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.
Unfortunately not! Realistically I’m not big in the e-paper space in general, I bought the remarkable 1 probably 4 years ago on sale so have tried to make the most of it. I agree it’s a huge let down, they had an incredible opportunity to make this a FOSS dream but are moving in the apple direction of telling users what they want and not providing settings. It may still be some peoples best option but I personally run a very old version of the software and have multiple FOSS programs installed just to make it worth using. I must admit the writing experience is phenomenal, everything surrounding it is a letdown. They are trying to be a hardware, software, and cloud company and seem to be spread too thin, choosing a worse experience for users rather than open sourcing things. Their “display manager”, xochitl, which is the software you interact with when the device is on, has no API meaning theres no programmatic way to do, well anything. You can only use the stock software by clicking the screen. The files produced by the tablet are in a closed proprietary format so only the device/ their cloud can convert them to pdfs. Some efforts have been made to reverse engineer the file format so FOSS devs can write programs to render the files, though I’m not sure the status of that with the newest format.
Pick up a secondhand Surface pro/go older gen install Linux and using linux-surface kernel, kernel can easily be found on github. Surface tablets are great little power houses
i have thinked to take a xiaomi pad 5 and install AwakeOs (a custom rom) is this a good idea?
If that suits your needs, then sure, but personally, I’d choose a tablet PC for its versatility, broader app selection, and to avoid the challenges posed by Google’s APIs within what I see as a problematic ecosystem. I appreciate my degoogled phone, but it’s still quite common to encounter apps that heavily rely on Google’s services
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/
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.
Check out e-ink tablet like the Supernote A5! They are marvelous and study/work only focused!
Would I be able to use one of these for web browsing of like Wikipedia or similar? Or ebooks?
Most definetely, i would strongly suggest the Supernote, if you want there are also android options like Onyx, but those are more similar to full tablets than just to a study tablet / productivity device
That looks exactly like what I have been wishing for fir a while now. Interesting!
I’m a huge reMarkable fan; we have two in our house, and use them for everything. They run Linux (and can be ssh’ed into), and the feel is amazing - there’s tactile friction, like writing on paper with a pencil, not slick like writing on a glass tablet with a plastic nib. You can install extensions on them… they’re just awesome devices.
How about a refurbished Lenovo Yoga?
Runs Linux well, comes with a pen, you can have it folded as a tablet or with a keyboard to take notes. Battery might not last as long as an Android tablet. But is way more powerful and fits perfectly in your budget if bought second hand / refurbished.
Edit: I bought a Yoga 460 back then. Used it during lectures. But soon realized typing notes was faster than a pen. Except for calculus and linear algebra. You should learn latex or use a pen for that. Otherwise, would recommend a Linux convertible over an Android device.
I think with linux, rnote or xournal++ work well for taking notes or annotating pdf.
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
Probably as its the same as any x86 device
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
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.
I used to use Xournal++ too but Rnote is much better
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.
I had a little trouble with a convertible and it’s touch screen, where it wouldn’t disable the touch screen when the pen was near the screen, so my palm always made xournal.scroll away.
Turns out there’s an easy fix: the software responsible for touch and pen handling (libinput) does support disabling touch when the pen is near, it just couldn’t figure out which 2 devices belong together. A minimal udev rules file and a reboot fixes it, but the IDs depend on the hardware.
Fortunately it has since been fixed upstream, so udev rule hacks are not needed anymore unless you run a distro that runs ancient (~2 years, but it varies) packages, like latest openSUSE Leap.
remarkable i guess if you want a non e inc tablet get a sticky note app
Had one pre forced subscription. Upgraded to a PineNote out of spite and not looking back.
How is the PineNote these days? Last I heard no distro was production reasy for it yet.
I’m still using the android based OS, which does it’s job and allows for stuff like kde connect.
I returned my Remarkable 2 after a couple of days for a Supernote. Can do local network file transfer, and wifi screen sharing.
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 at least 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
