Basically title, but I don’t want an iPad because of my “open source mindset” ik it sounds cringe but fr I hate Apple’s philosophy and I don’t want an iPhone to sync every shit. Also I’d like to have a tablet that doesn’t all my data to some big corporation (like Xiaomi or Google), and I don’t know where to start to find it. Do you have some tablets to suggest? Budget is around 300/400€. Thanks to everyone who will respond ✨
Consider the Remarkable 2. It is a little Linux computer that allows root access by SSH. It’s moddable, can markup pdfs, and is pleasant to write on. If you get one, just get the bare tablet from the manufacturer. Get a folio and pen from Amazon for way cheaper. Also, you can get $50 off with a referral code from someone who already has one.
Unfortunately they have become much less friendly towards open source as time goes on and strongly push users to use their cloud. Many open source programs aren’t officially compatible with v3+ since each minor release requires reverse engineering the display binary. I am a package maintainer for Toltec and would not buy a remarkable 2 considering the direction they have taken.
Would you have a recommendation dot an alternative? That is super depressing to hear I’ve been eyeing one for a while.
Supernote is the alternative I went with. They have a pretty responsive dev team and the cloud integration is optional, you can push stuff over the local WiFi network.
I put a similar amount of money into a used fujitsu T935 a few years ago for the same reason.
It was great for this, so I’d recommend looking into used 2in1 laptops. With linux and TLP you can easily get enough battery life out of pretty much anything.
is linux compatible with pens? and most important, is it usable enough? Like I used Ubuntu for 3 months, and ArcoLinux for like 5 months but i always ended up returning to Windows because I practically never did anything productive with Linux. U know i don’t want to spend money and don’t get any support
I’ve owned both an X220T and a first generation Yoga. Each has different pen technology, but both worked out of the box on all apps on Linux.
Rnote is a good app for handwritten notes on Linux. Xournal++ used to be the one recommended, but the UI is not great. I still use it occasionally to mark-up PDFs, since I don’t think Rnote is quite there on that feature yet.
Nothing quite compares to OneNote for organizing notes, however, since it has built-in OCR and you can search your handwritten notes. Unfortunately, there is no Linux implementation of it that supports inking. I’ve seen people say that OneNote 2010 works through WINE, but I couldn’t get it running. I also tried an Android emulator to use the Android version, but it didn’t work with my high DPI display and crashed a lot.
Pen support on linux is amazing. On the T935 it worked without any setup and was much better than on windows in terms of input lag and turning the touchscreen off/on properly.
I used Xournal++ and while the UI is a bit small on a 13" 1080p screen, it worked perfectly.
Now I remember another thing you should probably look out for: Don’t get anything with a higher resolution than 1080p. Fractional scaling on linux is basically not a thing, so the resolution determines the size of any UI.
Since its for school you’ll want it to be reliable and to work 100% of the time. I’d just get a big brand and not connect it to the internet if you don’t want your data collected.
Other than that you can try to block the telemetry at the DNS level by VPN to your home with a pihole instance or using a private DNS.
If you really don’t wanna use apple or google OS, then best bet is to buy the tablet for the hardware and try to flash a different OS. But then you’ll risk it not working very well or having app compatibility issues.
Give the Pinetab a try. https://pine64.com/product-category/pinetab/
These are still beta but I would recommend if you like to tinker. You may want to set them up with a nas / flash drive so you can still get notes on a laptop in a pinch.
Something from here, if you want an Android device: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
Just here to comment about ‘tablet that doesn’t send your data to big corporate’.
If that’s an Android tablet, you’ll always have Google spyware. If it’s <manufacturer-name>'s (that is not Google), then you’ll have the spyware of them both.
So, I, personally, would’ve go with one that have a custom ROM. If you’re not open to the idea, maybe something created by Google.
i was thinking about a custom rom, but I don’t know which tablet has support for these. Is there like a Pixel Tablet?
Yes. A Pixel Tablet was released recently. GrapheneOS (a good privacy-focused custom ROM) supports it too. And iirc the tablet supports USI2.0 stylus. But it’s 500$ US brand new
I would recommend buying a pixel tablet and installing [email protected] on it. [email protected] is private and doesn’t send anything to Google. You can get a pixel tab second-hand.
GrapheneOS is stock Android without any tablet mods. As its such a nieche, AOSP sucks extremely on Tablets. If you want to try how it sucks, run Waydroid on your Linux machine.
Many apps dont display well like they whould. Firefox for example has no adaptive Tablet UI, so Chromium / Cromite / Brave are the only good options.
Pixel Tablets are awesome though, as they are secure and well documented. Could be great ARM linux tablets, for some modern system like Fedora Silverblue. On Tablets I would say GNOME is superior, both are not really ready yet. KDE Plasma mobile looks great too though
Well if I have a tablet, it wouldn’t be for Linux based apps, unless maybe some SSH/terminal stuff anyway. The apps mentioned would need to update to properly support tablets, if they haven’t been yet.
What mentioned apps? And what do you mean by “updated”, automatically in the background, or “getting a Tablet UI at all”?
There is xournal++ for writing, apart from that no idea. This “write text with a pen, the OS recognizes it and replaces it by text” is not there yet afaik.
You mentioned, firefox. The app could be updated to better support tablet UI. That’s what I meant.
True. But that would be a rather big thing, should be done though. I will open a FR
That’d be a good idea
best solution i’ve seen so far, but ubuntu isn’t my distro, could I install arch without fucking everything up?
one of the preinstalled os options is manjaro so yes it can run arch
