I’m really excited about Linux tablets, but quite apprehensive about Purism as a company. Starlabs’ new tablet does also seem like a compelling package, luckily.
Purism’s corporate charter recognizes them as a social purpose corporation, it sounds very good in theory, but I think it’s been a struggle for them to pull off. Under this charter they’re supposed to value creating products and services that benefit society more than simply making profits. Unfortunately, I think being so idealistic has caused them to over promise and under deliver, as was the case with the Librem 5 phone imo.
In addition to what the other commenter said: AFAIK Starlabs is the only Europe based manufacturer that makes their own Linux based laptops (non Clevo/similar computers). I personally don’t have any experience with their stuff though, but I’ve never heard similar complaints about them that are levelled at Purism.
Yeah, that’s generally the idea behind Pine64 devices. Also note that they encourage you not to order if you expect refunds for issues like broken pixels.
True. I just wanted to add that comment just because the other poster make it sounds like PineTab2 is an alternative for Purism tablet - which is competing with iPads and Android tablet. It gave me false hope for a moment until I searched some reviews online and see it is a totally different device category.
So I just replied to clarify just in case other people got the false impression too.
Correct. They used an old Android wifi/BT chip that had a driver for an old kernel, but it tends to run slow and crash on the newest kernels. The devs are working on wifi first and then will start doing the others.
Another Linux tablet is definitely good news. I like Purism’s stated values and their laptops are very solid, the Librem phone was a disappointment for me personally though.
the low power cpu bottleneck for nvme drives is pretty intense from what I know. These specs, to me, look like the equivalent of a tech youtuber just throwing together random hardware into a case to make a build video because it’s a slow week for content.
I just received mine after waiting 3+ years actually. It is pretty sweet with waydroid and KDE connect. I’m still not daily driving it because of the lack of a maps application with navigation though.
On Sailfish OS I used to use Pure Maps, which seems to be available on Flathub. I don’t know if it works on the Librem 5 though, but you might want to give it a try? There’s also an optional dependency for offline maps.
Oh yeah, I saw this on Ubuntu touch also. I’ll see if I can get the flathub repo loaded in. That will certainly increase the variety in apps I can use!
From what I understand, the RISC-V ecosystem is not polished enough yet, so the state of PineTab-V roughly represents the state of the entire platform for desktop Linux.
As much as I like the idea behind Pine64, make sure you understand what you're doing - their devices usually need some time before they're useful, they might underperform, etc.
On the other hand, they're usually priced well for what they offer, and I think the ARM model of new PineTab might look better than their usual new offerings. Make sure to find out, how polished it is before you buy.
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