this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Has anyone bought one of these?

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/08/star-labs-reveal-their-new-starlite-a-surface-like-linux-tablet/

They look pretty good, and the price is decent.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

I ordered one. First units should be shipped early December. Right now they seem to be some out - just few days ago you could order with 7-8 weeks delivery, now it's just 'notify when available'.

[–] Quackdoc 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I find that even if you get a touch primary device, make sure to get one with a keyboard, Ubuntu, Fedora, doesn't matter, KDE, Gnome doesn't matter, the touch only experience on linux is simply not great. Make extra sure to get the keyboard with it if its optional.

[–] TheGiantKorean 5 points 1 year ago

Absolutely. Touch would just be a nice extra feature to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

+1 have been trying to make a Linux tablet work. Gnome is alright but it's got a crap CPU and 2gb of ram and nothing lightweight has good touch support annoyingly

[–] Quackdoc 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am, very hesitantly, optimistic for the new smithay based compositors. Cosmic doesn't have touch support yet, but it's super light weight, I get better perf then I do even with KDE. I plan on swapping to it full time on my tablet when it gets touch support. (and when some touch friendly gui stuff is available). you also have catacomb which is an actual mobile compositor. Very promising stuff, but still very far out

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I was trying things along the lines of hyprland, sway and i3. I have this idea in my head that a touch screen tiling WM would work really well (from what I've seen that's what people love so much about the iPad nowadays anyway)

Hyprland has something called hyprgrass I think which enables touchscreen gestures, still in the process of figuring out how to install that in NixOS though. (it's got a nix.flake but it's not in nixpkgs and I'm still unsure of how to install flakes to a traditional configuration.nix setup)

[–] Quackdoc 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You could probably look into something like paperwm or Niri, I think scrollable window managers have a lot of potential to be a novel but good touch experience

EDIT: Im not sure if niri support touch, I havent tested it, but I think i might actually try it myself when I get the chance now

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I got a pretty good setup going with forge, problem is gnome is too heavy, this thing has 2gb of memory and like 2ghz CPU

[–] faction2145 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I preordered on announcement day, I expect it'll arrive December. I am excited for it to replace my 12" iPad pro. The 3:2 screen is perfect for reading and office app work.

You can check their status page for updates by model https://support.starlabs.systems/status

[–] TheGiantKorean 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the link! I'm really close to pulling the trigger on this.

[–] desmosthenes 7 points 1 year ago

didn’t know about this till just now; very interesting

[–] TechAdmin 6 points 1 year ago

Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I'll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.

[–] Metatronz 4 points 1 year ago

Sounds freaking sweet!

[–] tinkeringidiot 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I put Ubuntu on a handful of Surface Pros a couple years ago for work, and while the process wasn’t horrible, I was wishing for something with more native support the whole time. Nice to see I wasn’t the only one.

[–] TheGiantKorean 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This was another route I was thinking about. Any idea how hard it is to do now?

[–] tinkeringidiot 4 points 1 year ago

It’s been awhile and I haven’t tried to latest hardware, but I’m sure it’s still doable. The process wasn’t terrible, just a few extra steps to add compatibility for some of the devices.

I mostly just used the guidance here:

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Doesn't look like it's available yet