Seems like no stylus? If so it makes the starlite not very surface-like in my mind. Ain’t a stylus the reason for something like this?
Ah damn yeah, I was just thinking that this device might be something I’d consider blowing my budget for, if it can replace multiple devices. But the lack of stylus on a device like this is huge let down.
How hard would it be to make it work with a third party stylus?
it wouldn’t be hard at all you just buy a stylus that works like a finger
With the catch that it works like a finger meaning fat and imprecise. A stylus like the surface has is more like a pen and needs hardware in the tablet to function.
Did you ever use the Nvidia Shield Tablet stylus? It was a very thin and precise passive stylus that worked on any touch screen. It was pretty nice. They probably only sold a handful of them, so there was no gen 2. I happen to know someone who was working on that project, so they let me play with it.
Not really. I’ve got a cheap stylus for my phone that acts like a pen, down to drawing fine lines too. It can’t adjust the thickness of the line based on pressure, like my Wacom pad and pen for the PC, but for most things it works brilliantly :)
maybe 10 years ago
I have a surface and I love it. At the same time, I hardly use the stylus.
I’m sure it’s the reason many get it, but I also think there’s a large audience for a tablet without one.
I genuinely dont see the reason for a windows tablet without a stylus. Note-taking is nice with a stylus but for just holding it and watching videos or browsing a surface is honestly too unwieldly and the windows touch interface is also not great.
Agreed. Although I do use the stylus that came with my Galaxy Tab S7 for note-taking, that’s the only time I use it. 95% of the time I just use the tablet for browsing the web or watching videos.
My thoughts exactly.
They do have a generic MPP active pen as a configuration option though
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I’m not sure on Starlab’s background or people’s stance on them, but I think this looks pretty nice.
Coreboot, 3:2 aspect ratio, magnetic keyboard, aluminium finish, I’d say makes this a pretty compelling alternative to a surface. Specs aren’t super beefy, but I don’t think they need to be in this form factor. Introductory price on this seems nice, too.
I’d say makes this a pretty compelling alternative to a surface.
And like a Surface, it puts a desktop OS onto a tablet, basically repeating Microsoft’s mistake.
Specs aren’t super beefy, but I don’t think they need to be in this form factor.
There’s a difference between “not beefy” and a super crappy 1.00GHz Intel N200. A hardware OEM just needs to go to AMD and pick off the shelf whatever is the closest thing to Steam Deck’s CPU.
Desktop OS on a tablet is fine and even preferred depending on what you want it for.
I have a surface and don’t mind using full windows that way.
I agree with you. I got a surface go for some time because I wanted to travel with a mini computer that could do some coding with my preferred IDE, document editing, web browsing and a couple other tasks like a computer, even if it was slower.
At the same time it being a tablet was also very useful to watch movies in other rooms!
I used the stylus only because I was curious, but didn’t used it more than a couple of weeks
Desktop OS on a tablet is fine and even preferred depending on what you want it for.
If the use case is to use a tablet as a tablet, then a desktop OS is not fine. Source: Me and my Surface Pro 7 which is unusable without the type cover.
Gnome shell works well on my vivo as either a tablet or with the keyboard.
The DE itself is less of a problem than the applications. On my Steam Deck in game mode I use Angelfish as web browser because all the mainstream browsers are just bad for touch controls compared to ones specifically designed for touch. You see a similar complaint in Windows forums were they sag that original Edge was better for tablets than Chromium Edge.
Cool touch applications like Krita Gemini and Calligra Gemini died because “fuck that touch trend, fuck QtQuick, GTK forever”. Now we’re stuck with applications that need a touchpad or mouse…
Cool touch applications like Krita Gemini and Calligra Gemini died because “fuck that touch trend, fuck QtQuick, GTK forever”. Now we’re stuck with applications that need a touchpad or mouse…
Wut… GTK is one of the very few touch friendly toolkits on *nixen. And neither of those apps were ever GTK.
I also have a surface pro 7, how is it any less usable without the type cover than any other tablet without one?
how is it any less usable without the type cover than any other tablet without one?
Most Windows applications work like ass with touch. Most iPad and Android apps work best with touch.
I mean sure, but you have the flexibility of a fully featured computer. You could run Android apps on it if you really wanted that UX.
In my experience all that really means is that you’re forced to use the stylus for precise taps or right click functionality sometimes.
I mean sure, but you have the flexibility of a fully featured computer.
Same flexibility would be there if the default OS was different. The same PC with Android-x86 would just as capable of booting other systems but the default experience would be touch (finger) friendly.
all that really means is that you’re forced to use the stylus for precise taps
Cool. There is no stylus included, though.
Well the desktop OS is what made me choose a Surface Go 1 as my main computer. And now that I’ve switched to Linux (Fedora), I’m even more thankful that you could apply every tutorial you found on the web for that tablet.
Well, presumably the Linux apps are a feature for the target audience. In terms of the OS UX itself, if you had never seen GNOME before, would you call it a desktop or a tablet UI?
I’d definitely prefer to have gone the AMD route for these, but N200 isn’t that awful, no? At least comparable to some Skylake gens? Not that that’s amazing in the modern day, but I’d say still capable enough with the included specs to not be too bogged down by some of the lighter distros.
Better off with a Chromebook 10/10 times if you need something low powered, but I think it’s an interesting entry to the hardware space.
I’d definitely prefer to have gone the AMD route for these, but N200 isn’t that awful, no?
I doubt it’s powerful enough to play back 4k videos smoothly and 1080p stretched to the native resolution doesn’t look super great. If AMD didn’t offer a vastly better alternative at similar cost, fine, but Ryzen Z1 and such are available.
I have an N100 box running as my Plex server. It has no problem transcoding multiple 4k videos at once. This processor is no M2 but it isn’t really a slouch either.
It has no problem transcoding multiple 4k videos at once.
At 1 GHz? Sure about that? Even if my performance assumptions are off: something like the Steam Deck CPU surely still beats it, especially in low power.
It can clock up to 3.7 GHz and has a decent GPU for an Intel one. All I can say for sure is that it keeps up just fine.
It can clock up to 3.7 GHz and has a decent GPU for an Intel one. All I can say for sure is that it keeps up just fine.
I see no cooling vents, so apparently passive cooling only and massive downclocking. Still think an AMD chip would have been better.
I am of the opinion that if we keep waiting for the “perfect” Linux tablet, it will never exist. The specs of this unit are head and shoulders above any other Linux-dedicated tablet thus far.
I plan on buying one once I see a product review, and if it’s as good as I hope it will be, I hope that Linux users will support it with their wallets so we get more and better devices like this.
I don’t need this, I don’t need this, I so need this… I mean I don’t… fuck!
Well, this month I am already broke…
It seems like Star Labs is pivoting away from making superheroes and finally decided to use their technology more responsibly!
Was looking for this comment.
The best thing for me is that you can buy a battery for it on their site with instructions how to do the replacement. Nothing is glued together according to the manual (which probably makes it mory clunky than Surface but oh well). Coreboot is an icing on the cake.
Always wanted to try a star labs product. What always stops me are the specs. Not enough ram or storage or CPU to justify the price. Even though I know the premium is there because they aren’t just white labeled clevos like every other Linux focused PC company
Have a clevo and it sucks.Battery life is poory And the Fans go off for like no reason
Oh no. Man that sucks. Which one? The lemur pro by system76 was a clevo I had it for a bit and thought it was really good all around. I would have kept it but the specs on a M1 were just ridiculous compared to anything out there. No fans, no dust collection was something I didn’t know I appreciated so much
It’s a tuxedo. The xp15 gen 11 vor clevo PD50. i7 10th gen and a 2070 max q. And a 4k OLED. Battery life is about 50 min : (
I would LOVE an arm machine, but I need a GPU for work.
I got my eyes on the framework 16. I could leave the GPU at home and go for battery life. Or put it in and go into work mode.
I see soo many people complain about the CPU but if your CPU use too much power, your battery is going to take a big hit on battery life, unless the tablet now start at much higher prices. So the 6W form factor makes a lot of sense.
People complaining about it not being AMD. AMD just doesn’t make good 6W CPU (other then custom one but that would cost a fortune for such a little company). Intel has been really experienced in this market.
To the people scared about video decoding, Intel has really good HW decoding so 4K isn’t an issue. It’s better then AMD’s one on Linux from my own experience.
Finally this is a $600 tablet, so don’t expect a workstation to run Blender. Linux runs well on weaker CPU. My school computer runs KDE Plasma with a few apps open without much trouble and it has a Intel Celeron N5100 and 4GB of RAM.
The problem is that tablets like this generally can’t take advantage of the turbo boost on the CPU due to thermal throttling. I’ll wait and see, but I expect it to perform worse than an N5100 laptop.
Wait and see
I wish I would have known about this before buying the Pinetab2. I didn’t realize (completely my fault) that the Pinetab2 was a development unit without working wifi, bluetooth, camera and other issues. Once again, my fault, not Pine64’s.
Would absolutely get if it had a pen for drawing and notetaking, but otherwise I feel it’s just a somewhat underpowered laptop in a neat form factor.
Oh damn, I may actually get it then
That’s an incredible price for 16gb of memory and a 512 ssd. Would be an upgrade from my 14" laptop. I just hope I don’t have to wait multiple years to get it.
Damn this might be an easy buy for $600
Does anyone have on-screen keyboard experience with Linux tablets?
GNOME Mobile should have a good one after purism started pushing it, right?
Any more info on this?
It’s ok, but you really need the “improved OSK” gnome extension so you can have things like arrow keys, Ctrl, etc at all times. The keyboard is usually very good about popping up on it’s own when you tap on a text field. If it does fail to auto show itself you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pull it up that way. There is no swipe to type but other than that and with the extension I mentioned before, it works well enough. Now there are issues on Wayland that makes it unbearable though so I would recommend you use X.
The point of a tablet is to be secure to use it with a touch interface. If you install just some vanilla Linux distro, that won’t work. Is there any touch based interface for Linux that’s worth using?
Gnome has a strong touch interface. You just don’t see it when used in a desktop.
If you install just some vanilla Linux distro, that won’t work.
My Surface 3 Pro with Debian Stable would disagree. The Gnome desktop does pretty good without a keyboard.
Interesting. Might give that try some time. I’d love to have a tablet with Linux.
If only there was another group of touch first devices, preferably with even smaller screens, oh wait…
Yeah, I know I could just use Android or ChromeOS. But there’s a reason why I prefer Linux.
You haven’t read the list to the end, have you?
Gnome is actually amazing on a tablet. The touch gestures work well and it even does fancy stuff like pushes the content on your screen up when the on screen keyboard is active so you can see what you’re typing. The only thing that really needs work is the on screen keyboard, however it is greatly improved by using the “Improved OSK” Gnome extension. If only it had swipe type.
Source: I recently acquired a hand me down Dell latitude 5175 which is an x86 tablet (can be found for cheap on eBay) so of course I had to install Linux on it. If anyone happens to be interested in using Linux on a Dell latitude 5175/5179 do note that deep sleep does not work and neither do the cameras. I also recommend Ubuntu LTS and using X11 instead of Wayland.
Is there any touch based interface for Linux that’s worth using?
Plasma should detect automatically when the keyboard is detached and then apply some changes to its desktop layout. There’s also Plasma Mobile but I think that would not work well on the larger screen.
If I were StarLabs, I would probably default to BlissOS which is based on Android-x86 which means all regular Linux distributions are still feasible to install.
Android
This is honestly quite interesting. I might get one, if only to play around with and see what cool stuff I can think of to do with it.
Also, their laptops look pretty sweet - I think it strikes a much better long-term balance between framework’s “plug-and-play” approach (which necessarily leads to a slightly clunkier and less sleek design) and Apple’s “inscrutable slab of electronics” approach.
Star’s approach requires more (dis)assembly time and care, but I think that’s fine. You can open up a Framework way more trivially, but well… how often do you honestly plan on disassembling your laptop? For me, it’s:
- when I get it, to upgrade the RAM and SSD
- if I want to upgrade later, but that typically happens years down the road, and sometimes not ever if it can do what I need it to do without issues
- if something breaks and needs replacement… but that also typically happens years down the road
So, while I appreciate Framework’s approach… I’m honestly not going to crack the thing open more than 3 or 4 times, and hopefully only once or twice, so I am absolutely fine sacrificing super easy maintenance for an overall sleeker and more robust-feeling design.
I once had a laptop that let you upgrade the mobile graphics cards. It was incredible.
Framework’s newer 16” model lets you do that now, I think
Yes
I agree, I would say a reasonable limit for me would be:
- An hour for any maintenance (replace any component, start to finish)
- About 5-10eur for single use materials.
I think anymore would be enough to deter me from doing it the 1 or 2 times a year I really need it.
The important bit not mentioned here is that FW machines are both user serviceable and user upgradable. No need to eat the cost or create the waste of replacing a perfectly good chassis and display, and then sell off the replaced mainboard on the market.
