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StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

us.starlabs.systems

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Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#281

Post by ewoodrich »

MikusR wrote: post #129
mcny wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had USB 3 with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 in September 2013. It is now almost a decade. If rumors are true, Samsung will announce a USB 4 (thunderbolt 3) phone before the end of 2024. I agree with the grandparent. While most people don't care too much for eGPU (?), I'm sure if we let people innovate, good things will come. My dream is much smaller. I just want whatever hardware circuitry is required to accomplish t…

And it was so bad they went back to microusb on 4

All Galaxy S models were Micro USB until they switched to USB-C on the S8 series.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#282

Post by algas »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #210
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 just bought a ThinkPad X1 Tablet Gen 3. Everything works great, the on screen keyboard is actually functioning properly and appears on demand every time. Screen orientation is handled properly and promptly. The only let-down so far is battery life, but I need to make some adjustments to help there. I'm running the latest version of Fedora workstation, under wayland too. This thing is the only truly repairable table…

I love my X1 tablet gen 1, but I need to repair the screen on it. Not sure if it's still true for the gen 3, but the gen 1 had a lot of modular parts you could add, like an extra battery that also gives you an HDMI port. Plus, I had this ridiculously nice solid carrying case.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#283

Post by azangru »

schaefer wrote: post #237
azangru wrote: post #141

Has anyone tried their Starfighter? They've been selling it for about a year; but I have yet to see a proper review. Wait time of 4-5 months is a dealbreaker for me; but perhaps someone has gone through with it?

I haven't ordered or used a starfighter, but ages ago when the ryzen sku first went up I e-mailed the company. I was asking if they had any video of the removable camera being stowed in the base. I was having trouble imagining it. That video [1] was finally posted at the end of May. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tzeL2CJTd6g

Cool! Thank you for sharing the video. Such a strange design choice!

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#284

Post by dspillett »

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?

Looking for a laptop for my Dad more recently (early 2023) there were no models with less than 1080 that were not also incredibly crumby in other respects (dog slow eMMC drives, too little RAM to run current Windows well especially once it swaps to that slow drive, awful looking keyboards, etc.). We checked for lower resolution screens because with his eyes higher is pretty pointless (and it might have reduced the price) but went with 1080 and set it to be scaled in the OS.

> In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display

You can buy a full laptop fur a fair amount less than many phones with high-resolution screens though, possibly more so back then. What spec was his machine beyond the screen? Also: most people are closer to their phone screen in use than they are a laptop, perhaps making the case for higher resolutions there stronger.

Reliably producing those 720/768 displays at common laptop & tablet sizes was cheap so making laptops/tablets around them was cheap, and more than enough people thought it good enough (or didn't know better). Given our experience above, the economies of scale on 1080+ panels have changed such that the 1080 screens are in the sweet zone.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#285

Post by yencabulator »

tjoff wrote: post #149

Looks much better, and cheaper than I expected. Quality can't be fenomenal at that price point but it looks well thought out from the ground up. Impressive! And thank you for the 3:2 display aspect ratio Gonna keep an eye on this one.

I'm not really at all surprised by the price.

It's more expensive than the base level Steam Deck, which is also a Linux touchscreen tablet (with some extra input hardware...), and that's Zen 2, 16 GB RAM, GPU, etc though with smaller&worse screen. Adding a comparable 512 GB SSD to the Deck makes it $649, compare against StarLite's non-preorder $713 price.

A full Framework 13" laptop is $1049 and that's a hugely more powerful CPU etc.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#286

Post by Arnavion »

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…

To answer the general point first:

>I don't know how much touch screen only computers are considered during development of desktop environments and display servers

Phosh, Plasma Mobile and SXMO are DEs for phones and tablets, so they support touch fine. I run Phosh (also on pmOS) on my phone and have none of the problems you described. GNOME is also making its own GNOME Mobile.

---

Now, for your specific hardware: I don't know how old your "old surface tablet" is, but I run postmarketOS on the very first Surface RT and it works fine. It uses the kernel from [1] and requires a one-time semi-complicated procedure to bypass Secure Boot and switch away from Windows [2], and even then it has some issues with CPU scaling etc not supported. So I won't recommend it as a general-purpose Linux tablet, but it's good enough for what I use it for.

>On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland

It's a Tegra 3 chipset so I don't run a wayland compositor on it (it would need CPU rendering), just Xorg with i3. I haven't tried an OSK inside i3, but the OSK at boot time to enter the disk encryption password (unl0kr) works fine.

If you do run wayland, wayland-native programs should be able to auto-launch the OSK because they will invoke the input-method protocol, and xwayland programs probably won't. This is the behavior I see on my phone running Phosh - firefox and foot (terminal) showing wayland windows trigger the OSK (squeekboard), whereas chromium using xwayland does not. But even then, chromium does respond to the OSK input when I manually trigger the OSK.

>X had trouble with screen rotation.

The grate kernel supports reading the tablet's accelerometer sensor, so I just wrote a script to listen to iio-sensor-proxy signals and run `xrandr` to rotate the screen accordingly.

[1] https://github.com/grate-driver/linux

[2] https://openrt.gitbook.io/open-surfacert/common/boot-sequenc...

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#287

Post by danudey »

fignews wrote: post #204
no_time wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On screen keyboard was completely broken with Wayland, with some apps like Firefox just not popping it open Did you check if FF was actually running in wayland mode? Not trying to blame you, the current situation is pretty dire. The only reliable way of finding out if something is actually using wayland is running xeyes and seeing whether the eyes move above the target window.

Been using wayland on Fedora for years and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Intel and AMD graphics here.

"Wayland" works fine, but as soon as you start mixing X11 and Wayland apps, it starts getting complicated due to different levels of functionality support for the two APIs.

I started running into them pretty fast when I added a 4K monitor to my Ubuntu 22.04 system and enabled fractional scaling. All of my Wayland apps look fine, and all of my XWayland clients look awful, blurry and obviously scaled. Working one by one to switch them over to native Wayland has been a hassle for various random reasons, most notably:

* Slack: works from the icon in the taskbar, but when auto-started at login does so in X11 mode

* VS Code: works fine when run from Terminal, but when launched from taskbar icon shows up as a different "app" in the taskbar. Launching from the terminal starts in X11 mode

* Zoom: requires more setup in order to share screen. The Zoom UI for screen sharing doesn't work so it's not obvious how to stop sharing screen. It also freezes or crashes all the time for no discernable reason, including locking up when joining some meetings three times in a row and then succeeding on the fourth time.

So if you're not really leaning into what Wayland offers it works fine, but even just fractional scaling has been a four-month hassle to get things working as expected.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#288

Post by yencabulator »

keyle wrote: post #21

Somewhat related - will we ever see linux on old iPads? Old iPads can't get updated anymore, they can't easily browse the web, apps can't get updated or reinstalled... Basically recycle material or dust catchers. I'd like to jail break or whatever my old iPads and have them as simple linux tablets.

How many heavily-NDA'd Broadcom chips are in those things? Good luck getting working drivers, even if you manage to jailbreak it: https://projectsandcastle.org/status

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#289

Post by yencabulator »

mdp2021 wrote: post #164

I would have included GPS: those tablets are good as maps.

For what it's worth, some dedicated hotspot gadgets expose a GPS service over TCP (the protocol is often somewhat inaccurately called NMEA), and a standalone USB-connected GPS receiver can be For tablets, I believe often the GPS receiver is on the same chip as the cellular modem, so you don't tend to get GPS without that.

Re: StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet

#290

Post by yencabulator »

ConSeannery wrote: post #104
xqcgrek2 wrote: post #40

I would have preferred their new Star Lite was an updated 12" fanless Linux laptop rather than a tablet. Do any decent fanless 12" Linux laptops exist now?

What's the difference between a fanless laptop and a Linux OS tablet? A keyboard on hinges or something?

Looks like StarLite needs a kickstand behind it to keep the display up, the hinge likely has no stickiness whatsoever, it's just like a folded piece of the folio cover. Like a Microsoft Surface. Can't type in lap, hard to use in tight spaces like planes or busy coffee shops.

I have a couple of Pixel Slates with Brydge keyboards that have actual good hinges, that's much closer to a laptop. Still more top-heavy than laptops.

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