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I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

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Re: I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

#191

Post by MarsIronPI »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #55
nine_k wrote: post #23

Booting into Debian with most devices fully functional is great. What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM. Web browsing should definitely be possible, but I suppose it's limited to very few tabs. Some very lightweight DE could likely make it more usable. Running something like WezTerm + tmux as the DE could be even more economical, leaving some room for e.g. development tools.

having many tabs is perfectly fine - it's having many *youtube* tabs is troublesome main trouble to me has been caused by unity games - those are the big ram devourers, even most basic 2D ones (I still don't understand how that happens, why such regression since KSP days) and plenty of 2D games work perfectly fine (devs really overestimate minimal requirements)

Battle for Wesnoth can run on <4 GB.

Re: I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

#192

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

nine_k wrote: post #23

Booting into Debian with most devices fully functional is great. What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM. Web browsing should definitely be possible, but I suppose it's limited to very few tabs. Some very lightweight DE could likely make it more usable. Running something like WezTerm + tmux as the DE could be even more economical, leaving some room for e.g. development tools.

I have a 4GB surface tablet running Fedora that I use for very light duty tasks like PDF reading or listening to music. The memory holds it back for much else because it begins swapping.

Re: I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

#193

Post by jhbadger »

I've actually done something similar with a cheap $50 Amazon Fire tablet -- I installed F-Droid and Termux plus Unexpected Keyboard (software keyboard that has ctrl, alt, tab, and other important techy keys) -- It is actually pretty fun to use for light coding.

Re: I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

#194

Post by regularfry »

tech4bot wrote: post #79
regularfry wrote: post #78

Interesting. I don't have the hardware to test it, but: - Bookworm rather than Trixie looks like a conscious choice. Does 13 (either via apt upgrade or direct installation) not work? - What's the performance of this hardware like? I've got an old Samsung tablet that's not rootable and it's really creaking on recent android. I'd much rather something like this, but I don't want to swap one too-slow thing for another.

Bookworm was a conservative choice. I haven’t properly tested Trixie yet, so I don’t know. In theory the rootfs should be swappable. Performance is usable, especially compared to stock Android, because there is less background bloat. It’s fine for terminal work, light browsing, VS Code, and small experiments. If you want you can check my video: https://youtu.be/DbX13_mahKc

Ok, performance is definitely better than the Samsung. Think I'll be giving this a go.

Re: I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

#195

Post by regularfry »

m0llusk wrote: post #20
igtztorrero wrote: post #18

Why tablet makers does not provide an easy way to run Debian 12 on their hardware?

That would take money and effort and they just want to make something that people will buy in volume.

My guess is that the reason this works is because the manufacturer used SD card booting in developing the tablet and just never disabled it when it shipped. Which would mean breaking it would have been extra work, not less.

Re: I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

#197

Post by sciencejerk »

ge96 wrote: post #101
roryirvine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers and anything electron-based are your enemy. Firefox is actually pretty good in low-memory situations, silently discarding tabs when under memory pressure, but the main benefit comes from being able to run proper adblocking. Chromium-based browsers just can't compete these days. Otherwise, a bog standard Gnome-based Debian Trixie desktop should be pretty doable. I'm currently using an 8 GB machine with 3.7 GB…

Funny I'm using Ubuntu 24 i3 with vs code on a black 2008 Macbook

How?

Re: I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

#198

Post by regularfry »

jeroenhd wrote: post #117
kklisura wrote: post #48

Why is Android so slow?

It's a device running Android on a bottom-of-the-range SoC with, according to the description, 5 out of "9" gigabytes of "RAM" running from swap space on the internal storage. Perhaps Doogee could've ported Android better, but I don't think Android will ever run smoothly on this device. Android contains a lot of tricks to cache as much as possible in RAM so things like sleep/wakeup and app launching can be very fast.…

It's a particular choice of terminal, that. I can't help wondering how quick it would be with urxvt or similar. I'll probably pick one up in a few weeks to find out myself.

Re: I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

#200

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

jolmg wrote: post #111
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's probably the "you only notice when it doesn't work" situation, but my experience with firefox on ram limit has been a lot about tabs forgetting the url in them as in, I click "open in new tab", some time later I switch to them... only to get hit with "new tab", even though a moment ago it displayed tab name and I could right click -> bookmark to preemptively copy the address

Haven't had that happen, but what I have had happen is that I open in a new tab, and it just displays this spinner in the middle of the window while on the tab. It never loads. I take the URL from the address bar and drag it into yet a newer tab and there it loads. Then I close the original new tab. Sometimes I gotta do that a few times for the thing to load. I tend to open in new tab with middle click, if it makes a…

> I open in a new tab, and it just displays this spinner in the middle of the window while on the tab

oh, that happens too, all the time - I just got so used to immediately do "right click -> duplicate tab" in that case that it stopped bothering me

but tabs forgetting url causes this trick to fail (and yours too, there is no url to copy!) - so that's a pain point

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