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StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

us.starlabs.systems

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Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#261

Post by iiiieu »

YoshiRulz wrote: post #180
Osiris wrote: post #69

No one has mentioned the 2880x1920 resolution display. That’s fantastic I’m this price range. $500 laptops are (nearly?) impossible to find with displays above 1080p.

A friend of mine recently (2019 or '20) bought a laptop, new, with a 768p LCD display. It's ridiculous. In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display, and it was 5" so it had a high pixel density too! Why does it feel like consumer electronics are going backwards?

Perhaps because people realized that the pixel inflation is at some point counterproductive. If you can't distinguish pixels, what difference does it make?

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#262

Post by mhitza »

urduntupu wrote: post #186

Is this any good for regular full stack programming, running a couple of docker containers?

Yes, performance is very close to i5-8250U ( https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3042vs5178/Intel-i5-825... ), which was release at the end of 2017. I have this in my laptop that I use for work, VM's, IDEs and containers are running all the time on my system.

Works great, even if I have all CPU mitigations enabled, turbo boosting disabled, and running in powersave mode. What I do to avoid the fan from getting audible. However, with all the options I mentioned enable (especially enforcing a strict powersave profile/max frequency/etc) you'll get a bit of latency here and there; which I can put up with because I hate to hear the fans spin. With a fanless design, a better power profile (6W TDP vs 15W TDP), I wouldn't constrict my CPU to such extents.

To compare it in relative performance terms, the Apple M1 is ~3.8x times more performant than it (if that helps).

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#263

Post by rollcat »

smcleod wrote: post #88
eternityforest wrote: post #15

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.

I haven't seen one of those in many many years! I wish HDMI in general would die and let displayport take it place.

> I wish HDMI in general would die and let displayport take it place.

That would be an interesting thing for the video production industry. Basically the entire market is divided between "professional" equipment, in which SDI continues to dominate (with some movement towards SMPTE 2110 aka IP), and "amateur" equipment which is all HDMI - with very few products on the boundary and supporting both connectors.

Consumer grade digital cameras have only recently (10 years, maybe less) started being able to output the live video feed over HDMI. Before that, believe me or not I've stumbled upon MANY camera models from 2013 or before that had an HDMI port, but all it was good for was displaying pictures from the memory card on a TV.

It would certainly make life easier in a lot of "small streamer" setups. Currently, if you don't want to torture your camera's battery, you need to get a silly (often third-party) "dummy battery" that you can (hopefully!) plug into an ordinary USB power supply; and on top of that, a separate mini/micro HDMI -> full HDMI cable to plug into a capture card. If you could reduce that to a single USB-C with PD and DP - trust me, every silly cable you can eliminate from your setup is an enormous win.

Even better, if these cameras could talk the regular USB "webcam" protocol in addition to DP, eliminating the capture card for the overwhelmingly common setup of "I just want to look very good on video calls".

But that opens a can of worms: in any non-trivial setup, a camera (one camera) is merely a small piece of a much more elaborate puzzle. Even seemingly simple setups end up converting the signal back&forth between some crazy stuff. On one job, we needed to run an SDI or HDMI cable between the floors, but couldn't do either because the building was untouchable; so we've used a couple of HDMI -> HDBaseT converters to run the signal over existing Ethernet cables. Turns out, it was no longer possible to convert the resulting HDMI signal again to SDI (we've tried many converters, all failed), which limited our choice of video mixers. Would the signal make it through if it originated as DP? Your guess is as good as mine.

Broadcast is a strange place. I still laugh whenever I think of Quad-SDI; only the broadcast industry could ever come up with that. Things need to work with one another and even if every single person in the world agreed that HDMI must die, starting today, I'm fairly certain we'd still see new equipment being made in 2033 that supports it.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#264

Post by paulcarroty »

resonious wrote: post #116
PrivateButts wrote: post #98

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…

I suspect this is largely because the Microsoft Surface products contain a lot of proprietary hardware components that aren't not well supported by the kernel. KDE and friends have pretty good touch screen support, but it's all for naught if you have no drivers.

> Microsoft Surface products contain a lot of proprietary hardware components that aren't not well supported by the kernel

and not repairable at all as Surface itself, being honest.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#265

Post by kposehn »

As a long time iPad user I’m apprehensive. As others have noted, Linux based touch experiences have so far been lacking.

That said, I love the thought of it. I’ve recently started using my iPad Pro as my daily driver (replacing a Mac Studio M1 Ultra no less) and haven’t looked back. The only gripe with iPadOS is it took me a while to get a smooth vscode setup for development - having that be easier out of the box with the StarLite is quite appealing.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#266

Post by bogle »

hereonout2 wrote: post #230
non-nil wrote: post #226

Just received notification and went to order. Shipping to my location (Nordic region) turned out to be expensive enough that I’ll have to pass on this for now and live with older hardware for a while yet. Too bad!

The keyboard is also extra, which bumps the price up to more than I originally thought. Biggest downside is a 3-4 month lead time though, I'm too impatient for that unfortunately, especially given this would be a bit of a punt for me.

And you'll need the keyboard if you want BIOS passwords or full disk encryption. No OSK or bluetooth keyboard will be available until you're past those.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#267

Post by AlecSchueler »

YoshiRulz wrote: post #180
Osiris wrote: post #69

No one has mentioned the 2880x1920 resolution display. That’s fantastic I’m this price range. $500 laptops are (nearly?) impossible to find with displays above 1080p.

A friend of mine recently (2019 or '20) bought a laptop, new, with a 768p LCD display. It's ridiculous. In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display, and it was 5" so it had a high pixel density too! Why does it feel like consumer electronics are going backwards?

What was the laptop?

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#268

Post by kimbernator »

lproven wrote: post #192
dheera wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB-C is equally bad. I really wish they would have the rubber housing of the USB-C go inside the case like an IEC power connector. I break about a USB-C cable every week. Broke one today just by putting it in my backpack while connected to a power brick. Power bricks of the 1990s didn't have this problem. The barrel connectors were almost indestructible. You could drop bricks on VGA connectors and they'd still work.

Wow. I have never yet broken a USB-C cable. Not one. When I used an iPhone for a couple of years, I went through approximately a Lightning cable per month, sometimes more. At one point I took a carrier bag of broken Lightning cables to the electronics recycling. You must treat equipment exceptionally roughly.

Yeah, I've never once seen a USB-C cable break in that the physical connector itself was damaged. I've been through plenty that just seem to stop reliably connecting if they are in high-motion environments (the cable connecting my phone to my car's entertainment system, for instance)

I will say that I really wish they had managed to not have that middle section sticking up in the female connectors - cleaning out my phone's USB-C port is about 20x harder than cleaning out a lighting port because I feel like I'm going to break that little thing in the middle.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#269

Post by kimbernator »

YoshiRulz wrote: post #180
Osiris wrote: post #69

No one has mentioned the 2880x1920 resolution display. That’s fantastic I’m this price range. $500 laptops are (nearly?) impossible to find with displays above 1080p.

A friend of mine recently (2019 or '20) bought a laptop, new, with a 768p LCD display. It's ridiculous. In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display, and it was 5" so it had a high pixel density too! Why does it feel like consumer electronics are going backwards?

I mean, yeah that resolution is ridiculous, but anything above 1080p on a screen less than ~14 inches is going to have diminishing returns and most of those returns will be in how "pretty" it is, not how useful it is.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#270

Post by unregistereddev »

bArray wrote: post #244

Reminds me of the Pine Tab (v1) with the contact pins at the bottom, fold-up keyboard, etc. Having an Intel processor would make me heaps more confident about good kernel support out of the box. The A64 by Pine is essentially abandoned for Linux kernel development. This device looks great, I would just take care expecting too much from that keyboard. It looks almost identical to the Pine Tab keyboard and that was not…

Sadly, Pine has a long history of using poorly-supported chipsets and doing nothing to improve support. I want to like the company, and their hardware designs show a lot of promise, but ultimately they do not stand behind their product.

It's truly a shame. Their products have potential and could build a huge hobbyist community behind them, but extremely few people have both the skills and the time to troubleshoot buggy kernel modules.

I agree that StarLite's Intel processor will probably work a lot better.

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