FOSS Linux devices but also iOS and Android.
Desktop Linux is already a niche market, and FOSS Linux tablets/phones is even more niche. The only "Linux" built and polished for touch from the ground up is Android but I put Linux in commas for good reason there.
I'm running the latest version of Fedora workstation, under wayland too.
This thing is the only truly repairable tablet I've encountered so far, 8 screws and the display pops off, no glue, no can opener required like a Surface Pro. 9 screws to get the heatsink off (they're all captive) and you're at the full size NVME SSD.
Works like a charm on my OLED touchscreen laptop. I am actually surprised by how better KDE looks compared to windows or macos and how stable it is (KDE version 5.27.4 that is).
The OSK pops up when I need to. There is a Gnome extension to make it work better like adding ctrl, alt and cursor keys for instance.
I also use Gnome extension to force apps to open maximized.
I use it primarily as a tablet at home and a travel laptop for work. I am quite enamored with it.
>I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display servers
Phosh, Plasma Mobile and SXMO are DEs for phones and tablets, so they support touch fine. I run Phosh (also on pmOS) on my phone and have none of the problems you described. GNOME is also making its own GNOME Mobile.
---
Now, for your specific hardware: I don't know how old your "old surface tablet" is, but I run postmarketOS on the very first Surface RT and it works fine. It uses the kernel from [1] and requires a one-time semi-complicated procedure to bypass Secure Boot and switch away from Windows [2], and even then it has some issues with CPU scaling etc not supported. So I won't recommend it as a general-purpose Linux tablet, but it's good enough for what I use it for.
>On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland
It's a Tegra 3 chipset so I don't run a wayland compositor on it (it would need CPU rendering), just Xorg with i3. I haven't tried an OSK inside i3, but the OSK at boot time to enter the disk encryption password (unl0kr) works fine.
If you do run wayland, wayland-native programs should be able to auto-launch the OSK because they will invoke the input-method protocol, and xwayland programs probably won't. This is the behavior I see on my phone running Phosh - firefox and foot (terminal) showing wayland windows trigger the OSK (squeekboard), whereas chromium using xwayland does not. But even then, chromium does respond to the OSK input when I manually trigger the OSK.
>X had trouble with screen rotation.
The grate kernel supports reading the tablet's accelerometer sensor, so I just wrote a script to listen to iio-sensor-proxy signals and run `xrandr` to rotate the screen accordingly.
[1] https://github.com/grate-driver/linux
[2] https://openrt.gitbook.io/open-surfacert/common/boot-sequenc...
----
Didn't really consider postmarketOS. I haven't played with installing mobile operating systems on desktop hardware in a long time.
----
Yeah I think what screwed my testing was applications that were using xwayland without me noticing. The stable firefox snap at the time (which is preinstalled on Ubuntu), uses it apparently. I have only used Xorg before, as I've never felt the need or desire to step into the tarpit that's migrating to Wayland.
----
Neat workaround for your tablet, glad it works well for you.
----
End of the day, I'm sure that I could have puttered on it and eventually got it all working (aside from the hardware on the surface that appears to be completely locked down), but it's a pretty poor showing out of the box. YMMV and all that, and I hope that more investment in the space makes it a better experience in the future.
100% more usb-c please, with alt modes. USB4 mandates every port be able to do DisplayPort output.
I really hope we start to see phones and tablets which have >1 USB port. Lenovo has an absurd beast phone, a Legion phone, with both dual batteries and dual USB-c (USB3) ports. If we get to 2030 and phones can't plug in to GPUs something is f-ed and the system is broken, tech has ossified grossly. Hopefully happens sooner, and hopefully we see dual ports emerge midway to then too. Would be such a great capability set.
Why? That’s an incredibly minor use case. If you’re expecting something this niche to become the norm then you’re destined to be disappointed.
My dream is much smaller. I just want whatever hardware circuitry is required to accomplish the scenario where a phone that is plugged in to a good power source runs directly from the wall, shutting off battery charge completely, not trickle charging all day and night.
Maybe we should be filing feature requests for it;
And even before then.
I have an M1 Macbook Air which will only output video over one of its 2 USB-C ports, not the other. There is nothing visible on the case or in the OS to indicate this.
I have had an Arm and an AMD Thinkpad which both have only dual USB-C, and both unpredictably switch between one or the other being bootable, with no discenable pattern.
Weird, ever since I had USB-C based Mac Mini or MacBook (two Intel, two M1) they could reliably output video on any of the two, three, or four ports (as long as I don't go past the limit). They're essentially symmetric on all features.
PCIe transport ("Thunderbolt") and Power Delivery are both optional though, I think.
Unfortunately its not a phone. Its a mini tablet. But I find the size ideal for daily use - browsing，reading pdfs, small sketches . (no SIM slot though)
Wish every battery powered device would have a setting for this.
As opposed to always charging when charger is plugged in, and always charging up to 100% (non-configurable).
But more notably, I think around half also have charge control. It's just been on/off. But it would be a pretty basic bash script to make this happen.
But it depends on the laptop. From what I understand not all laptops have the drivers for power control ie. the ability to from-software tell the laptop to stop charging
But reciprocally, what's the new ultra-hot device? Gaming decks. Lenovo just announced theirs today. Steam, Asus, and dozen of others have amazing devices. And there are still gaming-centric phones galore.
This should be an easy ask. It should be a lock. Android alas is kind of a weird divergent hard to use OS that makes everything difficult. Apple hasn't supported anyone elses GPUs in a long long time. But in general, this should just be easy simple & doable, were it not for the sins of these ultra-bizarre weird not-PC but so close systems. ChromeOS finally found jesus & is now running on Wayland, because it was obviously the correct & only sensible choice all along, And has huge advantages, such as having a huge world of people optimizing & making the system better. I don't know how Android ever pivots (they just steal everything ChromeOS (which runs Android great) is doing), but it should, so that it can make ideas like this unimaginably easy & simple tasks, versus today where this sort of idea is a painstaking slow & awful endeavor to make happen.
So much of computing is a story of niche finding leverage & finding adherents. The early adopters are just those who see potential, and they continually have reshaped what computing is. Writing off "niche" as uninteresting & minor ignores how sensible & clear & obvious so many advancements are & should be.
If people could plug in their phone and run Linux apps on a full size monitor they'd probably pay a lot more for the phone, knowing they didn't then also need a nice laptop.
I used Samsung DEX a few times on my tablet. The mouse plus touchscreen combination works well. The keyboard is a little worse because there is no Esc key on Android and Ctrl [ is uncomfortable.
If one IS a software developer of course, then you probably need a lot of Linux apps, and it would be cool to have them alongside a platform that's way more reliable than Linux, so that your browser and email and calendar and music are always there and don't bog down.
The point is not that phones should be connected to GPUs, that’s a silly idea.
But nevertheless for plenty of reasons including ecology and autonomy of people, it should be the case that any device should work with any other device as long as anyone is able to develop a driver. And there should be no permanent lock against custom drivers.
Every usb-c to HDMI adapter has to actively convert the signals which is why one end is usually much larger than the other.
We're much more likely to get phones with 0 USB ports (justified by 'security', 'water proofness' or 'simplicity') where the only charging is wireless.
I might get one anyway, if they ship to SA. At least micro HMDI is still dockable.
(Just out of curiosity - does anyone know of any other option to use an external display with this tablet? Are wireless displays a thing?)
Consistently good colors. Sometimes even PC monitors won't negotiate properly with the PC and start displaying washed out colors. IIRC this had to be forced on a Raspberry Pi on the PI side. Not all monitors can be adjusted.
Consistently no under/overscan. For some reason, the TVs we had in conference rooms figured it would be smart to cut the borders of the image and zoom in, so you get missing bits and whatever's left is a blurry mess.
For the TV situation, you usually don't have a full remote to adjust it, if it even supports that. You often don't have time to look up things in the TV's typically crappy menu system. I've usually found the option to disable over scan, but using full-range RGB seems less common.
Also, HDMI seems to lag DisplayPort capabilities when it comes to higher resolutions and refresh rates. When my 2013 MBP came out, it could drive a 4k@60 screen over DP. HDMI required the 2.0 version to do that, which, IIRC, came much later.
I think that one very much depends on when you chose to look at it. HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4, enough to do 4k@120 which DP1.4 wouldn't be able to do it without dropping color down to 4:2:0. DisplayPort 2.0 devices are starting to come out, but even Nvidia's RTX 4000 series still do not have DisplayPort 2.0 (but do have HDMI 2.1). While TV started supporting HDMI 2.1 around 2019, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X having HDMI 2.1 ports.
So while DisplayPort may be ahead now with DisplayPort 2.0, HDMI was ahead for at least 4 years with HDMI 2.1
Although, if I'm not mistaken, my particular PC monitor initially didn't support HDMI 2.0, even though it's a 4k panel. There was a further revision which included it. I have that revision, but support is still somewhat wonky, in that it can't seem to switch on its own from 2.0 to 1.4b.
I've only encountered overscan on TVs not monitors, but I don't give conference room presentations, which would be very annoying. On Macs there compensation for that.
I've had trouble with colors where it uses YPbPr rather than RGB, but that seems to be an Apple thing where it's done on purpose for non-Apple-approved displays and it happens for both HDMI and DP. Generating a custom EDID profile fixes that. Can't recall having trouble with color range, sometimes the display has a setting but the default always looked better to me.
I've used 4k@60 HDMI just fine (and 4k@30 on an early Apple adapter), but more often use 1080p anyway. I use USB-C with my 4k displays which likely runs DP on them.
Right. So... DP is better than HDMI?
The color issue I had was not with a Mac but with an HP laptop on an HP monitor. My understanding is that there's something about "broadcast colors" or something, which is "regular" RGB only with a narrower range. I think the PC thought the monitor was a TV with a limited range, which the monitor was not.
With the TVs I plug into, it's usually harder to judge since their color rendition tends to be all over the place anyway and tend to have the reverse issue (too much contrast).
I remember the overscan control on the mac, but it still was a PITA to have to fiddle with that instead of, you know, just plugging the screen in and being in business.
While I've also had numerous positive experiences with HDMI where things seemingly "just worked", I've never had an issue with DP. It always worked. Hell, even my gaming GPU, which came out a while after HDMI 2, and supported it out of the box, connected to my monitor with full HDMI 2 support, still has weird colors compared to DP. No tweaking in the AMD drivers managed to get me the proper output, so I went and bought a cheap Chinese DP KVM instead. Which worked with no fuss.
All this makes me automatically pick DP if given the choice, and discount any computer or screen that only does HDMI. Which makes it pretty tough to buy a TV, so I just watch movies on my computer monitor.
That would be an interesting thing for the video production industry. Basically the entire market is divided between "professional" equipment, in which SDI continues to dominate (with some movement towards SMPTE 2110 aka IP), and "amateur" equipment which is all HDMI - with very few products on the boundary and supporting both connectors.
Consumer grade digital cameras have only recently (10 years, maybe less) started being able to output the live video feed over HDMI. Before that, believe me or not I've stumbled upon MANY camera models from 2013 or before that had an HDMI port, but all it was good for was displaying pictures from the memory card on a TV.
It would certainly make life easier in a lot of "small streamer" setups. Currently, if you don't want to torture your camera's battery, you need to get a silly (often third-party) "dummy battery" that you can (hopefully!) plug into an ordinary USB power supply; and on top of that, a separate mini/micro HDMI -> full HDMI cable to plug into a capture card. If you could reduce that to a single USB-C with PD and DP - trust me, every silly cable you can eliminate from your setup is an enormous win.
Even better, if these cameras could talk the regular USB "webcam" protocol in addition to DP, eliminating the capture card for the overwhelmingly common setup of "I just want to look very good on video calls".
But that opens a can of worms: in any non-trivial setup, a camera (one camera) is merely a small piece of a much more elaborate puzzle. Even seemingly simple setups end up converting the signal back&forth between some crazy stuff. On one job, we needed to run an SDI or HDMI cable between the floors, but couldn't do either because the building was untouchable; so we've used a couple of HDMI -> HDBaseT converters to run the signal over existing Ethernet cables. Turns out, it was no longer possible to convert the resulting HDMI signal again to SDI (we've tried many converters, all failed), which limited our choice of video mixers. Would the signal make it through if it originated as DP? Your guess is as good as mine.
Broadcast is a strange place. I still laugh whenever I think of Quad-SDI; only the broadcast industry could ever come up with that. Things need to work with one another and even if every single person in the world agreed that HDMI must die, starting today, I'm fairly certain we'd still see new equipment being made in 2033 that supports it.
It seems like the last few standards started really robust and open because of the lack of compatibility, and then greed got involved and vendors just slipped in something to make it difficult cross connect. I assume so people would have to buy more of their stuff.
The focus on "realtime" makes the standards have worse quality in practice (bad handling of dropped or bad bits), and makes it much harder for the IP based standards to be routed (network congestion from high bitrate through uplinks). WebRTC by comparison can be quite nice.
I seriously don't have any hope for sanity in that market.
So cost and complexity increase. MicroHDMI does suck, but despite that raspberry pi 4 has two of them.
They're a great company but MicroUSB? Really?
Micro HDMI
USB Type C 3.2 with Power Delivery 3.0
USB Type C 3.2 with Power Delivery 3.0
Micro SD Memory Card Reader
3.5mm Headphone Jack
HDMI version: 2.0
USB-C Interface: Display Port (DP Alt Mode)
USB version: 3.2 Gen 2 (up to 10 Gbps)
But the 2x HDMI are visible + listed. :(
> USB-C Interface: Display Port (DP Alt Mode)
Did you assume it definitely will support DP out for both?
Power bricks of the 1990s didn't have this problem. The barrel connectors were almost indestructible. You could drop bricks on VGA connectors and they'd still work.
I have never yet broken a USB-C cable. Not one.
When I used an iPhone for a couple of years, I went through approximately a Lightning cable per month, sometimes more. At one point I took a carrier bag of broken Lightning cables to the electronics recycling.
You must treat equipment exceptionally roughly.
(Now the cat chewing on cables in another matter xD)
I will say that I really wish they had managed to not have that middle section sticking up in the female connectors - cleaning out my phone's USB-C port is about 20x harder than cleaning out a lighting port because I feel like I'm going to break that little thing in the middle.
Like if my phone is low on battery I plug it into a portable battery and shove the phone and portable battery (connected by a USB-C cable) into my pocket, like any consumer would. I then go hiking, snowshoeing, biking, sleeping, like any consumer would. Cables have bent and broken in my pocket in these scenarios, among thousands of others.
My parent comment was yesterday; today's USB-C cable broke when it got stuck in an office chair's wheel caster, bending the sheet metal housing. Thi doesn't happen with ANY connector of the 1990s. BNC, RCA, DB-9, 1/8" headphone jacks, 5.5x2.5 barrel connectors, they ALL withstood office chair crushing and were all probably designed with consumer abuse like office chairs in mind.
I've even run over DB-9 and BNC connectors with heavy duty carts, they were fine.
USB C doesn't have that issue. There are high end cables and just kind of OK cables, but at least with the braided ones I normally buy, there aren't many terrible ones at any price. They decoupled reliability from craftsmanship and materials.
Pockets should be considered industrial duty environments.
Right next to a person is a much harsher environment than people think it is, stuff people carry tends to break and wear.
I'm not surprised the cables break in pockets in that kind of scenario, although I haven't experienced it myself with my admittedly much lighter and less varied lifestyle (lots of walking, occasional hiking, maintenance work sometimes including light carpentry, but no sports or biking).
There seems to be a very large variance in percieved reliability of cables and tech in general. Are you buying the same brand every time you need to replace something? Do more athletic people with more muscle have problems because their weight or level of force they commonly apply is more likely to break stuff? Probably just unrelated factors but it does seem like people who lift are more like to hate new tech. Is it about what clothes you wear? Is it the phone itself having something about the connector?
Obviously USB C has a problemwith a few specific environments, but I'm not exactly sure what those cases are.
While not saying USB-C is a great choice instead. Personally I just wish everyone could have generic magnetic Magsafe style connectors.
Just terrible overall.
Inventing a new standard with a weak sheet metal connector and 19 pins to deliver + and - isn't a solution to the above.
Regardless it's a crappy choice for consumer electronics because it's got no voltage negotiation. You can fry stuff with it, and chargers aren't universal.
2.1mm is a wonderful connector for switches, sensors, solar panels, and power you need to daisy chain, but PD is pretty much perfect for point to point medium power devices.
USBC seems to break far less often than anything else that's cheap and small. I don't see why 19 pins is an issue unless you just really like simplicity.
It absolutely looks like something that would fail all the time... But it doesn't. Somehow they made it so even the cheap knockoffs are durable.
(Kubuntu with KDE project's PPA to be on latest stable)
> In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display
You can buy a full laptop fur a fair amount less than many phones with high-resolution screens though, possibly more so back then. What spec was his machine beyond the screen? Also: most people are closer to their phone screen in use than they are a laptop, perhaps making the case for higher resolutions there stronger.
Reliably producing those 720/768 displays at common laptop & tablet sizes was cheap so making laptops/tablets around them was cheap, and more than enough people thought it good enough (or didn't know better). Given our experience above, the economies of scale on 1080+ panels have changed such that the 1080 screens are in the sweet zone.
fyi: On their specification page[0] they list both 2880x1920 (s/b 3:2 aspect ratio) and that the screen is a 16:10 aspect ratio. I'm sure the 16:10 aspect ratio is a typo since 2880x1920 is used in multiple places.
[0] https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite-specification
May I dream that by the time I do need this they will also have a combo offer along with a fully integrated linux mobile?
It already works fine with PureOS/Mobian.
My specific setup is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/vzs8mm...
Dell also has been selling a fanless XPS 13 tablet for the past year but I haven't heard of anyone using it. This said it's nice to see more vendors considering the tablet form factor with appropriate ports and display resolution.
Currently the main problem is not the hardware, but we simply don't have usable software. I have been driving a PinePhone for many months (still do), but mostly with programs that I wrote for myself after a lot of frustrations about the available software, because having a keyboard and mouse is mandatory with 99.9% of the available Linux applications. So basic (UX) things are missing and/or fatally broken, it's not even funny. This makes a new n+1th Linux tablet a bit pointless in my eyes.
tldr: it works and it's great, but it's not reliable in phone/SMS in the way a phone needs to be reliable.
With these ARM-style devices that are quite closed down and need their own respective device tree, mass adoption seems a requirement for a company and ecosystem to hit critical mass and be financially viable. I don't think a "Linux phone" is enough of a value proposition to hit that critical mass without any specific features that would appeal to a non-technical crowd and can't easily be replicated by the iOS or Android behemoths.
So personally I think it's not that the open-source/Linux approach can't produce a phone that has good-enough basic functionality, but that there's no clear way to market and sell these phones to a sufficiently large crowd to offset the massive investment into a new platform.
Linux as a whole might be far ahead of iOS and Android as a general computing platform, but a viable device would have to break through the mass production hardware (and marketing!) barrier.
I would gladly switch back to a Linux phone if it had reasonable battery life and good support for the modern assortment of at least the open messaging protocols. (Obviously things like Discord are out of the question, but SMS/XMPP/Matrix?)
As of 2023 there is 1 actively supported email client with a mobile and touchscreen optimized "interface": Geary (at least that I know about). The scarequotes are there with a reason: you can't set up your account without connecting the phone to an external monitor: the Next/Cancel buttons are out of the screen during the setup. Normally I would laugh, but now I don't feel like it. Have no idea if it works afterwards, I just deleted it at that point.
Note if you'd decide to get one: at least original PP is kind of abandoned. It is still a nice toy, but I wouldn't hold my breath that anything widely supported and usable will be published on it.
https://us.starlabs.systems/cdn/shop/files/CFR-01x2000.png?f...
idk, but a bios setting for fan speed isn't actually indicative of a fan.
edit: could just be a really roundabout way to increase TDP
This device looks great, I would just take care expecting too much from that keyboard. It looks almost identical to the Pine Tab keyboard and that was not great.
It's truly a shame. Their products have potential and could build a huge hobbyist community behind them, but extremely few people have both the skills and the time to troubleshoot buggy kernel modules.
I agree that StarLite's Intel processor will probably work a lot better.
It wouldn't even be difficult either, they could just charge slightly more and then pay a kernel developer to solve these problems.
> Their products have potential and could build a huge hobbyist community behind them, but extremely few people have both the skills and the time to troubleshoot buggy kernel modules.
It's not just buggy kernel modules, it's also significantly buggy hardware too.
The only thing I would say they have got going for them is good connections for hardware and manufacturing which help them reduce costs, otherwise another player could easily take over.
Probably.
That said, I love the thought of it. I’ve recently started using my iPad Pro as my daily driver (replacing a Mac Studio M1 Ultra no less) and haven’t looked back. The only gripe with iPadOS is it took me a while to get a smooth vscode setup for development - having that be easier out of the box with the StarLite is quite appealing.
My Librem 5 works fine with the touch screen.
(And, very important to me, runs a "real browser", not some limited mobile variant. And the full Linux CLI environment.)
Also, it’s not 2006 anymore, maybe stop calling people “fanboy” for preferring a different computer than you.
And I absolutely will label anyone a fanboy if they barge into a Linux conversation going "Rah rah Apple best Linux sucks" without actually contributing anything insightful, useful, or specific. Please don't just repeat the age old "Apple did it best" line, we already understand you think so. To people actually interested in the topic, all it seems like is you wanted to mention Apple for the sake of mentioning Apple, and that's why I called you a fanboy.
I've used ChromeOS tablets for years. I haven't tried KDE/Gnome on a primarily touch based device, just ChromeOS, so I can't speak for those, but I see no inherent reason why they'd be worse. There is an iPad some 30 feet from me right now, so I think I am in a position to be able to compare to that.
That would be an incredibly negative statement on the state of desktop safari if this was true.
I have an m1 iPad Pro. It mostly collects dust. It’s just atrocious to use for anything more than playing games or basic web browsing. Multitasking makes me want to pull my hair out. Window behavior is horrific. Why doesn’t stage manager allow me to actually resize window and put them where I want them to go? File management is garbage, too. There are just so many weird limitations and missing basic functionalities to make it a viable DD device.
I tried multiple times to make android tablets work for me before Google apparently gave up on them. Never could, but even back in the Xoom days android tablets offered more functionality than my current iPad does.
And this comes from someone who dumped android for iOS years ago.
The iPad is just a disgustingly gimped product.
I do agree about file management, but I don’t really work with files at all on my device anyway - code is in the dev box I SSH in to, and everything else is in Google Drive.
For reference, 80-90% of my work is slack/gmail/gdocs/zoom. The rest is development work done using a PWA for VSCode, code-server on my dev box and Blink Shell for SSH (I would prefer Termius but I can’t have SSH port forwarding done automatically). This works quite smoothly and gives me access to pretty much everything I need.
iCloud sync (won’t sync my photos until I restart).
Sharing (can’t email stuff unless I restart. Just stays at the “preparing” stage).
Search (both iMessage and spotlight).
Safari is incredibly unstable and tabs or the whole browser crashes all the time.
I assume you’re using some sort of remote dev server?
It has been resolved in Webkit proper, but isn’t yet resolved in iPadOS, so I use a workaround to deal with it. I’m also enjoying trying out micro, helix, neovim and emacs as well for purely terminal based editors.
And thank you for the 3:2 display aspect ratio <3
Gonna keep an eye on this one.
The specs say 16:10...
I couldn't find the specs for it, but the resolution is stated as 2880x1920 which ought to be 3:2.
yes the resolution seems to indicate 3:2, but they also write 16:10 - out of what, it is unclear.
The tablet size is 11.15'' x 8'' , i.e. around 10:7 .
It's more expensive than the base level Steam Deck, which is also a Linux touchscreen tablet (with some extra input hardware...), and that's Zen 2, 16 GB RAM, GPU, etc though with smaller&worse screen. Adding a comparable 512 GB SSD to the Deck makes it $649, compare against StarLite's non-preorder $713 price.
A full Framework 13" laptop is $1049 and that's a hugely more powerful CPU etc.
Jan 2023 ; 0.01µ tech ; cache 384 2048 6144 kb ; 6W TDP ; 4 cores and threads
Previously used ( https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?page=2&q=Intel+n... ) in some "Google Nissa" (could not find further details about what it is), "Micro-Star ADL-N Cubi N MS-B0A9" minicomputer, "Asus MiniPc PN42", "Lenovo IdeaPad 82XB"...
With a 38Wh battery, 12 hours seem optimistic but achievable under many conditions of power economy.
I could finally find some references: according to Ryan Whitwam ( https://hothardware.com/news/premium-chromebook-x-laptops-po... ),
> Chromebook X machines will have to be built on one of four hardware platforms with high-end x86 CPUs: AMD Zen 2+ (Skyrim), AMD Zen 3 (Guybrush), or Intel Core 12th Gen (Brya & Nissa). The Nissa chips are the Intel N-series
so the N100, N200 and i3-N300
Old iPads can't get updated anymore, they can't easily browse the web, apps can't get updated or reinstalled... Basically recycle material or dust catchers.
I'd like to jail break or whatever my old iPads and have them as simple linux tablets.
If the answer is "just don't have a tablet and buy a FairPhone or a feature phone, have less tech", I think that's coherent.
But if the answer is just "don't buy Apple, but continue to buy", I'd say they're all just as bad at best, way worse in general. Apple devices have a longer supported life, although others tend to be more hackable.
You might be able to run a really basic Linux on the older devices, but their very limited RAM will severely constrain what you can run on them.
The native OS is so optimised for the hardware, trying to get better performance, or even matching power consumption on generic Linux is just not realistic.
Frankly other than for hobbyist purposes the last version of the native OS is probably as functional as they’re likely to get.
Having said all that, more recent iPads are powerful machines that are likely to still be very capable fur as long as they will run. Asahi Linux is compatible with M-series hardware.
So while think getting latest gen performance such as modern browsing out of legacy kit is a pipe dream whatever Apple did, I think there are real possibilities going forward.
I also recall that the final iOS version for that device (iOS 5.x or 5.1.1) left less memory for apps and I regretted agreeing to that upgrade.
I really wish I could install a minimal Linux and the best minimal browser available. That would at least be an improvement over the doorstop that I have.
Which means iPad mini 2, iPad Air, iPad Pro 1, iPad 5 and greater.
I have a Retina iPad stuck on iOS 9, which is now essentially an ebook reader and movie player.
I had two of them stuck on iOS 5. Perfectly working, cosmetically perfect, lots of battery life, but bricks.
Whereas I have a 1st gen Pro and a 5th gen (when the stock iPad got the Air form-factor) which both run the latest iPadOS, but their battery life is now a couple of hours if that. They're nearly useless.
I had a new battery fitted to the 5th gen. It is no better but now the screen is damaged with multiple artifacts visible.
There is no battery replacement for the Pro: it's too big and too fragile.
In other words, in important terms, the old ones were BETTER but they are now useless because of an outdated OS.
Giving older devices new life is part of the reason I started developing my framework.
For example, the websites linked in my profile are backwards compatible all the way to Netscape 3.0, while still supporting more modern features like in-place updating vote counters and adding dialogs to a page without reloading it.
And LLM use will only make this type of website easier to build, once you can ask, for example, "operator, please ensure the website markup is compatible with my particular device, which is an iPad 2 running iOS 6.0."
I think we're about to experience an amazing renaissance of the Web, with sites and services which bend over backwards to accommodate each particular user, device, and abilities combination, rather than telling the long tail to fuck off.
And I think it's the right way to go. Each device-user deserves to be catered to and supported, the same way we support wheelchairs and baby strollers with elevators and ramps, even though they're less than 1% of the traffic.
It's not enough for sites to work, the underlying software also has to be secure enough to handle the internet. That can come from Apple providing software updates to the device to keep it secure, or Apple providing a supported mechanism for someone to install Linux, or some other operating system that can be updated.
Unfortunately, apple does not provide security updates or any way to actually "unlock" them, so they are unsupported. Tailoring your site to work on these insecure clients is in a sense encouraging them to venture onto the internet, encouraging them to try other sites which might have untrusted 3rd party ads that pwn them and steal their bank cookies..... In that sense, it's more responsible to make your site only work with newer secure browsers than the reverse.
I think the accessibility necessity of supporting older devices is often underrated severely, while the need for security is overstated. New, currently supported devices people use day-to-day are also exploitable.
I am at a relative’s home doing a hospice thing sitting with a loved one who is dying. I only have a small iPad Pro with me, and that is sufficient, but only because I am using my VPS.
Having just normal iPad apps does not cut it for me.
I had a tablet with Intel Atom CPU on it about 10 years ago, the performance and battery life was good during usage but it would stay only 4-5 days in idle before running out of battery (even if left it with 100% battery). But I can leave my iPad aside and come back to it 2 weeks later and it still holds most of its battery.
Having said that, this tablet really looks nice and if it also turns out to have long battery life, I might give it a try.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Processor-N200-CPU-Bench...
The lack of low-tdp products on AMD side was also one of the reasons given by pcengines to discontinue their embedded line. AMD's last 6W APU was the 2-core R1102G which is now a couple generations old.
Apparently this also supports hardware accelerated AV1 decoding and h265 encode/decode.
> 1.00GHz quad-core Intel Alder Lake N200
> Turbo Boost up to 3.70GHz, with 6MB Smart Cache
The keyboard is very nice. Short travel for keys but pleasant to use. I use iwd as the wireless deamon and wifi autoconnect works just fine. I do not have bluetooth headphones so cannot comment on that, but my bluetooth mouse works as expected.
Battery life depends largely on how you use it. I have a minimal setup with alpine linux/i3 and just typing in a terminal with screen at 33% brightness results in battery-reported power consumption of just under 2W which is great. Obviously a browser like firefox will impact it quite a bit. Hardware-accelerated video playback works fine.
There are a few minor downsides: the built-in speaker is quite awful (not a consideration for me), the webcam is not great and the microsd card reader is usb 2.0. UEFI secure boot is currently not supported on the coreboot fw. The documentation is sparse.
One weird gotcha is that the power button is one of the keys on the keyboard, so to avoid suspending your device accidentally it will only fire an interrupt after you hold it for a couple seconds. Took me a while to figure out.
(No affiliation, although they do operate out of a barn within walking distance of my house!)
I wrote a whole thing about this about eight months ago: https://tedium.co/2022/11/30/fydetab-duo-jingpad-comparison/
The wait times last I checked are dreadful but that could've changed. I really like their approach though, whenever I can finally get away from Apple's stuff they're likely what I'll opt for (unless System76 knocks it out of the park with their custom one...).
Is there an option for an active stylus?
>the touchscreen does support a pen/stylus which would be an active capacitive pen type. This would need to comply with MPP 2.0 or WGP.
Cellwriter is a reversion to the comb-based printed inputs of the early 90s.
Maybe the QT option is better?
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/handwriting.html
(but it only shows printing)
Do any decent fanless 12" Linux laptops exist now?
I have a couple of Pixel Slates with Brydge keyboards that have actual good hinges, that's much closer to a laptop. Still more top-heavy than laptops.
The visual presentation of it is really delicious.
As with 90% of everything, people take a bunch of highly visible indicators to decide their opinions & then shit on anything & everything that doesn't meet their set conception. People hate Electron because they think of Slack, but Slack has shit ass architecture. Dump it's web data and you'll find dozens of multi-megabyte indexeddb databases with mostly duplicate data. It's just a shit app. You can build shit apps in anything. But vscode being slick fast & smooth doesn't register for anyone, seemingly carries no weight. The negative conceptions dominate & rule, are the things that get posted, actively, and with energy. It's a damned shame.
Electron may be great for people who want to write Web apps, but browsers are RAM and CPU hungry beasts compared to the GUI toolkits they're trying to replace.
In short, which environments are running VSCode smoothly? Do I need next gen hardware to run a damn IDE smoothly?
Web apps have some advantages, but performance is nowhere in that list.
Having a huge git repo could poyentially hurt; would be interesting to test. Who knows maybe vim mode is partly to blame? I personally still mainly use vim, not vscode, so I don't know what usual suspects there are. It'd be awesome if there's good profiling that can show what plugins are taking significant time in the core loop. We have brutal eslint to apply but that for example all happens async. Once again, we're back where we started, of one bad situation - some random plugin somewhere - creating a lightning rod for disdain.
I have one, running Linux on it, love it and consider best Linux device I ever had had, but I wish there were fewer quirks.
Interesting, but that must be some bad configuration, something that must be fixed on that specific line of tablets. It is not necessary on Linux.
Edit: to expand more on the implicit of the original post «not necessary on Linux»: that «an hour or two of battery life» is quite extraordinary, and should really require a bit of expansion: what is it that drains that battery? That is not normal at all, and requires some more detail, like "Android 12 tried to marry my cousin" or similar would.
Sure, the screen on/off comparison makes this measurement a bit unfair, but calling x86/x64 energy inefficient doesn't sound particularly correct.
Maybe the architecture, but not the products.
You can consume 3 watts on some Intel based laptops.
I feel like buying this one. What inspires me even more is it seemingly having more than one USB-C port.
Although if anyone has any ideas for a better fit, I'm open to suggestions:
I just need a tablet to stay in the kitchen to display recipes. I plan on running a self hosted recipe database. So actual CPU muscle needed is pretty minimal, but I'd really rather have the repairability and am willing to overpay somewhat to get it.
Biggest downside is a 3-4 month lead time though, I'm too impatient for that unfortunately, especially given this would be a bit of a punt for me.
I wonder if these can be upgraded to the latest versions?
edit: Now that I look at it again, there are two different "Star Lite" entries, and I'm not sure which one is this tablet.
[1] https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/faqs/is-it-possible-to-r...
I just don't like this tablet factor. It's a poorly engineered design - a flimsy top heavy structure that takes a lot of space? What could go wrong. I can't count how many times I accidentally knocked my Surface off the table or when I needed to type something quickly and didn't have enough space on the desk and getting that thing on the lap... eh.
But very probably: new battery, low screen brightness, network off...
Reasonably less than 12h - say, 8h, 10h - probably well achievable.
The only thing I'd change is have a 4:3 screen (or at least 3:2). The extra height really matters on small screens.
Is there a linux equivalent of goodnotes?
Getting this tablet and running linux would be ideal as long as i could have something like goodnotes
Hmmmm. Why a five year cutoff? Does this have some custom firmware not in mainline Linux that would preclude updates beyond five years?
Hopefully, at least Coreboot itself stays buildable for the motherboard in the long term so you can keep locally building core system firmware for many more years to come. Star Labs themselves are not committing to continuing to ship pre-built binaries from their side for more than five years.
For tablets, I believe often the GPS receiver is on the same chip as the cellular modem, so you don't tend to get GPS without that.
0: https://sxmo.org/ "Simple X Mobile"
Extra quote from their docs:
> Sxmo >= 1.6.0 runs both on Xorg (using dwm) as well as on Wayland (using sway). The X in our name historically referred to Xorg, but is now open to whatever interpretation you prefer (eXtensible, eXcellent, eXperimental, etc...)
Note: I have yet to try it but I'm getting more interested now..
What's needed for use as a laptop (aside from a disregard for ergonomics) is a k/b with an extra battery for weight/balance, and actual friction hinges to hold the tablet at the desired angle.
The tablet itself could then have smaller batteries and be lighter, maybe as an option.
which doesn't exist. You can't just design half of a device and tell customers that 3rd parties will come up with the rest... in time.
Or, BT keyboards with trackpads (they do not consume much power) including hinges could be in commerce.
Let me know if you find something on the market that may work with this specific tablet.
Linux has all the drivers and infrastructure in place to use cell networks efficiently, carriers and vendors just don't want to be part of that.
Source: my only Internet access at home comes from a LTE router running Debian I built myself.
The gist is that since it is a router only (switch and access point are external appliances) it is not that difficult, there are plenty of resources on the web explaining how to turn a linux box into a router. I had to configure a bit of nftables, dhcpd, dnsmask and stubby and that's pretty much it.
The server is a standard PC Engines APU4 and the modem in the mPCIe slot is an Huawei ME906s.
As I alluded earlier, the hardest part is finding a good modem and getting it to work. Once the modem shows up as a network interface the hard part is done.
I'd rather a RISC-V Pinetab-V, based on the same JH7110 as VisionFive 2.
Since when is x86 legacy?
> I'd rather a RISC-V Pinetab-V, based on the same JH7110 as VisionFive 2.
Have you actually used one of those? They are excruciatingly slow. Less performance than most Raspberry Pi. Maybe it works for your niche workflow, but for StarLite to succeed they'll have to build a _usable_ product.
Also competitive ARM based alternatives (such as Snapdragon) require many closed source blobs to function.
Since the first commercial RISC chips obsoleted x86 in the 80s.
>Have you actually used one of those?
Yes, JH7110 on VisionFive 2.
>They are excruciatingly slow. Less performance than most Raspberry Pi.
Not my experience, owning VisionFive 2 and all raspberry pi B boards (1,2,3,3+ and 4), all of which have been used heavily.
The CPU is much faster than RPi3b+'s while using way less power. Only a little slower than RPi4, and this is assuming the RPi4 has a huge heatsink like mine does. JH7110 doesn't require a heatsink nor throttle under load, for it stays under 75C even when running builds 24/7, yet is designed to survive 125C.
Whereas everything else in the SoC is better. Especially the GPU, which in the RPi4 is anemic, and can barely keep up even for 2d at 1080p. The experience is much better on VisionFive 2 for even simple tasks like web browsing, and it's not even close. Night and day.
Nevermind the upstream support effort[0] getting this far in just a few months (indiegogo delivery was in March), and follows standard RISC-V boot/firmware interface specifications, whereas Raspberry Pi is all bespoke and never cared much about upstreaming support.
>Also competitive ARM based alternatives (such as Snapdragon) require many closed source blobs to function.
Here I just do not understand what point you're trying to make.
That was my point. It is slower than a RPI4, which is already too slow to use for anything serious. You can't expect StarLite to develop a tablet that is 'a little slower than RPi4', because nobody but you will buy it. And yes, your workflow may be possible on a low powered machine, but that is not how the majority of customers use a tablet. Until there is a serious competitor to modern x86 processors in terms of performance (which the JH7110 definitely isn't), RISC-V is not going to be offered in any commercial grade product anytime soon.
> Here I just do not understand what point you're trying to make.
The point I was trying to make, it that the other alternative, ARM, is also not suitable for StarLite's mission due to the closed blobs. So really, x86 is the only viable option they have.
That sentence isn't gonna age well.
>That was my point. It is slower than a RPI4, which is already too slow to use for anything serious.
I am still using my RPi1, but I guess my uses would not meet this arbitrary "something serious" tablet requirement.
Joking aside, the RPi4 is actually very fast, and its shortcomings are elsewhere than the CPU.
E.g. its GPU is grossly inadequate. Its video codec block can't encode. It lacks cryptography acceleration, so LUKS and SSL need to be done in the cpu with non-specialized instructions.
These are issues JH7110 does not have. The experience is much better with JH7110.
>The point I was trying to make, it that the other alternative, ARM, is also not suitable for StarLite's mission due to the closed blobs.
Ah. They buy the FSF nonsense where closed blobs need to be burned into a ROM for the machine to quality as "open".
Unfortunate, but I understand.
RISC-V is inevitable.
I don't need a bleeding edge gaming GPU, I don't need USB4, I don't need Thunderbolt. These are optional extras for me, I've given up on them already.
Currently I am kind of stuck with the old T440p because of this, all other laptops that I bought in the last 10 years have died already with no chance of repairing or fixing them - either because of non available parts, or because literally the GPU melted down (happens more often on MacBooks than one might think, apparently).
From Ultrabooks to even MacBooks, I've had them all, from Dell to HP, Apple and back... all died eventually and I switched back to my T440p in 2019. This old laptop still lives, can be repaired, has a replacement parts community [1], and doesn't break when I let it fall down on the floor. But it's now so outdated that I cannot even order battery packs anymore, because they will arrive with less than 20% capacity condition when they're being sold as "New" because they're even not produced anymore and are stored for too long.
I think what I want is something like the MNT Reform laptop [2], where the battery cells are replaceable 18650 standard cells. But without the problems that come with ARM. I've been thinking about even getting an older Thinkpad just so that I can just let the guy from xyte.ch [3] build a better one out of it.
Honestly I've spent more than 10k over the years for crappy Ultrabook laptops or MacBooks, which all died up on me and I'm sick of spending so much money when my laptop from 2013 still works.
Why can't we have nice replaceable battery packs, RAM, and m2 SSDs anymore? I mean, not even the Framework laptop has a replaceable battery pack? WHY?
Am I the only one wanting this?
[1] https://www.thinkstore24.de
[2] https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20221130010517/https://www.xyte.c... (currently has php problems)
"Laptops designed for open-source software need open warranties. Our 1-year limited warranty allows you to take your computer apart, replace parts, install an upgrade, and use any operating system and even your firmware, all without voiding the warranty."
They also post disassembly guides for their products and, so far at least, they don't seem to use super fragile ribbon cables for the batteries. Here's the one for the last gen of the Star Lite: https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/guides/star-lite-mk-ii-s...
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/30/23612467/framework-laptop...
But it's sold out already.
Works great, even if I have all CPU mitigations enabled, turbo boosting disabled, and running in powersave mode. What I do to avoid the fan from getting audible. However, with all the options I mentioned enable (especially enforcing a strict powersave profile/max frequency/etc) you'll get a bit of latency here and there; which I can put up with because I hate to hear the fans spin. With a fanless design, a better power profile (6W TDP vs 15W TDP), I wouldn't constrict my CPU to such extents.
To compare it in relative performance terms, the Apple M1 is ~3.8x times more performant than it (if that helps).
Also the display seems a bit dim at 300cd/m.
And since it's touch, stylus (digitizer) would be very welcome.
Your post contains only negative points.
There will never be a perfect device because everyone has different wants, so enjoy it for what it is.
I expressed my issue with no USB-A ports because I prefer my devices to be self-sufficient (I hope that's the right word). My mouse that I've had for many many years has USB-A, all of my USB storage drives are USB-A, Wacom tablet is USB-A, external DVD drive is USB-A.
What I'm trying to say is that all of my devices are USB-A, I have a USB charger only for my phone. And I do find it absurd having to use an adapter to use a mouse with my computer. I would be very slightly less bothered if the adapters at least came with device, but they don't, switch means that it's something I have to buy (no, I don't have any USB-C to USB-A adapters, because only my phone has a USB-C port).
I don't believe USB-A is past its prime, I don't really even know what that's supposed to mean. I still love and use my 3.5mm headphone jack on my phone.
With criticism, it's much easier to improve then if you only hear praise.
The USB-A socket is too big for the slim form-factor of ultrabooks and tablets, and it won't make a come-back.
USB C to USB Hub 4 Ports ($13)