• twolate@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • darq@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        It depends.

        You can basically always use the crappy ones made for general touchscreens to replicate your finger. You can’t use a real one with features like Apple Pencil/surface pen/wacom without an extra layer built into the screen to recognize them.

        • twolate@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            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 :)

    • penguin@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year 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.

      • monotrox@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • ditty@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Treedav@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • penguin@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Camilo@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          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

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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…

              • holland@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  GTK is one of the very few touch friendly toolkits on *nixen. And neither of those apps were ever GTK.

                  Of course they were never on GTK because at that time GTK was absolutely useless for anything touch and it didn’t really change until libhandy became libadwaita and kinda-sorta became aligned with GTK but is also not part of GTK proper. Gimp is not touch-friendly. Modern Krita somewhat is, Krita Gemini totally was.

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

      • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        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?

      • Treedav@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • SoManyChoices@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

                • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

  • RockyC@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • ThyTTY@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • dona1dquixote@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It seems like Star Labs is pivoting away from making superheroes and finally decided to use their technology more responsibly!

  • Twashe@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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

      • Twashe@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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

        • withtheband@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • peotr26@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • raptir@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • RotatingParts@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • arthurpizza@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Same here. I’ve got Debian stable on a Dell Latitude 2-in1 (can’t remember the model number) and it works great with Gnome and I can flip the keyboard backwards and use it like a tablet. Although it is bulkier because it has a keyboard attached.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • KrapKake@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Great RAM and SSD, but at the cost of a quad core processor at 1Ghz. Still, I’d consider it a bargain, especially at 500 with the keyboard, as it is right now.

  • lvl@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Very appealing for a travel device running a Linux kernel. On the product page, they also mention Open Warranty, which makes me believe it will be easily serviceable - this would be a big plus, especially for a travel tablet, being able to switch the disk easily.

    • wispydust@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Gnome is not so bad. It has a decent on screen keyboard that’s very useable. I occasionally use it on my Dell 2-in-1 laptop.

  • frankfurt_schoolgirl [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.