The LINUX TABLET IS THE FUTURE - and it always will be The year of the Linux tablet is, like the year of the Linux desktop, destined never to arrive. That doesn't mean we won't see Linux on a tablet, but you'll see Linux on a tablet the way you see it on the desktop - clinging to a tiny percentage of the market. There is of course Android, which does use a Linux kernel somewhere …
"Having used a Samsung Windows 8 tablet for a few months, I have a theory as to why: you think you want a full desktop computer on your tablet - I certainly did - but you don't"
Be that as it may, what I REALLY don't want, is a half-arsed mobile OS interface shoe-horned onto my desktop, kthxbai.
"...What this author denies is that Android IS Linux..."
Au contraire. What this author does is almost unique for El Reg. He admits that Android: "...does use a Linux kernel somewhere under all that Java..."
I'm as keen to see a 'real' Linux running on phones and tablets as the majority of commentards here but unfortunately Android isn't it.
"......Android is not a means of running most Linux applications not specifically written for Android." But Google are smart enough to have realized the average consumer does NOT want a Linux device, they want an easy-to-use phone or tablet. Techies may want full-blown Linux because they want full control, they want to hack stuff, but the average consumer needs a simple interface with the hard stuff done for them, hence Android. And that is why more tablets will be sold with iOS, Win8 and Android than with "proper" Linux.
I am thinking the answer to tablets is IBM's AIX operating system.
Seriously AIX is bullet proof, never fails, has thousands of mission critical applications.
Yes and none of those thing matter to the after tablet holder who just buys an ipad and
holds the power/home button to fix whatever is wront.
Microsoft is the next HP tablet...forget what is was called even thought i bought one...then gave it away
face it Microsoft/Intel "WinTel" is dead and HP is deader....samsung and apple ownt the mobile mkt.
e99
I'll happily admit that I'd take an AIX workstation (or laptop - ah, the RS/6000 N40 - pretty nifty for 1994) over a tablet running anything.
But then I'd take a Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, etc workstation (or laptop) over a tablet running anything. I'll even take a Windows laptop over a tablet running anything.
I've got Windows XP running, in a VM on my OS X laptop. At work, we have got windows 7 running in VMs on Linux servers and vice versa. I was unaware until your post that this meant that XP is really a version of OSX or that Windows 7 is just Linux Redhat in disguise. Odd, after all these years in IT.
What's all this nonsense about? I suspect if you had even 10% of the mobile market for just your firm (I assume you are in business as you seem so au fait with how to read market figures), selling just one current edition plus a couple of older hardware versions all able to run the same OS, you would be very happy and somewhat rich if you had more business sense thatn your apparent understanding. In fact, IOS has got much more than that and, in the segment where it matters (those that spend money rather than those who have not got it or who prattle on about their technical ability while unable to explain why they themselves are not astoundingly rich and successful market leaders), it seems that IOS has much greater penetration.
But anyway, so what? Does one over the other enrich your life? Or the lives of others (I gather that Samsung, for example, is singularly unbeloved in S. Korea because of its employment practices)?
If you like the vagaries of the Android suppliers, lovely. Make the most of it, buy shares in that supplier market, build vast collections of their hardware and interfaces, write books, articles, paint them in pictures, make accessories. Just do it.
If you like a rather clearly defined environment with a stable interface, consistent across models (much as standards for pedal, gear and steering wheel layout in cars), good for you. Do the same. Even, have both. Jail break both, use them as they came. The world is your oyster.
Do you go around rubbishing other people's cars or houses because they are not your taste? Or were you one of those slanging off IOS users as "sheep" when, actually, the "sheep" according to you are buying something else?
It is the season of Good Will. So have a present: use your freedom to do what you will and let others do the same, free of your pointlessly denigrating unpleasantness. Be glad that IOS came out and gave your favoured system a boot up the arse to get into the market and improve. IOS users can also be happy that Android and Windows and even Nokia keep Apple on their toes. App writers can write for the love ot if for Android and for money for IOS. We all win.
The wonderful thing is that we have got the choice.
You didn't read the article or you'd realise he said Android is Linux underneath all its own stuff. That said Android lacks a lot of stuff, like X, and has an incompatible C lib iirc so it's not the same as all the other Linux distros. It's not completely genuine to say linux is making inroads on tablets.
If I could have a super computer, the size of a shelled peanut, with all the software that you could ever possibly think that you could want, with an atomic battery that ran it for 10,000 years, with an IBM Model M keyboard, and a 23" screen - if not 3 or 4 of them....
And it had a recording studio quality PA system - with a thousand plugs, jacks, 5 miles of leads and cables, and lots of really nice speakers and all...
And a set of super dooper High Def spy satellite cameras....
And I could run at least 19 different operating systems on it simultaneously, with a trillion Terror Bites of infinitely incorruptable storage..........
And it had news paper printing press capabilites of volume and speed, in photographic grade imaging, with ZERO TCO in terms of ink, paper and toner supplies.......
And it would fold up into a match book sized device, and weigh under 5 grams, and sit in my wallet beside my credit card - I would be immensely fucking happy.
But tough shit......
We live in a world filled with compromises.....
And fuck it - this is just how it goes.
(glumly accepts reality check to fantasy)
...it's like Windows users don't do anything else with their machines but start the OS and start applications.
Are they constantly crashing or something? Otherwise that metric should be pretty meaningless in 2012.
Also, Windows has a nasty habit of appearing to be started but not being really terribly useful. So these startup metrics can be intentionally misleading. They're a bad thing to judge anything on.
When is it useful?
One big plus point of win 8 (the only one?) is that startup is fast and thats to the point of actually being able to work, not just watching more stuff load. It's more a factor for laptops which see more on\off action than destops. It's definately less of an issue since windows got rid of the need to reboot every time you changed font in word. Mitigating that is the suspend \ hybernate options. Ultra fast startups are nice, but probably not all that important for most people.
Proper support for increasing pixel density is something I'm looking forward to!
The Win8 'fast startup' is actually a return from hibernation, only you are not told about it.
That fact made me spend a while trying to find a bug in a device driver I was working on. Apparently, being back from hibernation, it did not go through the 'Miniport Loaded' state as the driver was already loaded. Which is pretty obvious if you know that.
Next time I will RTFM.
Maybe people don't want to leave their computers on, or even in sleep, still sucking power. Sure, there is hibernate, but as he said, he has a SSD. With a SSS, I wouldn't want to be writing out a hibernate file constantly! Why bother anyways when it starts up so quickly? Now who's trolling?
in no more than 15 seconds using a good, old-fashioned hard drive.
The real test of boot-up speed is how long it takes from start to the opening of, for example, the browser. Windows continues loading startup programs, drivers, etc. even after the desktop appears and applications, though clicked, hang around until these have been pretty much loaded.
Try it. See how long it takes from cold start to the opening of the full browser window - I guess, Internet Explorer - in Win 8.
I don't know about Win 8 because I don't use it but when the desktop is boot up, when I click Firefox, it responds immediately and begins loading.
"Try it. See how long it takes from cold start to the opening of the full browser window - I guess, Internet Explorer - in Win 8."
Sorry but I've better things to do, not many I'll grant you but they're slightly more important than tuning the restart times of my chosen operating system. Providing it starts without falling flat on it's arse and I can do the very unimportant stuff I need to keep my life ticking along, I'm happy. I get my stuff done and I can then go outside and do something far more interesting.
All this time you lot are saving being able to restart your operating systems at lightning speeds, are you spending it wisely? Doesn't sound like it to me!
My Amiga 1200 booted in 5 seconds on a much slower PIO 0 IDE drive - is that therefore better than Linux?
Comparing boot times is pointless, and the idea of Windows being slow to boot is pretty much a myth, or a leftover from the NX/2000 days. I don't remember if Linux boots faster on my system - maybe it does - but then, I also note that my Clevo boots quicker than my Android Galaxy Nexus, so is Android crapper than Windows? (Same with the myth that Windows always needs rebooting for updates - Ubuntu seems to have far more updates, and also needs rebooting. Same with the myth that Windows is unstable - all modern OSs are pretty stable, but Windows 7 even survives graphics driver crashes that take down Linux and OS X, and I've had black-screen-on-boot when upgrading Ubuntu due to driver problems.)
I like Windows, Linux and Android (and Amiga back in the day), so I'm not taking sides. The idea that GNU/Linux isn't ready for ordinary users is also nonsense.
> The one thing that unix does well is 1982.
So that's why it's in your phone, in your tablet, in your TV, in your cable box, in your BluRay player, in your PVR, at your bank, managing your paycheck?
The entire article is silly troll bait. Linux is already in tablets. It's presence will likely blunt Windows.
Most banks run on mainframes, AIX, Solaris, Linux, Windows and HPUX.
Also, they use other stuff.
Take out any one of those OS's and you'll probably take the bank down. I even caught a bank installing a new copy of Windows 2000 for mission critical internet services not so long ago.
Do ya feel lucky, punk?
"So that's why it's in your phone, in your tablet, in your TV, in your cable box, in your BluRay player, in your PVR, at your bank, managing your paycheck?"
No, that's lack of imagination. And the fact that GPL makes it possible for corporations to snarf working code for projects without paying for it.
*N*X is adequate for utility computing, and especially interesting to the kinds of developers who think command line scripting is the most exciting thing ever.
What it isn't is an innovative or interesting OS for the kinds of developers who think aping Apple and MS is setting the bar really, really low for 21st century computing.
*N*X is adequate for utility computing, and especially interesting to the kinds of developers who think command line scripting is the most exciting thing ever."
What are you gibbering on about?
Linux and Unix can be found running everything from the worlds fastest supercomputer [The 17590 TFlop Titan Cray XK7] right down to educational computers like the Raspberry Pi and consumer electronics like TVs and set top boxes.
Apple's OSX is, itself, a Unix [developed from BSD]. You probably use, or make use of, Unix or Linux several times a day without realising it. Windows may, still, be the most prevalent desktop OS, but everywhere else is *nix.
My corporeal self, my basic diet, furniture, housing, lawn, coast .... Hey, they have not changed the way they work since then either. Better complain and change them. Perhaps 1982 is before you were born. But actually, life existed then and did rather well, for some people, rather better.
UNIX then was rather good: makes even Android look bloated. Well, Android is bloated. UNIX still is rather good, though it has put on a lot of weight. Now, clicky-pointy-drag-and-drop: that is so 80's, inefficient, slow ... Ugh.
I took the plunge and put win 8 on an old laptop after trying to get used to it on a vm. It's faster than vista and boots faster (to a useable state) than win 7. Apart from still swearing a hell of a lot at it being awkward to use I have found it solid and reliable.
I'm genuinely curious (not in a bitchy commentard fashion) as to how it is buggy? I'd love to know before I start risking (or being forced) to use it for actual work and find out I just wasn't testing something.
Win 8 seems ok for casual non work use, even better than vista and on a par with win 7. It works well with a touch screen if your activites are going to basically be facebook \ hulu \ gmail but it's clunky for actual work, especially without a touch screen. Depending on what you want to do it's either great or abysmal.
"Win 8 seems ok for casual non work use, even better than vista and on a par with win 7. It works well with a touch screen if your activites are going to basically be facebook \ hulu \ gmail but it's clunky for actual work, especially without a touch screen"
I sort of agree with you on a par with Win 7 but not sure why you would say its clunky for actual work without a touch screen....Unless you actually need a touch screen working in the desktop environment of Win 8 is either the same or better than using the same computer for windows 7. Unless your in a field where you require a touch screen to test your work I can't think of many reasons why you would need a touch screen for work purposes right now?
The writer seems to have an odd view of linux as basically just Gnome + Unity. KDE (yes, yes, I went there) is wonderfully touch-friendly and a very different user experience to gnome. Just as widespread, too.
But then, you see, that still makes the mistake of thinking Linux = UI. Android is Linux. Simple as. It's a fork of the kernel - but it's slowy being merged back into the trunk - sitting under all the same userspace tools, or at least a large subset of them, and it has a fancy Java-based UI on top. In that sense it's no different to Ubuntu, it just has more market penetration in the tablet space.
So the Linux tablet is already here. What we don't have is a gnome tablet, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. I don't want a gome tablet. I'd be rather keen on a KDE/Plasma tablet, but I have an android tablet. And they are all (or would be) Linux tablets.
Now back to the boxing day belly-ache. Turkey sandwich anyone?
> Asus Transformer?
Marvellous machine. Mine is still going strong after nearly two years. I think. I've written an entire novel on it. I'm considering replacing it with a padphone or one of those fancy slender models Asus do, at which point I'll likely start experimenting with some version of Linux + KDE just to see how well it works.
I've got an Asus Transformer and it's an absolutely stunning machine. Android runs wonderfully on this form factor. I've completely replaced my laptop with this device. And in those rare instances when I need "a desktop" -- I simply use the Jump Desktop client to remote-control the desktop on my DESK.
And yes, the Android stack has a Linux kernel in it. Linux is alive, well, and WINNING.
Does Linux sound like userspace to you? Does the word Linux sound kind of similar to GNU? It's a very interesting language you speak if it does, which is not what the rest of us are speaking. Linux is a kernel. So to say Android is not Linux is correct. It is incorrect, however, to say that there are no tablets running Linux. In fact, according to what I read in this article, it seems like the majority of tablets run Linux.
It's a wonder to me how it possible to twist everything and double speak till the exact opposite expression is made from "facts". Oh well, I suppose I should follow politics more and then I'd understand this blabber.
and since gnome3 , I dunno if I want a gnome desktop on Linux.
gnome2 was pretty good with ubuntu's 10.04 implementation
and then it all went wrong . Oh why did they break it so badly ? Even forgetting about Unity the classic gnome on Ubuntu 11.xx onwards is pretty broken to me.
At work I'm now on Ubuntu 12.04 but with XFCE , which is okay , but in my opinion not as nice as Ubuntu 10.04 and gnome. At home I've left Ubuntu 10.04 with gnome on my desktop.
I couldn't stand Windows 7 on my daughter's ex-laptop ( which is now mine, she gets the upgrades in my house, sumin going WRONG there ! ), and it is about to be Ubuntu 10.04-ed.
"At work I'm now on Ubuntu 12.04 but with XFCE , which is okay , but in my opinion not as nice as Ubuntu 10.04 and gnome. At home I've left Ubuntu 10.04 with gnome on my desktop."
CentOS 6 / Scientific Linux 6 / Springdale Linux 6 (formerly PUIAS Linux) are RHEL clones with updates until well after I retire. Rougly similar kernel and applications to Ubuntu 10.04 with incremental updates. Grab a live CD and try it on your hardware. I'm leaving CentOS 6.3 on my recycled thinkpad until it dies, while I continue to ride the Ubuntu rollercoaster on my home desktop (well, it keeps me alert, dodging the low branches).
Back on the nut roast bagels...
I've been for Gnome all the way....until now. I've surprised myself by how upset I am over Gnome 3 - as @Karl H says "Oh why did they break it so badly ?"
Looks like as toss-up between an XFCE or similar or KDE...... Still sticking with the mighty Debian Testing though :-)).
PS Re:Userspace tools - Even if the C lib & shell is different, its probably got the same tools though, or they can be built....
Funny to read the Windows users "expert opinions" on Linux
"The writer seems to have an odd view of linux as basically just Gnome + Unity."
Graham, the author does not have a fucking clue about anything Linux, much as he keeps insisting. I wonder how come his articles are even accepted by the Reg in the first place. Just have a look at the other stuff he wrote. It's just embarrassing.
Windows is the ability to run Windows applications, and Linux is the ability to run Linux applications.
I realize Android devices typically run on ARM hardware, not x86, but I can't see a way on my Android tablet to build, say, FontForge from source. In fact, I can't find GCC on it anywhere.
The OS = the platform, not so much the UI. The applications it lets you run. What bits of code it uses matters not, except to tech aficionados. Android may be a moral victory for Linux, but it's not a market share victory that encourages people to develop for Linux.
Really, if your idea of Linux as a touch OS is a variant of Ubuntu or Red Hat using Gnome or Unity, then it's no wonder you'd think it's a hopeless quest. One of the things the KDE team did right a few years ago when transitioning to KDE4 was to rebuild from the ground up so that the environment could be easily redesigned to suit many and varied paradigms without needing further redesign of the underlying system. Plasma is a fantastic touch interface, more modern and arguably better than iOS, Android or Metro.
As usual with any attempt to get Linux into the mainstream, it's not the quality or usability which will be the problem but the inertia and vested interests of device manufacturers and consumers.
Couldn't agree more about KDE. Everyone moaned about the changes when KDE4 first came along but now you can see why those engineering decisions were made all that time ago. The challenge for the KDE team is to release a finished stable version of the touch interface without their usual monthly tinkering where features are pulled or added by complete surprise.
KDE is a great desktop interface, I'd love to see a good stable version on a tablet.
Likewise. I saw a demo of Plasma on the n900 some time back and it looked rather spiffy, albeit a little slow as it wasn't particularly optimised. It did all the necessaries though.
Given a little time it could easily contend with Android for the mobile space.
Since The Powers That Be have taken away the official Rate This Article button, perhaps the Payers That Be (that'll be you, dear readers, whose pageviews pay the bills at TheRegister) should start a crowdsourced RateThisArticle, especially for the ones at the top of the pile or at the bottom.
Spread the word. And remember, vote early, vote often.
I see a lot of arguments over which OS is best, but they are almost all really about the GUI. Where does MS get dinged most when changing Windows versions? The GUI. What makes Linux tablets unlikely? The GUI. What makes Apple fanbois weak in the knees? No comment. Most folks don't care about what's under the hood (present company excluded), but they do care that they can get in a do what they want to do without having to fight with their systems or they have to re-learn how to open and close a document with every new version of their OS.
spot on the button. Linux is an operating system. X windows is the GI and the GUI is down to whatever bloated load of wombat turds you prefer.
There is no point in loading a mouse,keyboard, big screen GUI onto a fondleslab. Android IS the Linux GUI for fondleslabs. It seems, from a safe distance, to work.
End of matter.
Linux is already the choice for servers. Desktop users of the more trivial sort are abandoning desktop machines for their I-Bling anyway. So there is likley to be no mass market for machines with mice and keyboards.
Those will become professional; workstations. And when they do Apple and Microsoft will probably abandon them to LInux anyway.
Android is a bit more than just a GUI. It's a whole stack of software that basically uses Linux as a hypervisor to run each app in its own VM. Not quite the same as selecting "Android" from the drop-down list of KDE, Gnome, XFCE and whatever other X window managers you have installed.
Would be nice to see an official Dalvik for Linux though, made as easy as clicking an "androidclient" icon in the package manager, with Google apps support, and maybe with some kind of copy/paste and file support through to the host OS. Maybe have a go at showing Microsoft how you do "everything at once".
Tablet interfaces don't work on PCs, and PC interfaces don't work on tablets.
This is the fundemental problem with windows 8, it tries to have both and instead of being the best of both worlds it's ended up feeling second rate on both platforms.
Luckily this is so self evident that the current blip of the windows 8 interface won't last long, it will soon evolve into one interface to tablets and a second for PCs
I agree eventually it will evolve and very possibly seperate thats what windows 8 is all about, major change to an aging system. The problem is the trolls and dinosaurs can't seem to deal with any kind of change so instead of embracing it they need to rant and rave about how its not this, it doesnt do that etc.
Windows 8 Pro is great, I use the apps in metro for my news consumption, game scores for sports etc etc and I work everything else that I do business and consumer use the same way I always have done with Win7 and earlier while getting more stability than I had in Win7/Vista/XP.
It's a win win people, if you don't want to give it a chance fine but don't knock it just because you think it sucks!!!
"Pair a Linux tablet with a hardware keyboard and mouse and you'd have a great little three-piece laptop replacement"
Or do the same with the Windows 8 one you've got (which would appear to be Microsoft's intention, certainly when the Pro ones arrive) and you'll have that too, surely?
Either you want a tablet or you want a laptop OR you want a SMALL laptop with consequences (the evolution of the netbook).
I would have a small laptop with consequences personally, but I'll wait for the Surface Pro. Although the Lenovo Yoga does look interesting.
Now, Santa, where's my folding screen?
'Mobile' use, use as is.
But my problem with my tablet is that it can't stand up like a laptop. Trying to use it to talk to my mate on Skype yesterday - had to use a judicious arrangement of books to prop it at a decent angle, so video worked. (Could've held it, but I wanted a smoke, and drink my coffee.)
I think the neatest must be this laptop: Dell XPS 12 Convertible Touch Ultrabook, Windows 8, but it's freakingly expensive at $1,200, base price, $1,700!! Laptop and fondleslab, in one, tho'.
But, I'm convinced this is the evolution path. tHere's no doubt others out there I'm not aware of....
http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-12-l221x/pd
Apparently not - Android holds almost 50% of the tablet market and growing. As far as I can tell, Android is the best Linux UI for touch, just as bash is probably the best command line interface. The desktop is a tougher call - Ubuntu's Unity seems to have the biggest user base at 20 million machines (and I use it on a couple of my machines), but we have so many additional choices in KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, and several others that I'm not sure you can claim a consensus "best" yet. Time will tell. Maybe.
Linux is not "fragmented". It is adapted to multiple environments and capable of running the same tools and applications on the vast majority of them. Those environments where you can't run, say, Konqueror are probably not suited for desktop browsing in the first place.
To pick a random example, I could run abiword on my old n900, my desktop computer and, with a bit of tinkering, my router. Okay, a lot of tinkering, and it's probably not much fun running a word processor and all the other bits necessary to make that happen on a router, over a vnc session. It would be a dog.
But that's sort of the point. Linux doesn't fragment. You wouldn't want to have the exact same user experience across divergent devices. By the logic you're employing, Apple is fragmented because it has completely different user interfaces on iOS and OSX and can't run the same applications. It's a laughably stupid argument, yes? So why are you making the exact same laughably stupid argument about Linux?
Merry boxingmas.
> If "Linux" using the term loosely here had less fragmentation maybe it could actually compete better in the desktop space with the likes of MSFT and Apple no?
No.
Linux is a technology, not a product (I think you allude to that by your "loosely" comment). Technologies don't hold market share, products do. The ONLY for-profit corporation making a serious play for the desktop to my knowledge is Canonical, with about 20 million active installations of Ubuntu (based on unique IP accesses to their update servers) as of 2011, along with a range of related products such as the Ubuntu Software Center, UbuntuOne media store, cloud services, and enterprise offerings.
In contrast, Linux was FAR more "fragmented" in mobile a couple of years back, with Bada (a Samsung product), WebOS (championed by Palm and then HP), Maemo/Meego (Nokia's former future), and Android (an odd little OS from Google). Yet Android has quickly captured a majority of the mobile market, even without the ability to run Bada, WebOS or Meego apps (eek! fragmentation!!!).
Compare that to Steam, Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome, Netflix - they all run on most Linux-based desktop products, though some are only "officially" supported on Ubuntu and only Ubuntu is seriously working commercial deals with vendors and developers as far as I can tell.
I have no idea whether Canonical will continue to gain desktop market share, but if they don't, clearly fragmentation won't be the cause.
But is "Linux" trying to compete? Which organization similar to Apple or Windows is pushing Linux? Maybe Canonical but I haven't seen the ads, shows, Balmer-style antics. .
I'd say most Linux users don't care if others use it or not. They choose a distro' then a version then a GUI then change the whole system to suit their particular needs. That's why individuals use Linux.
Bash is buggy rubbish spread only because it was default on Lînux. Its Posix mode is not complete, its array implementation bizarre. Still, it's a very good stimulus to use Perl more, while using ksh/posix sh for things best done in shell (and awk for real work. :) )
Actually, most Linux rewrites of utilities are sad: they took the UNIX philosopy of doing one thing simply and well, binned it and added a thousand options with two or three forms per option, plus spurious colours, just to save the effort of using a pipe or filter. The result is that nobody knows all the options and all tend to type some magic spell of options that seem to work, regardless of the utility of the output.
Bah! Give me a real UNIX, system V or BSD, any day, written and reviewed by software engineers and not by home hackers and self-taught, would-be geniuses. If you had had to work with the software of some people, as I have, who claimed to have had their "fixes" for "bugs" in the filing system or some utility "accepted", you would run a thousand kilometres to avoid "Linux".
My only two gripes about Android are the way it manages multitasking and the way Android-based systems are so locked down. I like to get a command-line interface to play with because I'm a tinkerer, but rooting and installing a terminal emulator gives me a lot of options in that regard. The multitasking issue is more fundamental. A few times, to begin with, I lost quite a lot of writing on my Asus transformer because I switched away from the app without saving and came back later to find it had been dumped from active memory and lost all my work.
Frustrating.
Other than the enforced "save all the time" regime, which is good practice anyway, I have almost no complaints. Now if only I could get jellybean on my phone...
Should have bought an N900 or an N9 while you could. Developer mode user-accessible SWITCH that auto installs a terminal and SDK "remote debugging", and true multitasking were all your apps are working in the background. Battery life does not suffer unduly and it's a true Linux (Debian-based, smallbox shell, glibc).
"Am I the only one around who is actually happy with Android on tablets?" Nope, very happy with Android on a Nexus tablet. But also more than very happy with even old Windows Tablet Edition on my old hp TC1100, which can do more than any tablet. And for all the fanboys out there feeling smug, the author seems to have skipped over the fact that using an iPad has exactly the same frustrations as using a Win8 tablet. I'm typing this on an iPad and it is immensely frustrating compared to a Linux or Windows laptop or PC. Tablets are still great as consumption devices, crap for actual productive tasks.
Of course not.
Apple play games in this area, they cherrypick the £60 Supermarket tablets, the ones without Google Play store, and come with resistive touchscreens, and pretend this is the typical Android tablet experience.
The idiots that pay £400 upwards for their tablets are all to happy to believe this is the real story, when we all know it's not.
Even the most inbred Apple owners are usually impressed when I show them a jellybean powered Nexus7, and then I break the news that me and missus have 1 each, for the price they paid. They then go on to talk about having heard at a Apple conference that all Android apps are just "big smartphone apps", which again is utter bullshit and I show them the apps I use, and very few of them fit into that category. I then break the news to them that that too is a double edged sword, and they where they buy separate copies of their apps for iPhone and iPad, this is rarely the case on Android, where the single APK has both smartphone and tablet layouts included that share the same business logic. Infact Swiftkey is the only example that breaks that rule of thumb on Android.
Apple owners believe any old shit to make it seem like their overpriced tablet is worth it.
RESISTIVE touchscreens??? HUH??? I've just used one, a very big one in Oulu City (They've several of these black monoliths mainly for tourist and visitor use) and it was about as responsive as my missus on a Friday night!
Terrible. OK, it's -10C at the moment but they were just as bad in the summer at +20.
Herre's one, and it's a great idea seemingly thwarted by old tech.
http://www.ubioulu.fi/sites/default/files/images/tn_kesa_valve.jpg
Happily still doing all I need to do on the move with my ASUS TF-101.
Just today I went looking for an app from a particular company website expecting to only find the Apple version, nope there they were both app-store versions of the app for Apple and Android. Things are simply getting better every day!
The Unix philosophy is based on text. However text entry is hard on those devices.
However there is no equivalent of the Unix philosophy for touch/pen based interfaces. Therefore touch/pen based interfaces are usually severely limited and unsuitable for anything except for document viewing and perhaps a bit of painting.
What we need is someting like GRAIL which allows for complex input via pen interfaces. Back then you essentially drew a data flow path.
Well but the Unix philosophy also means that you enter your data and your programs the same way, as text. And that you can easily edit both.
The Unix philosophy also means that you separate the UI from the actual program, even to a point where many tools don't even have their own UI and leave that task to text editors.
What we do have in mobile devices is just a primitive mess. You cannot program them properly on the device itself. You need to load the software from "the side" just like on many pre-unix machines you couldn't load your software via the terminal.
Asus Transformer Prime from a hardware point of view seems to have it about right. A tweak of that so you can choose to boot into Android or Linux but with both having common shared folders for user files would be great. Even better if you could get it to auto switch from Android to Linux when you attached the keyboard.
"Having used a Samsung Windows 8 tablet for a few months, I have a theory as to why: you think you want a full desktop computer on your tablet - I certainly did -- but you don't. It simply doesn't work."
Then why does nearly everyone agree that the opposite is true - that I want a tablet OS on my desktop? This idiotic trend has ruined just about every linux distro, and now Windows ...
I was wondering why there weren't Linux tablets out there already, since they would offer a full OS that could be scaled to a smaller processor. (Microsoft could sew up that market, though, by making Windows 3.1 available again.)
What I found is that Nokia's MeeGo, the likeliest candidate, still lives on, but it's been forked: Sailfish on one hand, and something I can't even Google up again on the other.
You're thinking of Tizen, which is the descendent of Intel's Moblin and runs "web apps" only. It principally targets embedded, particularly automotive where MeeGo had gained some traction.
Sailfish is the descendent of Nokia's Maemo, built by the Nokia refugees that fled in 2011 when MeeGo (the ill-fated merger of Moblin and Maemo) was killed by Nokia's CEO (and former Microsoft VP) in favor of Win Phone 7. Sailfish runs native Qt apps as well as web apps and some legacy desktop apps for us old timers.
So it wasn't so much that MeeGo forked as a recognition that the attempted merger of Moblin/Tizen and Maemo/Sailfish had failed.
I've seen few "ordinary" people purchase a fondleslab as the tool they intend to do creative work on or as a productivity tool. The majority use theirs to consume content. Fondleslabs exist *primarily* for that purpose. Fondleslabs consume content but _can_ be used for creative/productivity tasks, just not as conveniently. Desktops and laptops, on the other hand, are first and foremost creation/productivity platforms but _can_ consume content, just not as conveniently.
Though the purposes are not in opposition, they are far from the same thing. As long as it provides a convenient and easy way to fulfill its purpose, each platform will succeed in its own space. Artists, musicians and writers have always been only a small percentage of the population and I see nothing in society or evolution that has changed that fact.
The general market doesn't give a shit what's running under the hood, only how convenient to use the UI is. Since the UI on *nix is just another process running on the core, it is only the perceived lack of a convenient and easy UI that keeps "Linux" (per se) off the fondleslab (Android notwithstanding) and that can be remedied by "somebody else" at any time.
>Fondleslabs consume content but _can_ be used for creative/productivity tasks, just not as conveniently.
Depends on the task... ideally, for content creation, I would like to see a tablet integrated with the desktop/laptop software- using the tablet to house desktop tool-bars would be a simple example of this, or using the tablet as a digitiser.
"Unfortunately, the PengPod seems doomed to mediocrity."
I can't imagine that something called the 'PengPod' was created for any purpose other than to bait Apple's lawyers. Why in God's name would you put a bullseye on yourself like that? "Oh, it worked really well for Lindows - let's do it again!"
The fact that Linux is the kernel of Android means that Linux is in fact driving more devices than anything else!
Linux *is* the kernel. Everything else on top of that kernel, well, it's just everything else, yeah?
Or did you forget that most *very* simple of facts in the melee that's been Linux development over the decades?
FFS, do some fucking research first! - how long does it take to first find this:
"The defining component of a Linux-based operating system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released 5 October 1991 by Linus Torvalds.[11][12]"
And then this:
"Android is a Linux-based operating system designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers"
Took me 30 seconds.
No you wanted a tablet - you didn’t want to do 'computing'. You, like many others, probably think that making a computer into a Media Player /glorified typewriter is the ultimate. Well it seems handy for most but then those of you who only want to walk down the shops don’t expect the road to be dug up beyond the shops just because that’s as far as you want to go so please don’t think everyone else should be limited to your poxy desktop because its the people that went past the shops to discovered how to disable the computer to the point that YOU can watch a video without suffering palpitations that need to be allowed out of your padded world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
I have absolutely no interest in upgrading to it, heck I can't stand vista and I'm not much in favour of win7. Sure I'm still using XP (and I'm not that fond of it) but I 'know' it and it has a plethora of software out there that runs on it and most problems can be solved either by figuring it out yourself or a few seconds with google.
What bothers me is that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers are forcing everyone onto new OS's wether they like it or not by bringing out new hardware and not producing drivers for old OSs.
"I have absolutely no interest in upgrading to it, heck I can't stand vista and I'm not much in favour of win7. Sure I'm still using XP "
Win 7 is by far better than XP....
You should change your nick to dinosaur because thats what you sound like!!
Charming!
A "luddite!" or "get with the times, grandad" attitude such as that towards me is certainly not a persuasive argument for moving to another OS when the one I'm using now does all I need.
IMHO currently I do not believe I would gain anything by a switch to another OS (any other OS) other than frustration, indeed I believe I would needlessly waste time and money getting to grips with having to learn a new way of doing something I can already do with my current OS.
Do you also look down on people who use typewriters because they're 'living in the past' by not using a computer with printer, or people who use a pen and paper because they're not using a touchscreen tablet?
@The_Regulator
Oi whipper snapper, when you grow up you'll realise that life consists of more than listening to the bullshit marketers and that life is actually happening outside your window. As you get older you'll start to hone down the things you need to get done to the bare minimum and you look for tools to get them done as quickly as possible. That way you can spend time on the imporant stuff that needs to get done in life, like families and outdoor hoobies, social clubs. Most of the foggies and dinosaurs on here have been through that upgrade journey many, many moons ago on complex systems when upgrades would consist of reading a 500 page upgrade guide, 6 weeks of planning and 2 days to implement, not shove in CD/USB and click Next, Next, Next. Most of us foggies have been there and done it before you were even a glint in the pizza delivery boy's eye! I would have said milkman's eye but you're probably too young to know that milk used to be delivered to the door step!
I'm still more or less doing the same things in 2012 that I was doing in 2002 and probably even 1982! I play games, I write the odd letter, I keep records of my finanical odds and ends, I write a little bit of code. The only new thing I do these days that I didn't do "back in the day" is edit and print my digital photos. The only thing I need a reasonably up to spec machine and O/S for, as editing 750MB layered Photoshop files needs a bit of oomph.
Leave us foggies alone, we're happy with stuff that does what we need as we don't have much time left and every second we do have is earmarked for more important stuff than dicking about with a new O/S.
Dinosaurs of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our out-of-date support agreements!
Ohhhh I see, because I am younger than you I need to grow up...... and actually I am old enough to have had milk delivered to the house when I was growing up and to steal a few pints from the neighbors as well!!
Perhaps (as I said to the other person here) you could have saved yourself some time by learning something new and more efficient, perhaps your incapable though....Did the 2 finger typing take long to get those paragraphs out?
Make use of that valuable time old timer!! No need to respond unless you really want to as I know you will be chuffed to read this response :)
Haha, allow me to retort!!!
My point is that many many people (like yourself) simply knock a new product because they do not know how to use it and do not want to learn. Further to my point is that world moves forward, if you want to wallow in your mud thats cool but I have no interest hearing how your better off on XP when by your own admission you would not even choose to try windows Vista, 7 or 8. You should know that actually windows 7 and 8 (and I guess Vista too) are more stable and more efficient than the XP System you are using so perhaps you could have saved yourself some time somewhere along the line by learning one of them.....
Your last comment I won't even bother responding to as it is merely rhetorical.
At best, that sounds subjective. I believe that Win7 does a slightly better job of scheduling I/O than XP, but I doubt that's what you are referring to. I can't think of *any* end-user-visible feature in 7 that I'd rate as better than the equivalent in XP, and quite a few that I'd mark down quite heavily. But that's all subjective, too.
Also, remember that the dinosaurs did not die out because something better came along, unless your definition of better includes geological worst-case-scenarios and the pests/vermin that can survive them.
Gave my grandson a Win 8 laptop for Christmas yesterday, coincidentally, because that is the only version of Windows we can find. Took him 3 tries to solve the captcha (!) to set it up. Finally got in, and played "catch the charm" trying to get Flash to work on his favorite Facebook game (Adobe's insructions for fixing Win8 involved using a wrench charm that would only appear when the cursor was on the other side of the screen). I was astounded at the utter inane frustration of it all - did nobody at Microsoft TEST this crap?
I rather suspect that the problem is that no-one *outside* Microsoft was allowed to test this crap, so the only people involved in usability testing were either trained up in all the (undocumented) tricks or only asked to perform ludicrously simple tasks.
I also rather suspect that nearly all the usability testing was done on touch-enabled devices, with the assumption that anyone with a mouse and keyboard would go straight through to the desktop and stay there.
I really don't understand the 'war' between Apple device and Linux users. I use both. They're on the same side of the fence - beautiful, unix derived, OSes (and user environments) that can do anything that you require (as a geek) and that provide easy to use shells for the novice.
Windows, which I also use and develop for, is on the other side of the fence. Committee designed OS inexplicably requiring additional software to perform the simplest task. Add to that the requirement for inexplicable software updates at random times and for certain tasks and its a big bloody no thanks from me. It pays the bills, but I certainly would choose to use it.
The future belongs to Unix, but I couldn't care less which version.
> I really don't understand the 'war' between Apple device and Linux users.
Apple and Linux representing diametrically opposed design philosophies.
Calling Apple products "Unix derived" ignores most of the defining qualities of Unix. Here it is useful to distinguish between kernels and the user level interfaces. Linux isn't just Linux. It's also GNU. Whereas MacOS is a proprietary interface that's bolted on top. Any kernel could be under there.
It's Linux that has a Unix interface bolted on top of it.
Get beyond that and you have "why not" versus "justify yourself".
If you are the least bit creative, you will find Apple has put barriers in your way and you will find the Apple user community belittling you and what you want to do.
MacOS is not Unix. Neither is PhoneOS.
An interesting point. Personally, I've heard about these barriers - but I've never seen them myself. Perhaps they melt away when they see me coming. iOS certainly enjoys getting in the way of the user, which is fine on a phone (well it suits me, anyway) and a perfect bloody pain in the geek arse on a tablet. Thankfully, jail breaking isn't an onerous task and then iOS is as malleable as any other operating system. Mac OS X is nothing if not flexible - I can do everything on my OS X machine that I can do on Linux (and more than I can on Windows, at least as far as my non gamer needs are concerned), but not everything I can do on OS X can be achieved as easily on Linux. So why do I have Linux? Two reasons. 1. I like it, and as a geek I see it as in my interest to be as informed as possible on the OS's that are currently available. 2. I can run Linux on relatively cheap, commodity hardware. The Porsche is nice, but sometimes the VW makes more sense.
Also, because Mac OS X is Unix (it really is, I promise you), its relatively easy to port between it and Linux (depending, of course, on the APIs that one chooses to develop with). That's very valuable to me.
I don't get the OPs point about Windows updating at the worst possible time, but I do prefer being able to defer updates as I can on Linux or Mac OS.
You are deliberately conflating Mac OS X, which is a desktop OS, with GNU/Linux, which is a kernel and collection of userland tools. XNU (X is Not Unix) , which is the underlying kernel and userland tools for OS X is a fully certified POSIX compliant UNIX. The only thing that is really missing is a built-in ports system, but Homebrew and MacPorts go someway to make up for that.
UNIX was never about software "freedom" (although, neither is the FSF - the GPL is handcuffware masquerading as libre. Use Apache, BSD or MIT if you are really interested in freedom and not just Stallman's warped interpretation). It was proprietary to begin with, hence GNU. UNIX is just a collection of tools that makes an OS. GNU/Hurd was Stallman's attempt at creating his version of it. It remains unfinished largely through his inability to lead a project adequately. GNU/Linux is the same, but fortunately had Torvald's drive to succeed.
"""If you are the least bit creative, you will find the FSF has put barriers in your way and you will find the F/LOSS user community belittling you and what you want to do.""" TFTFY.
"""MacOS is not Unix. Neither is PhoneOS.""" You are right, but fucked if I know what PhoneOS is, do you mean iOS? As I already said, XNU, the kernel that powers both is is fully certified, POSIX compliant UNIX. So in many ways, you wrong. As ever, you won't let facts get in the way of your blind zealotry.
The GPL limits you from putting limits on other people. It prevents the situation where slight obvious enhancements to a BSD-licensed item are copyrighted or patented by someone, restricting its further usability.
That stunt hasn't happened yet,as OS X is not an example, sin the post-GPL era, but before the Free Software movement I think there were some cautionary examples; think of how Macsyma nearly disappeared until Maxima came along.
I'm not saying the GPL is perfect; certainly the LGPL can be too restrictive for its intended purpose.
Apple and Linux representing diametrically opposed design philosophies
Exactly that. Linux carries on the free and open aspect of Unix history, while Apple carries on the parts with all the litigation over copyrights, trademarks and such. OK, so the latter isn't actually anything to do with Unix as such, but it's a problem that has dogged Unix-like systems ever since people realised that it is actually valuable. At least Linux (and I guess the free BSDs to a lesser degree) managed to make most of the legal wranglings moot, apart from the SCO issue.
Apple is a tightly-controlled highly focused walled garden that seeks to maximize a positive user experience and (as a happy side consequence) Apple profits. Linux is a highly variegated garden meadow that seeks to maximize end user freedom and choice and lower the barrier for creating radical new products.
So while they both use Unix-like technology, the underlying philosophy of the two is polar opposite - hence the 'war' (to use your term).
Well, why is there a "war" between Windows and Linux? After all, it is now known that Windows uses some code from BSD, just as Darwin does.
The point is that despite Wine, Windows software can't be relied upon to run on a Linux machine - and Macintosh software doesn't run on Linux machines either, because the GUI does have its own API, which figures prominently in applications. They run different applications, so they are different platforms.
Since the Macintosh operating system is owned by Apple, if you need to use a Macintosh, you are less free in some senses than if you could use Linux instead. The trouble is, though, that you're still more free in other senses if you use Windows, since that's what most of the applications are being written for.
In the case of Windows 8 you can blame some of the "not working" on the buggy, incomplete software that is Windows 8[...]
Say what you want about the lack of usability (or lack of familiarity) of the new interface, but it works the way it was designed to, and it doesn't crash. I'm running 8 Pro on an older Core2 with an Intel-made motherboard without difficulty. Mind you, I don't buy garbage hardware with unsigned drivers.
By contrast, I know someone having issues running it on an AMD 8-core beast on some ASRock board, which I suspect is coming from cooling problems, or a flaky power supply, or something else while she renders HD video. My poky Core2 can render HD video painfully slow, but successfully.
Ya need 2.5 hours uptime (or better) to "safely" record your "45 minute event" by someone with the discipline to read the manual of the said camera, and computer[s], that gives you time to zoom in out, otf fx, and dump a copy somewhere. Don't matter if it's miniDV or DSLR or MIXING BOARD or which software .. as long as you focus on the task. So I rightfully don't give a fuck if it's a tablet, rack or low volt dc hack as long as it works every time consistently in this increasingly inconsistently fucked up world. I think I screwed that up...
Now other people have their way of looking at stuff, but that's MY way.
Anything substantial I do in Android, whether it is moving files with 'Root Explorer', making a User app into a Systems app by shifting it from /data/app to /system/app, or managing permissions, everything substantive is Linux. I use 'Terminal' for nandroid backup. I use 'Terminal' to run 'top' or any one of dozens of familiar utilities. It is just that the average user is content to ignore the operating system entirely, and backup is left to the geeks amongst us... (same as windows users in that way).
I vote ya up I agree backups. CLONE I say. Think NOAH . Buy TWO of everything hardware. 1 TB drive = 2 ea 1 TB drives, and so on... all the way to the main board and PSU! Whatever you get into you will be a force to be reckoned with. Clone your OS and apps to the OS drive and CLONE your data to the data drive, Get one of those sliding rack things like ICYDOCK.
Then place your shit in the vault. locked up. SAFE.
that's MY way.
Sorry guys, but the article is spot on. Linux Desktop is a bit of a dog (regardless of UI), and Windows Tablet failed for 10 years before MS re-imagined a tablet - with a desktop UI again, and the most ludicrous thing is that MS in their enormous wisdom market the Surface as a tablet with a keyboard!!
A pure Linux distro tablet will get no further than where the desktop versions have got, which is practically no where.
At the risk of bringing a whole ton of wrath down on my head, Ubuntu is beautiful. I don't like the Amazon integration, so I turned that off (it could have been done elegantly too - I don't know why canonical didn't). There are a few little other nits I could pick - but no more so than with any other OS. So no, Linux desktop is not necessarily a dog. There are beautiful distros out there.
"A pure Linux distro tablet will get no further than where the desktop versions have got, which is practically no where."
Read the rest of the comments re. what Linux actually is and then realise that there is no such thing as a "pure Linux distro", anything that uses Linux as the kernel is a Linux distro, whether it be a on a tablet, desktop or embedded device, it cannot be more pure than that.
Do One thing well?
I don't know what books you read, or systems you worked with --- but this is not so. The *nix philosophy was to do lots of things well, for lots of people, all at what they perceive to be the same time, without any of those processes interfering with each other or being allowed to bring the whole machine to a halt.
I guess what you are thinking of is the collection of individual tools, each of which does its job well --- but the idea is not to use them one at a time, but to pipe the output of one as the input of another. Thus a complex process an be achieved without having to build all its components from scratch. Is this so far removed from connecting a keyboard, a tablet and a mouse?
The transformer concept might work for me (if I was buying myself a cristmas gadget, which I didn't this year) because you don't need a keyboard to watch a film, listen to music, or even for most internet browsing, but it certainly comes in handy for writing letters or making spreadsheets.
Likewise, if you then want to play a game, you add a joystick. Make music? Add a MIDI adaptor. Illustrate a document? Add a graphics tablet. Make an audit of your warehouse's stock? A barcode or RFID reader. Survey a construction site? A laser range-finder.
For many tasks, a computer with a keyboard is no more useful than a computer without a keyboard, if you don't have the input device you need. (Though of course many applications benefit from some kind of text entry, if only for changing file names or adding notes)
Troll. That said, if one uses Windows for their productivity apps and general faffing around on the internet, than it's not a bad idea to have a Linux installed for online banking and purchases- there would just be fewer opportunities for it to contract a nasty, regardless of any security advantages it might have. And of course, you can use it as a recovery environment for your Windows installation too.
Linux distros will hopefully still prove to be a valid choice for many a year to come. The form factor is irrelevant. Laptops have overtaken desktops, Tablets may be overtaking laptops, but the things we have lost in the name of portability and tiny-shiny are no less necessary, so there are still desktops.
The future of Linux is ARM.
The king has spoken.
I was reading a recent interesting article on Tom's Hardware the other day... comparing Intel's new Atom chip to ARM competitors... the gist is that "In general, our analysis suggests that the ARM-based CPU core is excellent at doing nothing, but starts to require considerably more power during computationally-intensive workloads.
"The secret of Atom’s power efficiency is simple. The CPU's handicap at idle is overcome under load, when work is actually being performed, and by a more efficient memory subsystem that is always active. Although Intel continues to use branding many enthusiasts associate with underpowered computing and graphics in cheap netbooks, the Z2760 is a different chip than the N450 so many of us remember."
- http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/atom-z2760-power-consumption-arm,review-32593-5.html
But we already knew intel chips are better if you are loading them up with work to do.
Just as many people realised that they didn't need the power of a desktop and bought less-capable laptops to gain the benefit of portability, so most people don't need fast phones & tablets, they really need devices which can last longer while doing very little.
It isn't a question of "good" or "bad" its a question of "appropriate."
The whole fondle tablet format eludes me a bit. To me they all just seem like beefed up media players with a webbrowser. Oh and you can play games on them.. hacking fruit or something that keeps your hands busy.
However, using a pen you can shrink the clumsy keyboard and best of all use it to draw. Second gen OCR seems quite decent too, with fast enough processors to handle it at decent speed. If only the Samsung Note 10.1 would run a full fledged Linux so I could use my drawing apps on that, it would actually be useful. Yeah,.. you can jailbreak it and run Linux on Android, but I'm not sure how well that works.
But indeed, it's about the GUI and the input method. As long as none of the manufacturers get the bright idea to break out of the bloody smudge mode and finger paint methods and add a more flexible OS variant to that it will always be a bit of a toy. The technology is there,.. now all we'd need is someone to put it together.
"The whole fondle tablet format eludes me a bit. To me they all just seem like beefed up media players..."
...which is a bit like saying that magazines don't make any sense; they just seem like beefed up post-it pads. They're entirely different sets of functionality. A media player makes for a lousy way to read the news; tablets are excellent for it. A media player is a crappy thing to do a quick sketch on; tablets are quite good at it. A media player is useless at anything requiring more than one person to see what you're doing - tablets are very good at it (as an example, I've seen teachers at my son's daycare place using tablets to help communicate with disabled kids - who can touch icons for food or the bathroom or whatever).
Tablets, it turns out, are actually good for lots of stuff; the fact that you either can't think of any applications offhand doesn't mean there aren't any.
Not in an accusatory way, but genuinely - have you ever used a tablet much? My dad was an extreme skeptic, a bit like you, but got a Nexus 10 for the hell of it (Must be nice, moneybags...) and was converted within a few days. And he's 71 and is an engineer who considers video games to be useless...
From experience as a home 'luser' Ubuntu does it 'out of the box', when you have sorted the screen resolution problem. Other things may vary and will be available from elsewhere.
I get... and... and...
Plus, and I will not guarantee this, whatever I wish to do on this Linux/Ubuntu [other distro] install as a 'home luser' is miles above what other bloke experiences via XP beyond moaning that it is 'slow'.
Now shaft me for the first paragraph but when I ask the Evil One called Google about how to do stuff with my Ubuntu Flavoured 'Linux' computer, I get.. as top results assuming I parse it correctly, useful advice. Don't forget.. I am a 'home luser'.
I will state, as fact, that anyone, home luser, using Windows making a similar search will end up installing shedloads of cruftware on their computer before they reach Microsofts answer... which will not make sense to them anyway and will break itself whilst trying to reinstall IE8.
Sometime in between, along with the multiple toolbars, they will have installed TeamViewer, and gifted $50 to someone else, twice using a valid credit card number, to sort stuff out for them. These people will fuck things over for return business and have the 419 department call you up later.
Otherwise.. I know nothing beyond Linux Makes Sense for Home Users.
..I almost bought an android tablet this year, but I really wanted Linux I bought a beat up toshiba portege m750 for 100quid instead, and it is ace with fedora on it, touch screen and all . I tried Ubunut first thinking the Unity interface would be perfect on a touchscreen, but weirdly it was just as shit as it is on a regular desktop. So there you go -standard gnome 3 flavoured Fedora on a touchscreen enabled laptop ftw.
Really I don't. What I want is a touch-centric version of the Adobe Creative Suite on a tablet, and a reasonable way to get the photos and video from my camera to the tablet. That's all. Within reasonable constraints, it doesn't even matter what OS the tablet runs, because pretty much any commercial OS has the other stuff that most people use. Or, as was once said in XKCD, "since you do everything through a browser now, we're pretty much indistinguishable". All that's missing are the tools I actually need to get my work done. Once that happens, I'll dump the Windows laptop and never look back.
But the tablet-centric tools are toys, designed to spiff up photos taken with the tablet's built-in camera, not for serious use. All those neat ads and demos you see of someone editing and integrating media entirely on touch,,,, yeah, that doesn't exist yet. And the companies that could bring us that, don't really seem to be serious about touch.
It's really not about the OS (although I have misgivings about Win8) it's about the applications. A killer tablet app, truly killer, that's designed from the ground up with touch in mind, will make whatever OS it runs on the winner in the tablet world.
I don't care if it's IOS, Android or Linux. I care a little whether it's "windows 7 tablet edition" (I own a win7 tablet, it really REALLY sucks) or "Windows 8" (really tried to make it work, gave up in frustration) but for the most part, it's the applications, not the OS, that should be interesting to content creators.
for the fact that I can use it on the go as an Android tablet with touch and then boot into Linux and use it with a keyboard and mouse.
The normal tablet is insufficient for more sophisticated computing work. There are apps for editing photos, audio and video but these are basic but for fine-tuning, precise cutting or cropping, professional colour tuning, full-blown movies with credits, subtitles, transitions, to name a few, the tablet is not the place to do this type of work.
Having said this though, a tablet running Linux will be a bit under-powered for the moment, until processors and hardware on tablets advance further bringing their hardware configuration closer to higher-end PCs. With 1G ram, the PengPod is very useable on the desktop. I am still using some single-core PCs with 1G to 1.5G ram running Ubuntu or Linux Mint smoothly and quickly (using about 250Mb ram after boot-up).
So, yes, a tablet that can boot into the Linux desktop will be a welcome addition. This probably explains why in about 21 days from about $14,000 the deveopers received a storm of pledges raising their total to over $70,000 by the time the deadline came (their target was $49,000).
If you read the comments, the donors (or buyers) do really want a tablet that combines Android and the Linux desktop. Note also many have ordered, or even separately, the keyboard case. I already have one and have found it surprisingly effective and comfortable despite its size (7-inch) and my size (6-foot-2). I even tried connecting a mouse along with the keyboard and this works too, albeit only on Android. So, I am looking forward to the Linux desktop on a mobile tablet because I can type fast and point and click quickly without swiping. Don't forget there are also keyboard shortcuts and copy-and-pasting is a lot faster, speeding up work (e.g. writing a novel on the go).
I do believe that the Linux desktop on the tablet will prove popular.
One thing that has worried me a little regarding the future for Linux is that it has piggy backed on windows to a large degree since that is where the massive market is and hence has driven the development of pc hardware - something that may not happen in future if the pc market disappears.
However, thanks to this article I have now heard of the pengpod, and indeed the guide to installing Ubuntu on nexus 7.
It's not Linux in the sense of mint or ubuntu per se that I want. It's the freedom to play
"Linux .. has piggy backed on windows to a large degree since that is where the massive market is and hence has driven the development of pc hardware "
Misinterpretation of history.
Wintel has held back the development of mobile and volume computing. If it's not authorised by Microsoft and Intel, it isn't permitted to be made/sold in volume, Look at the original non-Wintel netbooks. They started to sell in volume, so the spin machine had to be set to 11 ("lots of people returning them") and the commercial blackmail had to be started up - MS revived a "dead" OS, Windows XP, so that the Wintel vendors could be "encouraged" to stop making/selling non-Wintel stuff that punters actually quite liked.
That game works for a little while but sooner or later the pent-up demand for an alternative to Windows becomes irresistible. If we're not there yet, we will be soon. Even when that happens, there will still be a market for Wintel PCs - but it will be a tiny market in comparison with what has been seen in the last decade or two.
Anything innovative in mobile or volume computing in the last few years has probably been Linux/ARM based.
Most people buying non Windows Netbooks wiped the OS and installed pirated Microsoft OSs on them - they just wanted to not pay for windows (but still use it!)
Microsoft have made that a lot more difficult with Windows RT, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 - all of which are so far uncracked in terms of the DRM used to control licensing....and as far as i am aware - Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 are totally uncracked - you cant even get admin acccess. Unlike other UNIX based rivals that have more holes than Swiss Cheese....
...if MeeGo, Mer, Sailfish, or Tizen were widely available on tablets. But the fact that these different projects have divided possible interest has delayed the hope that a version of Linux with a tablet GUI and access to most Linux applications might become easily available on tablets.
> the hope that a version of Linux with a tablet GUI and access to most Linux applications might become easily available on tablets.
Linux/Maemo tablets were available for several years in the Nokia N770, N800, N810 and N900. These ran Linux software such as Gnumeric, Abiword and even OpenOffice. With Python/Glade/GTK+ I could write applications that ran unchanged on these and on Linux and Windows.
The reason for the awkward user experience on these Windows tablets is that so many of the nice user interface features you see on iPads and Android tablets are patented by Apple and Oracle, and Microsoft wants to avoid paying royalties.
Even tapping a phone number in a text or email address to call that number is patented by Apple. The curved rectangle is patented, as is the unique pop-up keyboard. There are hundreds of patents. No thanks to Apple, it's a legal mess to enter the tablet market!
They need to run with a transparent keyboard (adjustable transparency with a wheel button) that sends keypresses through when it is being pressed (with said wheel button). Click on text field etc. and keyboard inhabits full screen of tablet at say 75% or a transparency based on display image intensity (e.g. if the keyboard is created with white icons, then it is less transparent with a light display image in the background). You can scroll the wheel button to adjust right away or even turn it off immediately if you don't need to type, and then depress this same wheel button as you type onscreen to have the keystrokes register as opposed to other touchscreen gestures.
Tablets are hysterical. Anyone who would prefer a tablet to a netbook is certifiable. Of course, those who were raised to use touchpads instead of a mouse might find the touchscreen useful, but that is because they have been using retard technology.
I have two "tablets", one apple and one android. Going to toss them out of the house, into the trash..
I'd love to be able to run a native version of linux straight on a tablet. You'd simply have it installed, and have 2 usernames, one which boots to the desktop (properly will be mostly used at home, when installing or upgrading software) and another username which auto starts a media center application like XMBC. Most people use windows because they can't be bothered learning how to install software on Linux, granted its getting easier with the use of kpackage and the like, but if you need anything which isn't on the distro server can sometime just be damned... this will be the reason why if linux was an option for an OS on a tablet, most people would stick with Android.
So yea, there will never be a time of the linux tablet, but it would be nice to be given the option of installing it. I used to have the GP2X and loved it... thought I'd just add that.
The premiss of this article seems confused. We're not discussing Linux on tables as that has already happened. We're discussing Redhat and Canonical pulling a Microsoft and trying to foist a desktop UI onto touch devices whilst at the same time foisting touch UI's on to the desktop platform. Anyone that knows me knows that I'm not Android's biggest fan, but credit where it's due. Google along with their OEM partners have made extremely credible and useable consumer devices based on Linux, which is more that can be said for either Redhat or Canonical - and I like Ubuntu! Dismissing Android out of hand is, to be quite blunt, sensationalist. It's a disappointing start to the new year El Reg.
Putting a linux kernel into a linux distro makes it a Linux, putting a linux kernel under a java VM doesn't.
You put a car engine into a car chasis and then you get a car. Trying to call Android a Linux is like putting a car enging into a speedboat chasis and then trying to call it a car. It just makes no sense.
> is like putting a car enging into a speedboat chasis and then trying to call it a car. It just makes no sense.
It is your analogy that makes no sense. It is not the engine that makes it a car, it is the chassis. 'Car' is short for 'carriage'. A 'car' is defined by having wheels (3 or 4 or infrequently more) and is for personal transport so it has seats and usually some form of weather protection.
A car can be powered by an engine: steam, electric or petrol; or by horses. Having one or the other does not stop it being a car. Boats also can be powered by these.
So to make an analogy: it is the chassis that is Linux; it is the engine that is the graphics engine (Qt, GTK, etc) and there are controls that are the UI (KDE, Gnome, etc).
A 'speedboat chassis' may analogized to being QNX and you could put a petrol engine (Android) in that and still call it a boat. A barge (SCOUnix) may be steam powered (GTK - Gnome) and would still be a barge.
So, if SCOUnix runs KDE it is not Linux. If Windows run KDE (which can be done) it is not Linux. If Android graphics engine/UI/App environment runs on Linux it _is_ a Linux distro.
The point of the article is that the so-called "Linux" app ecosystem and APIs (GTK, KDE, Qt, D-bus, Gstreamer, glibc, gcc toolchain) are not readily available on a tablet format. App programmers couldn't care less about the kernel, users same-o same-o. Any GUI or API can run on any kernel, given enough elbow grease.
Android can't be "Linux" for the effect of this discussion because it has a totally different toolchain and APIs over the kernel when compared to "desktop Linux". Not only iOS is a BSD "Unix", but WebOS was Linux, and Android would be Linux. But only Maemo (and Moblin) ever used desktop Linux distro's toolkits, APIs and toolchains.
Tablets are generally used -- at least, by non-techies -- as though they were limited-purpose appliances. Sure, I find it nice to have ConnectBot so I can play an MP3 on the RaspberryPi plugged into my stereo, but -- as anyone will tell you, if you haven't already figured it out -- I'm not most people.
Most people just use the applications that come pre-installed on their tablet. They don't really care too much about the underlying operating system, as long as there is an application store where they can install a few new levels for Angry Birds or whatever the latest and greatest new game is.
Usual lousy car analogy: Most people don't muck about with their engine or transmission. The enthusiasts who do the serious modding are really passionate about it; but most people really only care that they can buy the correct fuel, and don't do much customisation beyond adding ornaments.
* DOBO = Department of the Bleeding Obvious
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