251–260 of 347 posts
Why did they have to use a micro HDMI port? Couldn't they have done dual USB-C and made one the DisplayPort output? MicroHDMI is not a very nice connector, it's a lot of pins under mechanical stress from the heavy, rigid HDMI people generally attach to it.
Probably due to cheapening out a few dollars on the BOM, not a great sign to be honest.
A bit ago I did a bit of an experiment with an old surface tablet, where I threw some linux distros at it to see what the experience was. I tried Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Fedora, and all were extremely janky to downright broken. On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland, with some apps like Firefox just not popping it open, to others ignoring input. X had trouble with screen rotation. Fedora wouldn't let me p…
The OSK pops up when I need to. There is a Gnome extension to make it work better like adding ctrl, alt and cursor keys for instance.
I also use Gnome extension to force apps to open maximized.
I use it primarily as a tablet at home and a travel laptop for work. I am quite enamored with it.
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What's the practical difference? With USB-C there's power delivery. DisplayPort has..?
> DisplayPort has..? Consistently good colors. Sometimes even PC monitors won't negotiate properly with the PC and start displaying washed out colors. IIRC this had to be forced on a Raspberry Pi on the PI side. Not all monitors can be adjusted. Consistently no under/overscan. For some reason, the TVs we had in conference rooms figured it would be smart to cut the borders of the image and zoom in, so you get missing…
I've only encountered overscan on TVs not monitors, but I don't give conference room presentations, which would be very annoying. On Macs there compensation for that.
I've had trouble with colors where it uses YPbPr rather than RGB, but that seems to be an Apple thing where it's done on purpose for non-Apple-approved displays and it happens for both HDMI and DP. Generating a custom EDID profile fixes that. Can't recall having trouble with color range, sometimes the display has a setting but the default always looked better to me.
I've used 4k@60 HDMI just fine (and 4k@30 on an early Apple adapter), but more often use 1080p anyway. I use USB-C with my 4k displays which likely runs DP on them.
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Drew Devault (Sway and Sourcehut guy) wrote this on his experience with Linux phones: https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/16/Mobile-linux-retrospectiv... tldr: it works and it's great, but it's not reliable in phone/SMS in the way a phone needs to be reliable.
I've been using the Nokia N9 and some of the Jolla Sailfish offspring to this day. The phone part has been very reliable. The rest of the ecosystem is very minimal, almost non-existent, but I can't complain about the basic phone functionality. With these ARM-style devices that are quite closed down and need their own respective device tree, mass adoption seems a requirement for a company and ecosystem to hit critical…
I would gladly switch back to a Linux phone if it had reasonable battery life and good support for the modern assortment of at least the open messaging protocols. (Obviously things like Discord are out of the question, but SMS/XMPP/Matrix?)
A bit ago I did a bit of an experiment with an old surface tablet, where I threw some linux distros at it to see what the experience was. I tried Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Fedora, and all were extremely janky to downright broken. On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland, with some apps like Firefox just not popping it open, to others ignoring input. X had trouble with screen rotation. Fedora wouldn't let me p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the practical difference? With USB-C there's power delivery. DisplayPort has..?
> DisplayPort has..? Consistently good colors. Sometimes even PC monitors won't negotiate properly with the PC and start displaying washed out colors. IIRC this had to be forced on a Raspberry Pi on the PI side. Not all monitors can be adjusted. Consistently no under/overscan. For some reason, the TVs we had in conference rooms figured it would be smart to cut the borders of the image and zoom in, so you get missing…
As someone who gave the JingPad a spin, the Linux tablet market has been painfully difficult to pull off. At least this is based on Intel, ensuring that if the company goes belly up, it can be used for something other than a mirror.
IIRC, Ubuntu Touch has been ported to the JingPad, so there is one supported OS option.
I wrote a whole thing about this about eight months ago: https://tedium.co/2022/11/30/fydetab-duo-jingpad-comparison/
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The DE itself, yes. This is true of GNOME as well once the hidden setting is enabled. Unfortunately there's still individual programs which don't behave correctly, which for now means that 1x or 2x displays are still best if a trouble-free, low-tinkering experience is the goal.
The GNOME setting is not hidden anymore, fractional scaling seems to be a first class citizen now.
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> DisplayPort has..? Consistently good colors. Sometimes even PC monitors won't negotiate properly with the PC and start displaying washed out colors. IIRC this had to be forced on a Raspberry Pi on the PI side. Not all monitors can be adjusted. Consistently no under/overscan. For some reason, the TVs we had in conference rooms figured it would be smart to cut the borders of the image and zoom in, so you get missing…
Ok so that sounds like DP has better negotiation protocol spec and/or implementations. I've only encountered overscan on TVs not monitors, but I don't give conference room presentations, which would be very annoying. On Macs there compensation for that. I've had trouble with colors where it uses YPbPr rather than RGB, but that seems to be an Apple thing where it's done on purpose for non-Apple-approved displays and i…
Right. So... DP is better than HDMI?
The color issue I had was not with a Mac but with an HP laptop on an HP monitor. My understanding is that there's something about "broadcast colors" or something, which is "regular" RGB only with a narrower range. I think the PC thought the monitor was a TV with a limited range, which the monitor was not.
With the TVs I plug into, it's usually harder to judge since their color rendition tends to be all over the place anyway and tend to have the reverse issue (too much contrast).
I remember the overscan control on the mac, but it still was a PITA to have to fiddle with that instead of, you know, just plugging the screen in and being in business.
While I've also had numerous positive experiences with HDMI where things seemingly "just worked", I've never had an issue with DP. It always worked. Hell, even my gaming GPU, which came out a while after HDMI 2, and supported it out of the box, connected to my monitor with full HDMI 2 support, still has weird colors compared to DP. No tweaking in the AMD drivers managed to get me the proper output, so I went and bought a cheap Chinese DP KVM instead. Which worked with no fuss.
All this makes me automatically pick DP if given the choice, and discount any computer or screen that only does HDMI. Which makes it pretty tough to buy a TV, so I just watch movies on my computer monitor.
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Star Labs is trustworthy (typing this on a Star Labs StarLike Mk IV right now), but small hardware brand. They're based in the UK.
What’s your experience with StarLite IV? I’m thinking about buying it for heavy note taking - neovim/obsidian/browser (Google docs and excalidraw). What battery life I can expect? Is keyboard nice to type? Is stuff like sleep, Wi-Fi auto connect and bluetooth headphones really solved?