I’m looking to get a straight tablet (not a 360-hinge laptop with a keyboard) that will mostly be used for mobile centric applications like when I’m out and about or when I want to binge shows in bed. Ideally it will be a device that I can exclusive use the touchscreen with for when I’m either too lazy or can’t practically prop it up and use it as a proper laptop.

I want to keep at least the software as open source as possible, so my options are either an Android tablet that I can sideload an AOSP de-googled ROM like Lineage OS, or a Windows tablet with an x86 CPU that I’ll install a Linux distro on (inb4 “Android is technically Linux”).

I currently use KDE Plasma which is my favourite environment when I’m on my desktop, and I quickly found through testing on my touchscreen laptop that it’s practically unusable without a mouse and keyboard. Here are some things that I found KDE lacking that I need:

  • Integrated onscreen keyboard that automatically pops up when you’re in a text field, and/or can easily be brought in and out of frame when needed.

  • Smooth swipe-based scrolling. I find that swiping up on many KDE apps just selects text or drags an element, or does nothing, and you have to drag the tiny scroll bar to scroll.

  • Pinch to zoom

  • A terminal that works well with touch screen, namely one that makes it easy to use special characters and control keys with an onscreen keyboard. Termux on Android is what I consider one of the best implementations of this.

  • Active stylus support with palm rejection is a plus, like the Surface when running Windows or the iPad Pro.

I consider myself very knowledgeable with Linux, and I do tinker with my computers a lot, but for this one, I do simply want something that “just works”, because I’ll either be using it at school/work and can’t afford to start diving into conf files and searching up cryptic error messages because something broke, or I’ll be in bed just wanting to relax before going to sleep.

Finally, is this futile? If we’re considering stock Android as a benchmark for a decent user experience on a tablet, can anything on the non-Android Linux side even compare?

  • {first: "Roke"}
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    41 year ago

    Wayland Plasma Mobile isn’t bad, and with A13 Waydroid, it’s a viable competitor to native Android.

  • Dessalines
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    31 year ago

    I’ve been using a xiaomi tablet (pad 5) to do everything for the past year and a half or so: code(via termux), watch movies, write, etc. It’s cheap, has great battery life, perfect screen size, auto brightness adjust, video calls.

    You might be able to load an aosp variant onto it, but I haven’t tried. Having that native android app ecosystem means you can use less battery wasting web apps too, something not possible with linux atm.

    • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlOPM
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      21 year ago

      Interesting. Xiaomi (and Huawei IIRC) seem good about allowing bootloader unlocks as well, so will definitely have to look into this avenue.

      • Dessalines
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        21 year ago

        If you have time, they are going to release the pad 6 soon, so the you could go with that, or a discounted pad 5. The only other tablet I was considering, was the lenovo p11 or p12 pro.

        I also really wanted there to be a good arm linux device with great battery life, but there’s just none yet. Android has become the most popular OS worldwide for better or worse, but at least unlike windows or mac, there are open source variants, and its possible to run it without google play services. Android also has probably a far greater number of open source apps than even linux does too.

    • {first: "Roke"}
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      21 year ago

      Maui Shell is in its infancy, and solely works partially decently if preinstalled with its 1st-party distribution of Debian.

  • Ephera
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    21 year ago

    Was this KDE under X11 or Wayland? It should work better for this type of stuff under Wayland.

    It is also possible to get a virtual keyboard. Not sure, if that one is tied to Wayland or needs to be installed/enabled in some way…