The year of the Linux tablet?

By Jonathan Corbet
August 23, 2011

The theme of the 2011 COSCUP conference (Taipei, August 20-21) was "Gadgets beyond smartphones." Based on a number of the talks and exhibits on offer, "beyond smartphones" seemed to mean "tablets" to a number of the people in attendance. Two talks by representatives of competing desktop environments show some interesting similarities and differences in how they see the tablet opportunity.

First up was GNOME developer Bastien Nocera, speaking on the theme "my sofa wants a new form factor." That new form factor, naturally, is the tablet - an ideal device, it seems, for the typical couch potato. Tablets, he said, are "the new Eldorado"; everybody is trying to get there.

There are a number of options for software to run on tablets. One could use Windows, but it is non-free and uninteresting. iOS, too, is entirely proprietary; it's also unavailable for non-Apple hardware. WebOS was an option when Bastien wrote his talk, though things had changed in the meantime - the demise of WebOS shows what can happen to a proprietary platform owned by a single company. Then there's Android, but the problem with Android, according to Bastien, is that it's entirely owned by Google. It is not truly open; one has to be one of Google's best friends to have any kind of early access to the software. The result is that there are a lot of tablets on the market running old versions of Android. MeeGo, he said, was not really even worth mentioning; it is a "puppet" of Intel without any real community governance.

What all this comes down to is that, at the moment, there is an opportunity for something else in the tablet market. Unsurprisingly, Bastien thinks that GNOME 3 would be a good something else.

GNOME 3, he says, is the result of an ongoing push for more vertical integration in the platform. Increasingly, GNOME is seen to include components like PulseAudio, NetworkManager, udev, and, more recently, systemd. GNOME, in other words, is becoming more of an operating system in its own right. Furthering that evolution, the project plans to start shipping full operating system images to users. The full GNOME experience is hard to produce if distributors change pieces of the platform - using ConnMan instead of NetworkManager, for example. The project wants to produce a single, unified experience for GNOME users.

And they want GNOME 3 to be an option for tablets. There are a number of advantages to the platform: it's a community-based, 100% free project with an open development model. But, he said, it lacks one thing: hardware. So Bastien put out a call to hardware manufacturers: please talk to the GNOME project about what they have to offer. And, if nothing else, please send your drivers upstream and ensure that the hardware is supported by free software.

Bastien was replaced at the lectern by KDE developer Aaron Seigo who had a surprisingly similar story to tell. The existing platforms, he said, are not free; he cited the result of some study which - using an unclear methodology - came to the conclusion that iOS was 0% open while Android did a little better at 23% open. Linux (for some value of "Linux") came in at 71% open. KDE, he said, is going for 100% open.

Aaron introduced Plasma and Plasma Active (recently described in LWN); these projects have existed in desktop and netbook variants for a while now. The tablet version is more recent, but is well advanced regardless. The goals for all of the variants are the same: an "amazing experience" which creates an "emotional bond" in users, an efficient development framework, and the ability to run the same application on all types of devices. Aaron noted that all three variants share almost all of their code.

One part of the talk sounded quite different from Bastien's talk: Plasma, Aaron said, has been designed as a set of components which can be assembled in any number of ways. KDE is not shooting for the single unified experience; it is aiming to build a platform with which others can create any number of different experiences.

According to Aaron, there are seven companies working with Plasma now, along with a lot of community developers. But the project is looking for more developers, more designers, and more companies to work with; they are especially interested in hardware partners. KDE, he said, has something that is compelling and shippable today; all it needs is something to ship that software on. (He had previously said that a couple months of polishing were planned; perhaps a large value of "today" was intended).

An opportunity?

In your editor's view, there does seem to be an opportunity in the tablet space at the moment. Apple's offerings still own this category, but that situation seems unlikely to last forever. Android is the logical choice for a second leading system, but Google's control may not sit well with all vendors, especially now that Google is, through its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, becoming a hardware vendor in its own right. The management of Android, according to Google, will not change as a result of this acquisition, but that is just the problem: companies like Motorola have already tended to get privileged access to unreleased Android versions. And, in any case, a duopoly is still a small set of options; Android is clearly not going away, but it would not be surprising to see an appetite for a third option among both vendors and customers.

Becoming that third option will not be an easy thing to do, though. There are a number of contenders for that space beyond GNOME and KDE: they include MeeGo, Ubuntu with the Unity shell and, naturally, Windows. Even WebOS could possibly make a surprise comeback. Perhaps one other Linux-based platform can establish itself as a viable alternative on tablets; it seems unlikely that four or five of them will. Competition between projects can be good for the exploration of different ideas and as a motivation to get more done, but it's hard not to feel that, if we want to create a viable third platform which is competitive with Android and iOS, our community's efforts are a little too scattered at this point.

A related question is: can a tablet-based platform be competitive without running on phone handsets as well? Neither of the desktop environment presentations at COSCUP mentioned handsets; if the projects are thinking of scaling down that far, they are not talking about it yet. There is clear value in having the same interface - and the same applications - on both types of device. Android and iOS offer that consistency; alternatives may have to as well.

And, of course, there is the challenge of third-party applications; getting this week's hot application ported to GNOME or KDE may not prove easy. Sometimes one hears that HTML5 will save the day, but there are a couple of objections that one could raise to that line of reasoning. One is that we have been hearing that the web would replace local applications for at least 15 years now; maybe it is really true this time, but that has yet to be seen. And if everything does move to HTML5, alternatives like ChromeOS and Boot2Gecko may become more interesting, widening the field even further.

So the desktop environments have given themselves a big challenge, to say the least. It would be nice to see at least one of them succeed; we have come too far to give up on the idea of a fully free, community-oriented system on newer hardware. The technology to create a competitive alternative is certainly there; what remains to be seen is whether it is matched with an ability to woo hardware manufacturers and get real products into the market. At this point, the success of Linux on the tablet probably depends more on that sales job than on what the developers do.

[Your editor would like to thank COSCUP 2011 for assisting with his travel to this event.]

Index entries for this article
Conference	COSCUP/2011

to post comments

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 0:37 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (4 responses)

> There is clear value in having the same interface - and the same
> applications - on both types of device. Android and iOS offer that
> consistency; alternatives may have to as well.

Since we have run this race several times with the desktop, servers, etc. let me put in the obvious patch:

alternatives WILL have to as well.

It will be the checklist that companies will put on their why we don't use X pretty quickly.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 15:55 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

Among proprietary systems, none of them have the same interface on desktops and smartphones. It's unclear (to me, anyway) which, if either, tablets really ought to match, and whether the proprietary systems have picked smartphones to match for reasons that don't really apply to an alternative. (If you have different kernels for different processors, you may not want to put in the work to port the desktop kernel to the tablet processor.)

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Sep 5, 2011 10:59 UTC (Mon) by rlhamil (guest, #6472) [Link] (1 responses)

No, but Apple is clearly moving in the direction of increased uniformity across platforms. OS X 10.7 ("Lion") borrows a lot of interface features from iOS: an App Store, a similar-looking launcher, scroll-bars that auto-hide by default (and by default work "backwards" compared to usual desktop experience, so that touchpad motion corresponds to dragging the content, and the scrollbar indicates in a minimalist way the portion of the content visible in the window), a side-by-side arrangement of workspaces rather than a grid (that latter annoyed a lot of people, since unlike the others, there's no way to revert to the old behavior or ignore it).

There's no question but that Apple has a vision and is willing to sometimes shake things up to follow it. That of course isn't always popular (Final Cut Pro X was different enough, and apparently gave up enough functionality in favor of a new vision of ease-of-use, to garner a lot of mixed-to-negative reviews), but at least it's better than stagnation.

One doesn't need to approve of a license philosophy to learn from both the successes and failures of those that take creative chances, esp. when it's those that for all practical purposes had the first _viable_ tablet, and still the one that others would have to beat, despite the limitations of its locked-down environment.

So...I doubt one could have exactly one interface across devices ranging from a handset to a desktop, without excessive compromises. But one could have a reasonably _similar_ interface, both to the user and as an API, allowing a reasonable amount of user and developer experience to apply across the range.

Take an opposite example: Angry Birds on the Mac looks perhaps too much like the iPhone version, as if they did no more than they had to in the way of adjustments. To me, it's a little harder to use, and seems to crash more easily.

Or take another example: the problems getting Java to really deliver on "write once, run anywhere". Good on the server side (if the developer doesn't neglect efficiency), but a bit problematic on the user-facing side, to put it mildly. Some of the latter could have been better managed, but I wonder if _any_ environment would let a single implementation without platform-specific tweaks work equally well everywhere.

While reasonably consistent interfaces may make it more a matter of adjusting applications to different platforms than truly porting them, some adjustments may always be needed. (think how fonts at low resolutions just about need manual hinting added to look decent; this seems to me a metaphor for how extremes may exceed what any automatic adaptation can handle well) And no less important, _testing_ on each platform will probably not be something that can be dispensed with any sooner.

Any attempt at a cross-platform environment therefore has a balance to achieve to preserve familiarity across devices without creating or encouraging excessive compromises of the end user experience. And that balance may over time allow more uniformity, as interfaces with just the right adaptability and flexibility are developed. An environment that's expected to last for awhile not only needs to hit an acceptable balance for now, but needs to be able to be adjusted over time, as well.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Sep 6, 2011 3:14 UTC (Tue) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]

I think you're on the nose with this.

Personally, I think Apple has gone too far in attempting to unify their interfaces across devices, at least from the point of view of an advanced user.

As an example, the new auto-hide scrollbars mean you can no longer tell at a glance how much of the document there is or where you are in it. Unless some of the content is actually visibly clipped by the edge of the scrollable area, you have no indication that you're looking at something that scrolls.

The real problem with a unified interface is trying to wedge all the differing capabilities of your device set into a unifying metaphor that doesn't stretch too badly.

I'm coming at the problem from a game development point of view; I do console and mobile phone games, we've developed a cross-platform game engine that (in an OS kind of way) presents a unified programming interface regardless of the underlying hardware.

Or that's the theory, anyways. In practice, there's abstraction breakage, sometimes severely. As an example, consider the situation we faced when the Wii came along; we had a couple of implicit assumptions in the engine design that the Wii violated.

Single Pool of System Memory: The Wii has two banks of system memory, one slow and large, the other fast and smaller.

Many Gamepads, One Mouse/Keyboard: The Wii controllers all have lightgun capabilities, so they can all have screen positions.

Gamepads Don't Change: The Wii controller has dockable subcontrollers.

This kind of thing breaks your abstractions, often badly. You either wind up having to wrap a superset of all possible cases around everything (in which case the game has to understand the platform it's on to access the functional parts), use capability detection (in which case the game has to be modular based on the capabilities reported by the hardware), or find a new abstraction that hides the differences once again.

With our game engine, we have the luxury of retooling our abstractions whenever a new platform arrives; we don't need to have a stable API or ABI because we're effectively our only user.

General purpose operating systems and development ecosystems don't have that luxury. Even if you aggressively deprecate your old mechanisms for new software, you have to keep the old stuff working.

The same is somewhat true for GUIs. You can only change so much out from under your users before they revolt. More to the point, if you change things too much, and your users have to relearn everything, you lose all your "lock in" effect from user experience. If they have to re-learn everything, they may well chose to go learn a different system instead, perhaps one that won't yank the rug out from under them every time the major version number changes...

Usability is king

Posted Aug 31, 2011 14:57 UTC (Wed) by papatom (guest, #75834) [Link]

I tend to disagree, since the form factor determines the applicability of user interfaces.
The poor adoption of Windows Mobile, and Symbian (prior to Symbian^3) can be - at least partially - attributed to inadequate user interfaces.

Insisting on having the same UIs on desktops (with pixel-accurate mouse) and touch-enabled devices with cramped screens almost seems like a recipe for another half-baked product.

So no, it does not seem so obvious nor inevitable.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 0:45 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (17 responses)

I think the KDE view point may be the better for this space. The mobile-tablet space is going to become the mobile-tablet-washing machine space and having a widget set which allows producers to customize for their washing machine or refrigerator or car navigation system is going to be the bigger draw for companies not wanting to be in the standard market duopoly.

One thing I would like to point out is that HTML/HTTP has replaced A lot. We need to be very careful about the "where is my flying car?" viewpoint we technologists get caught up in. So the Web didn't replace everything people said it was going to in 1995. It has become the bottom structure for so many other things that it is hard not to see where some new service is really just an HTTP server morphed a bit, and its data being sent is just HTML without some of the eye candy.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 1:55 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (16 responses)

yes, the Gnome future sounds too much like what Apple is trying to do, namely control everything and not allow for any variation.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 9:58 UTC (Wed) by nzjrs (guest, #35911) [Link] (15 responses)

By some definitions the Apple approach seems to work out quite well.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 11:39 UTC (Wed) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link] (10 responses)

So it does. But if you want Apple, you know where to find it.

I do not get the point of releasing free software that you don't want people to change -- maybe "shared source" a la MS would be a more appropriate license.

That said maybe a better option for GNOME would be to produce a "reference platform" as their complete offering, and ask would-be reviewers to test that. If it is really that great in integration, it will stand on its own.

Reminds me a bit of the spats mplayer upstream had with Debian packaging its software non-optimally. For an extreme case of control-freakery and look at Schily's cdrecord.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 20:32 UTC (Wed) by nzjrs (guest, #35911) [Link]

Be careful conflating "cant change" (apple) and "shouldn't change" (GNOME, not that I agree that is the gnome position, if there is one, BTW)

The former is anti FOSS, the latter seems like good engineering based on limiting the scope of work to maximize the experience based on limited development resources.

Some people (not you actually, your reply was reasonable) have an undeserved sense of entitlement in FOSS, it is not enough that you get the GNOME code and have the freedom to break it to your will, those people require everyone else to do the work and bend it to their will. Not liking the GNOME direction or plans does not make them OMG APPLE EVIL.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 7:40 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (8 responses)

I do not get the point of releasing free software that you don't want people to change -- maybe "shared source" a la MS would be a more appropriate license.

if we didn't really want people to change, contribute, extend and improve our work then I'm pretty sure we'd have chosen another license. or went completely over and used BSD/MIT/X11 instead of LGPLv2.1+.

we want to define what's GNOME more carefully and precisely, so that developers will be able to target that platform without having to care about conflicts within our own software caused by the combinatorial explosion of moving parts. we want to be able to say to a user that any awesome application targeting that platform is going to be as tightly integrated with it as any application we write. we want to be able to have a fully structured approach, from the kernel up to the SDK, so that users won't have to mess around with their distributions.

if that's perceived as "being like Apple" then I'd be proud, as it would mean that we're doing, in the open, something that a multi-billion dollar company does in secret; and, unlike with Apple, if people don't like it they can take full advantage of our license, and go do their own awesome thing without any fear of patents or copyright infringment.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 14:44 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (7 responses)

The issue is that a lot of people want to break stuff with various choices. And the removal of that ability is where the frustration comes from.

To use the analogy of cars.

A 1960's VW bug was the epitomy of the vehicle you could take apart and put together in many ways. Most of those ways would be horrible to look at but it was fun to do so. You learned a LOT from being able to break a car and make it do stuff that wasn't what it was originally designed to do, and you could always mill pieces to rebuild it (which is why there are still so many 1960's VW's on the road, because the parts are easily replaceable).

A 2011 VW bug is the opposite end. It is a very pretty car, and I will say it is fun to drive where it was designed to drive with. It looks a lot like the original, and talks the same talk about being a free love sort of system. But deep inside it is not anything like that. Because it is designed to work and look in a certain way it is very very unfriendly to be changed to look like anything else. It is a pain to mod, and just not fun for that type of person.

The basic message is "You have taken the fun out of modding my system."

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 6:38 UTC (Fri) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (6 responses)

The basic message is "You have taken the fun out of modding my system."

that's why we didn't base the whole desktop shell on a high level language, and we didn't include the way to inject custom extensions, extensions that would not be able to access the whole of the Gnome API through introspection.

oh, wait...

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 15:06 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (5 responses)

You (GNOME) might have done so, but the messaging is lost. What messaging, I constantly run into is "Making changes to how GNOME is set up by default is a detriment to the GNOME experience and should not be done."

Look at how you messaged your reply to me and realize that tone of snide, sarcastic superiority is how unwelcoming Gnome has become.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 15:15 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

I think we have been picky about responses we choose to consider (invariably negative ones apparently) and discard the really interesting and deeper choices.

It has been obvious from the start the GNOME Shell was designed to be extensible (a whole lot of extensions really, have you done a yum -C search gnome-shell-extension in Fedora 15 lately?) and the recent discussions around setting up a website to make this process easier with no restrictions beyond robustness and security should have been enough messaging but unfortunately lost in the noise. I think, GNOME developers should have been vocal to compensate and they have failed to do so as well. I hope they do better marketing (beyond just gnome3.org).

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 16:02 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

No I haven't done that search, and thank you for pointing it out. I realize that a lot of my own negativity towards starts in the beginning of the day with a

"Gnome 3 Failed to Load... This most likely means your system .. is not capable of delivering the full GNOME 3 experience."

which translate to me as "You aren't rich/good/etc enough to use this."

Which I realize is my own problem due to my self-identifying with the hardware too much. I do see that F16 doesn't remind me of this every day which is a nice change. And I see there are 37 extensions I wasn't aware of before.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 15:46 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

It should not be done, but it's designed to be easy for you to do so if you choose to.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 29, 2011 21:03 UTC (Mon) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (1 responses)

You (GNOME) might have done so, but the messaging is lost. What messaging, I constantly run into is "Making changes to how GNOME is set up by default is a detriment to the GNOME experience and should not be done."

yes, it should not be done. in the same way that modding a car most of the time removes the road-worthiness of the same, and you should be aware of that. should you decide to continue, there are ways in which this not only is possible, but it's also easy to do. you pay the price of stuff potentially breaking, so there's that.

Look at how you messaged your reply to me and realize that tone of snide, sarcastic superiority is how unwelcoming Gnome has become.

wow, sarcasm: now a novelty on LWN and in an open source project. something that never happened before, and it's now unwelcoming.

oh, sorry: I again used sarcasm - targeted at somebody that never really bothered (to his own admission) to check before writing off something that I worked on.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 30, 2011 15:22 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

You are over-reaching on the "never bothered to check". Never bothered would not mean I haven't tried using GNOME3 at all. I changed over my desktop and used it for 3 weeks on Fedora-15 and am using it again for Fedora-16. I have asked around for help and gotten the "Making changes to the desktop, screensaver, etc is not to be done." answers.

My issues were solved by Rahul. The systems I have run in fallback mode so I am not using mutter or seem to have any access to it. Such is life.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 14:05 UTC (Thu) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link] (1 responses)

The Apple approach is certainly working well for Apple, but as a user you can certainly see the limits of the approach.

In particular, the Apple approach is driven by a singular vision per overall product. In iOS, the singular vision is the single app appliance (not that it only has a single app, but you're not really expected to try to use multiple apps simultaneously, and certainly not expected to try to make them interact). In OSX, the singular vision is a MacBook Pro with no peripherals, running a big software package (photoshop, spreadsheet...) full-screen and occasionally switching to full-screen Safari or Mail.

The further you get from the singular vision, the worse it works.

Let's say, for instance, you have a shiny new Mac Pro (one of the $2500+ towers) running Lion, and you've hooked it up to two new 27" screens (which it will do quite nicely). And let's say you want to use that spiffy new "full-screen mode" their programs have. You get full-screen on the "main" display, and the other one goes blank gray. You can't do anything with the second monitor.

The use case that Lion was designed for is the guy sitting in Starbucks with his MacBook Pro. It's designed around a single screen, with other screens being an afterthought. It's designed around the trackpad, with the mouse being an afterthought. It was designed around a relatively small number of installed apps, all of which are expected to run fullscreen (which, I presume, is why their window management is so primitive. No edge resistance in 2011? Really?). The non-vision parts still work, for the most part, but they're not as clean. The further you are from the use-case vision, the more you're on your own.

iOS has similar problems; it's better than it used to be, but real multitasking is still off the table, the launcher shell is a pretty version of progman.exe from windows 3.1 (now with folders! Oops, but don't try to nest them. Oh, and don't try to put more than 16 things in them (or 9, if you aren't on an ipad), because they don't scroll...). Notification is still weak, the filesystem is still inaccessible, you need a dongle to use a memory card...

This is a result of Apple focusing on their use case and building the device they think people want. And really, it does seem to be what a lot of people want, or think they want.

The problem with the Apple model, and by extension the Gnome3 model (since Gnome3 seems to be following Apple quite strongly down this rabbit hole) is that it only serves the specific target audience. What it utterly fails to do, what it's flatly terrible at, is allowing the user to grow and learn.

In recent years the design community has had an absolute hatred of configurability, extensibility and utility. The "ideal" design is one in which there is only one way to do anything, and the novice user can do it preferably with the mouse alone. The plan was that we could give everyone this computer, and anyone could use it.

The trouble with this plan is that it provides no growth path for the user; they can never be anything but a novice because the system doesn't let them take the training wheels off. It also means it's much more difficult to adapt the system to unanticipated needs.

The platonic ideal of this design style is Microsoft Bob, and the things that descended from it (Clippy, "wizards"...). Your whole computing experience is on rails, assistants do everything for you, and you can't do anything your assistants don't know how (or don't want) to do.

The Gnome project has been particularly bad about this over the years; one need look no further than Metacity to see that the current "you will use your computer the way we tell you" attitude is endemic, not some new development. As I recall, the current kerfuffle about lack of options in Gnome3 is a replay of Gnome2; when Gnome2 was new, there was a similar storm of complaints from users about options gone missing, and similar condescending "you simply don't understand my genius" replies from the design team.

The "we must maintain our branding" excuse is new, but it's merely another justification for the "thou shall not question the holy designers" attitude.

I remain unconvinced that the path Free Software should take is the same path Apple and Microsoft took. Ease of use and ease of learning for beginners is definitely important. Some damage control systems are important as well; preventing novices from burning the house down is clearly desirable.

But where all current "mainstream" desktop systems fall down (and I'm including Gnome and KDE here) is decent support for the steps past novice, the road to mastery.

Consider emacs. When you start using emacs, you can treat it as a simple text editor; open and save files with the menu, only open one file at a time, it supports drag and drop, cut and paste from the menu, and so forth. You can give emacs to a novice and expect them to survive in it, though they may occasionally trip over an advanced feature and get confused.

But emacs grows with you. In my experience, about once a month I learn a new trick in emacs that within six months I can't live without. There's a depth, a richness, access to new ways of doing things. Improved ways of doing things. Ways of doing things automatically in an instant that would have taken hours or weeks to do by hand.

We ought to be able to have that in our desktop environments.

There are hints of where to go to make this happen. The example of emacs is particularly instructive; having a completely scriptable system packed with hooks produces a very powerful environment for user mastery.

In window managers, elements of Enlightenment and the SawFish window manager showed some of what could be done.

A particularly important example of the sort of thing we should be doing is (now mostly defunct) Quicksilver for OSX. As much as possible should be made available through dbus, and you should be able to access those services directly through a command interface. I ought, for instance, to be able to bring up a shell and use a simple command to tell firefox to send the image on tab 2 to a new layer in the image I'm editing in gimp.

Perhaps these desktop environments should have a novice mode with training wheels and padded walls, but if we're going to offer a compelling reason to switch to our platforms, the novice mode must have an off switch. The real strength of the free software community is in our experienced users, our willingness to experiment, and our software's ability to grow with experience and need. As per the (attribution and exact wording forgotten...) quote, "Unix doesn't prevent you from doing something stupid because that would also prevent you from doing something clever."

A remarkable summary

Posted Aug 28, 2011 10:15 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Even my prosumer Olympus Pen E-P1 has an advanced mode that exposes several new settings. Free software should always keep advanced users in mind and help novices make the transition.

Too often only a predefined set of use cases is considered, without a unifying model which lets other functionalities grow on the same substrate. It is crucial to encourage these advanced use cases, probably coded by the advanced users themselves. This kind of enthusiast extensibility is one of the real strengths of Free software.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Sep 1, 2011 16:13 UTC (Thu) by mvaar (guest, #75742) [Link] (1 responses)

In this very article, it appears to me that the gnome fanboy himself doesn't like apple's approach because of that. Of course, its OK when WE ( as in gnome fanboys) do it, right ?

Please.

Posted Sep 1, 2011 16:16 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

If you disagree with what the speaker was saying, by all means express that disagreement. But can we please do it in a respectful way that avoids name calling?

Thank you.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 0:49 UTC (Wed) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (6 responses)

I wonder what needs to be done for running android-on-gnome.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 0:58 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

A commitment from google to open-source all their Android code?

I think it would be cool to have a davlik VM running on my x86-64 notebook... maybe even several of them.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 8:42 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (4 responses)

To reuse Android's bits, the main thing missing would be X.org drivers. Other than that, it's the same problem as on upstream Linux, drivers lacking generic interfaces (say, for ambient light sensors, or orientation detection) so you end up writing hardware specific integration.

also for Android-on-Linux

Posted Aug 26, 2011 10:35 UTC (Fri) by skierpage (guest, #70911) [Link] (3 responses)

There are other considerations, I think you need the Binder IPC mechanism and possibly other kernel features like Android's wakelocks implementation; see e.g. http://elinux.org/Android_Kernel_Features . Back in 2009 "Canonical demonstrated a prototype version of an execution environment for Ubuntu that lets it run Android apps", but nothing since. More recently, "Myriad Alien Dalvik Allows Nokia N9 to run Android Apps Seamlessly".

also for Android-on-Linux

Posted Aug 26, 2011 16:38 UTC (Fri) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not interested in running Android, on whatever devices are available. I'd want to use Android's kernels and drivers to run GNOME instead.

also for Android-on-Linux

Posted Aug 26, 2011 16:57 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

since people have reported running standard linux distros in a chroot sandbox on android machines, it appears that for the most part no special work is needed.

now since most normal distros don't work well with just touchscreen input (and as you note userspace interfaces to the hardware the kernel has drivers for), more work is needed to make it practical.

... or Linux desktop-on-Android

Posted Aug 26, 2011 22:58 UTC (Fri) by skierpage (guest, #70911) [Link]

Both ways are worthwhile. Linux desktop-on-Android would seem very doable, either run Linux binaries (probably chroot'd as libc is different) with a rootless X Window System running on Android, or port GTK/Qt to Skia graphics; it's just tons of work either way.

You would think Google is figuring this out so Android and ChromeOS are cooperating runtimes on one kernel; a Chromebook capable of running a subset of Android apps (like Google TV) seems useful. But for whatever reason the two projects are disjoint and ChromeOS is resolutely web-centric. FWIW I've tried booting Android-X86 and it failed on desktop and laptop (as did Chromium OS), perhaps due to poorly-documented graphics requirements.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 1:13 UTC (Wed) by bronson (guest, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

Well that explains why Gnome3 is trying so hard to look like a mobile phone.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 7:44 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

<blockquote>Well that explains why Gnome3 is trying so hard to look like a mobile phone.</blockquote>

<p>considering that a lot of GNOME developers have been working in the mobile and embedded space for a living, it should surprise at all that we decided to bring some stuff from that experience over.</p>

<p>it's also the nature of things: it happened in Apple, it happened in Microsoft, and it happens to users as well. more and more people are using smartphones: they are getting used to some of the concepts, semantics and experiences of the smartphone user interface. the line has been blurred to the point that there is a continuum of usage: start a task on the phone, follow through on the tablet, then resume on the desktop. designing for that flow is neither new nor unexpected.</p>

100% free? What about drivers?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 2:06 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

100% free is a nice dream, but for now it's just a dream. It does not look like tablet without hardware acceleration will attract anyone (besides GNOME3 and KDE4 don't really like to work without hardware acceleration), but AFAICS there are exactly zero offers with open-source 3D drivers in tablet space.

100% free? What about drivers?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 8:12 UTC (Wed) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link]

The ExoPC is one example that we currently run Plasma Active on, with fully accelerated video drivers.

100% free? What about drivers?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 10:02 UTC (Wed) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

In contrast to GNOME 3, KDE 4 actually does work without hardware acceleration. I often turn it off when latest git Mesa or graphics drivers have problems and all I lose is just some effects like shadows and transparency. But the desktop still works just as well.

100% free? What about drivers?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 17:23 UTC (Wed) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link]

On Plasma Active we actually require hardware acceleration (OpenGL ES 2.0 to be precise).

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 7:42 UTC (Wed) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (11 responses)

So, is it time to restart production of Openmoko's phone and raise contributions for the design of a tablet from the same manufacturer?

PS: BTW, from the hacking point of view, it seems to me that the price point still is an important bottleneck. As can be seen from latest HP Touchpad events, sub-$200 devices are much more easily bought for tinkering. With guaranteed access to extensive hardware documentation, hackers may be willing to spend more; but without...

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 9:30 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

Openmoko Inc itself has been out of phone business since May 2009, and it's probably unlikely that they'd gather a similar team in the near future. Of course there are multiple spin-offs from the company and from the Openmoko community.

German company Golden Delicious is continuing with the same Openmoko brand with their GTA04 replacement board (http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/). However, let them finish first what they're already doing with their limited resources, so that we've up-to date free mobile phone hardware ;)

As for tablets, one free tablet effort is http://cordiatab.com/

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 14:44 UTC (Thu) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

that Cordia Tab looks interesting.

the problem with most tablets is that there is no way (or no easy way) to install a new OS onto them.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 10:22 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (8 responses)

What I'd like to see is a tablet with a big screen (A4-size or close to it, and 4:3 rather than 16:9) for displaying sheet music. Extra points for a foot switch to page back and forth. The current tablets are a bit small while notebook computers are too big and heavy and their form factor doesn't lend itself to music stands.

Such a device would save me from having to haul around a pilot briefcase full of music books (or indeed more), and it could also double up as a tuner/metronome/.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 11:25 UTC (Wed) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

I am looking for the same thing. My hopes were set on the Kno 2x14" tablet which was based on a Linux+WebKit OS and has been cancelled now.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 12:02 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder if you can get a tiny PC and glue it to the back of a monitor? Then run them both off the same 16 volt power supply or battery pack?

Some laptops are convertible to tablet format, although they would be too heavy for a music stand.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 12:22 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Latest HP desktop PCs I've seen around here are exactly that...

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 17:01 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

A lot of the mini-PCs based on netbook technology (like Ion-2) are designed to be fastened directly to the back of any VESA compliant monitor.

The combination makes for a really slick all-in-one machine. It is a bit tricky to find LCD monitors built with touchscreen included but they do exist.

However, adding a battery backup that could run a thing like that for more than 20 minutes would be quite heavy and painful to haul around.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 14:32 UTC (Wed) by itsgeorg (guest, #4075) [Link]

When doing vocal music, the Archos 101 does the job for me. It's light weight, and with acroread I can easily slide an zoom the sheets in non page mode. In case you are interested, it's fun ...

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 14:41 UTC (Wed) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (2 responses)

I was hoping somebody would take up the project working on this for the GNOME Summer of Code. See:
https://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2011/Ideas#Desktop

But nobody did. I'd be happy working on an AirTurn Bluetooth driver given the hardware ;)

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 15:35 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

I'd be happy working on an AirTurn Bluetooth driver given the hardware ;)

That's probably not even necessary other than as a transparent ploy to get the gadget for free considering that, according to their website, from the computer's POV the thing basically amounts to a Bluetooth keyboard with a PgUp and a PgDown key. Looks useful if a bit pricey.

The Pageflip Cicada appears to offer the same functionality but somewhat cheaper, and even mentions Linux as a supported operating system (not that this is a big thing once you have the Bluetooth HID interface down).

Disclaimer: I haven't been in the same room with either of the devices, let alone used one to turn sheet music pages.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 17:12 UTC (Wed) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link]

Glad to know. I sure like to have free hardware, but I don't need any more "I won't actually use it" hardware. I have drawers cramful of those.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 13:58 UTC (Wed) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link] (12 responses)

"There is clear value in having the same interface - and the same applications - on both types of device."

I disagree. Tablets seem to be optimized for content consumption, not creation. And a touch interface probably can't have the necessary precision for a laptop OS. While the OS on PCs and tablets should be compatible, I see no reason that they should offer exactly the same interface.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 14:14 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (5 responses)

Um...but that paragraph was talking about handsets, not PCs...?

Same interface?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 17:20 UTC (Wed) by Chocrates (guest, #67068) [Link] (4 responses)

I still think its a valid comment. I use my phone for a certain set of tasks. I use my PC for others. And if i had a tablet id use it for another set. While some of these overlap, a web browser for one, I would greatly prefer an optimized interface for the hardware, with simply some way to share data between. Preferably with compatible document types if its applicable. I don't need my tablet to look like a big phone.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 8:41 UTC (Thu) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link] (3 responses)

Exactly. :-)

You want your devices to work consistently, but take advantage of the special hardware you're using. For that reason, I think one interface for tablets and laptops (as an example) is suboptimal, because you end up compromising on both sides. Some of the complaints about gnome-shell and Unity are I think symptomatic for these compromises.

In Plasma Active, we're sharing components and infrastructure across devices, but create specialized interfaces suitable for the type of device (screen, input methods, etc.), and the use-cases that go along with it to get the best user experience out of your hardware. The end result will (hopefully :-)) be a system that works consistently across devices, integrates well with your other form-factors and is easily adaptable to new types of devices.

And yes, the plan is to also support smartphones at some point, but given the "closedness" of this segment of the device spectrum, we are concentrating on tablets first -- a lot of that work also benefits an eventual phone interface at some point in the future, and not to forget the desktop and netbook interfaces.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 31, 2011 15:48 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes yes indeed. It's sensible to have a menu locked to the top of the screen on a handheld, just as it's sensible to have gestural interfaces on a handheld. The first is broken by a big screen, the second by machines where the screen is not held in your hand. Thus, different interfaces are absolutely required.

It's a shame the GNOME people didn't notice this. You can't just give the two things the same UI without frustrating a lot of people.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 31, 2011 17:58 UTC (Wed) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link] (1 responses)

Top of the screen menu is also particularly lousy with multihead setups.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 31, 2011 22:03 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite so. Top of which screen? Sod's Law says, whichever screen you weren't using. (Not that other programs are exactly blameless in this area: you'd go green if you saw the appalling hack I'm using to make libsdl-1.2 work on my dual-monitor setup.)

Same interface?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 7:56 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (5 responses)

I disagree. Tablets seem to be optimized for content consumption, not creation.

that's what people in the industry kept saying when the ipad came out, and I used to believe in that. "it's for consumption on the sofa". which is definitely true, media consumption on a tablet is an incredible experience; people should just try it it's awesome.

this stuff, though, was also said of the personal computer thirty years ago (except not with the "consumption/creation" terms): "it's too small, not powerful enough, not connected enough to do real work on it. at most you can play with some game".

let's just remember that the tablet market doesn't really exist: right now, it's the ipad market; and Apple has released media creation applications on it, with different user interaction models. others will start copying them soon, and miss the point by about a thousand miles: it's a new device, and it's finding its footing, and exposing new interaction models along the way. copying Apple, or trying to port desktop applications as they are to it it's not going to work.

you cannot write an Excel sheet on a tablet. only Microsoft thinks you can, but they also thought that the biggest appeal for Windows Mobile 6 was being able to edit a spreadsheet on a QVGA 2.4" phone screen (according to their adverts), so they don't really count.

the fact that you can't edit a spreadsheet on a tablet could mean that you just simply won't be able to do it, or (and I believe it's more likely) that the spreadsheet user interaction model has to be changed to take into account a touchscreen and direct manipulation of data. what we call a spreadsheet on the desktop might be a completely different experience on a tablet and you could still transparently migrate documents from one device to the other.

so I don't believe any more to the "it's a media consumption device" mantra. it's just what people say before others come up with something really cool.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 14:48 UTC (Thu) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link] (4 responses)

> so I don't believe any more to the "it's a media consumption device" mantra. it's just what people say before others come up with something really cool.

Speaking as someone who's done some iphone/ipad development, it really is a media consumption device first. The problems:

- screen keyboards suck for extended use
- bluetooth keyboards/mice are a negligible presence
- there are few hardware buttons, and you may not have access to them
- touch interaction is weak

The weakness of touch interaction is a particular problem. There are three main things that make the touch interaction suboptimal:

First, you have no context. There is "touch down" and nothing else. No "left click" vs. "right click", no pressure sensitivity, no angle detection, no "hover", no cursor position when there isn't a finger down. The only context you can have is multitouch, but that only improves things slightly, and it causes its own problems:

- two points approach each other, meet, and move back apart. Did they pass through each other, or bounce off each other? There's no way for the hardware to know.

- two points approach each other, meet, and then one of them disappears. Which one disappeared? There's no way for the hardware to know.

- you can't easily have multiple gestures occurring at the same time unless they're happening in compartmentalized parts of the screen that you've pre-defined

Second, your finger obscures whatever you're touching. Unlike an indirect device like a mouse or trackpad, with a touchscreen you can never see the point on the screen that you're activating.

Third, touch coordinates are very loose. Even if you touch the screen very gently, there's a 5mm or so diameter circle that's touched, and the touch coordinate the OS reports could be anywhere within (or near!) that point. On a first generation ipad, I've had touch coordinates come in completely offscreen (ie: out in negative coordinates, somewhere on the bezel) when touching a spot that was near the edge of the screen.

Things get better if you have a stylus, but not enough people have a stylus that you can actually count on it.

There's a reason the gestures are all large movements.

So, you've got sloppy, imprecise "mouse" input, weak text input, and some vaguely useful (but mostly unsuitable for content creation) inputs like the accelerometers.

You *can* produce content with current tablets; it's like producing fine art with crayons. Feasible for the talented, but a chore and done mostly for the novelty of the process. Much more of a chore than doing the same thing with (say) a laptop. Perhaps future tablets will tighten up their input systems, but until that happens tablets are going to remain mostly unsuitable for all but the most trivial of content generation; the kind where poking a few onscreen buttons does all the work.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 16:44 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (2 responses)

A tablet can offer a good interface that mimics single-function music devices: iPad Music: How To Make Drum & Bass w/Korg iMS-20 App. (If I were in the business of making gig bags for guitars or other instruments, I'd put an iPad-sized pocket on the outside.)

Same interface?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 17:44 UTC (Thu) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link] (1 responses)

I think that's where tablets and ipods and smartphones are going to be for the next few years, at least; a consolidation of all the little gadgets and doohickeys (phone, calculator, camera, music player, portable game machine, pager, password vault, video player, wristwatch, GPS, portable storage, map, notebook, wallet, keys, ID...) you used to have to carry around separately.

That's why Apple's stuff is all aggressively single-tasking; their base assumption is that the device is a swiss army knife of gadgets, and like a swiss army knife it's only good for one thing at a time, and it only has to be ok at any given thing as long as it does everything passably.

We're really feeling this in the game industry, because the iphone seems to be gutting the handheld console market. Why carry around a 3DS or a PSP when you've already got your iphone?

One of the places I think free software has an opportunity in this space is with more technical stuff; if a tablet plus a small arduino dongle could give you (say) a credible portable high-res oscilloscope, for instance, there's a set of people who would find that invaluable. Or something you could hook up to weather monitoring hardware. Or other arbitrary "unsanctioned" devices.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 18:01 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

+1 Insightful.

For a lot of devices, it's cheaper to put a mini web server on it than to design the needed physical controls and display. You could sell hardware, publish the REST API to control it, and optionally sponsor some of the tablet app projects that use the API. Test equipment and weather stations are two good ones, also lab equipment such as PCR machines, high-end printers, A/V gear, etc.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 30, 2011 15:01 UTC (Tue) by carlleigh (guest, #79395) [Link]

That is why when I'm out on the road working out of my office or home I want a touch screen tablet. I'd also like it to support 3G and voip or mobile phone.

At home I want the same device to hook up to my 24 inch display either by HDMI or micro USB. No Bluetooth I like speed and efficiency. Bluetooth requires several transceivers and I'd like to save the power when I'm on the road for a more energy efficient micro USB keyboard.

I want my tablet to do everything. I've got a spreed sheet program which works reasonably well. I don't need Microsoft...........

Nobody really needs Microsoft. (Tablets must really have them shaking!)

CPU and GPU Processors for small devices will improve quickly. Batteries will get small and cheaper. What do I need the old workstation for when my tablet frankly can do it all. I love empty pockets one device to rule it all.

5 billion of the worlds people really can afford all the eye candy. Powerful Desktop. Tablet. Mobile Phone. Land Line for data. etc .etc. etc. But they can afford what will be coming in the tablet space and wireless networking.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 2:17 UTC (Thu) by deater (subscriber, #11746) [Link]

I remember when 2001 was the year of the Linux tablet. I want my Transmeta-powered Frontpath Progear back!

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Aug 26, 2011 18:35 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (7 responses)

Why won't GNOME be a player on tablets or phones? It is a pig. Gnome Shell might be designed to look like a tablet or phone but the GNOME stack is a bloated hog. On a tablet 1GB of ram is the max currently seen in the wild and that only on the premium products that won't be running GNOME. No, they would have to break in at the bottom and look at the specs on those, CPU speeds at 1Ghz or lower and 256-512M ram No way GNOME is going to run well in that.

It gets worse, it is probably true that to survive the checkbox problem there would need to be smartphones too, their hardware and available battery is even more restricted.

Haven't really looked at KDE lately but I'd bet their footprint is just as horrible. And so will Windows 8's footprint be too heavy to succeed in a resource and power constrained environment. So it is likely to remain an iOS vs Android world for a few years off the desktop/laptop.

We had a choice a decade ago to keep our stack lean and mean and able to run on older hardware. All the bright kids with big ass developers desktops said screw that, lets bang it out in Python or layers upon layers of C++ frameworks and make it pretty, 90% complete and move on to something more interesting because it runs plenty nice on my machine and it will run OK on most people's machine in a year when the distros catch up. But had we kept the ability to run on older hardware, now when new tablets have the power of desktops from a few years ago we would have been in a position to rule the world. Alas.

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Aug 30, 2011 11:38 UTC (Tue) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

Just to add a data point: I'm running KDE 4.7 on openSUSE 11.4 with messaging, the rekonq browser and a couple of terminals and the system uses 559M of RAM total. I'm also running openLDAP, MySQL and PostgreSQL on this machine. It's not great, but I it should still run just fine on a machine with 512M of RAM and I can imagine that it would be possible to get by with 256M with some optimizing.

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Sep 4, 2011 15:20 UTC (Sun) by jlokier (guest, #52227) [Link] (1 responses)

I'll add a data point too.
My old laptop used to run GNOME, Mozilla and a plethora of development tools very well. It has 192MB RAM, and I used it from 1999 to 2006.

I don't expect a modern GUI to fit, but I thought at least a text console with a current distro would be useful as a VPN hub, remote serial ports etc. for I have quite a large network of embedded systems which I develop on remotely.

I quite like Ubuntu Server, so I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 on my old laptop with 192MB RAM, and it couldn't even run the text-mode installer. After an hour of swapping I gave up. Debian was not much better.

In the end I used debootstrap on another machine to make a Debian image, then copied the filesystem over. It runs fine, but the basic installer doesn't fit -- on a system that used to run GNOME and Mozilla very well.

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Sep 4, 2011 16:38 UTC (Sun) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]

I find that if you don't have fully modern hardware, it's better to go with something like gentoo or slackware or the like. I think the ubuntu folks have "modern desktop machine" as their baseline, so they work pretty well if you've got a PC that's less than 5 years old, but get creaky otherwise.

I wind up repurposing old hardware as unix/linux boxes fairly often. Generally, I reach for gentoo; it takes a little more fiddling to set up, but it works pretty well even on older hardware. Assuming you don't try to install KDE or GNOME, of course... :)

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Aug 30, 2011 21:59 UTC (Tue) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (3 responses)

No, they would have to break in at the bottom and look at the specs on those, CPU speeds at 1Ghz or lower and 256-512M ram No way GNOME is going to run well in that.

GNOME 3.0 runs fine on netbooks, which are single core Atom ~1 GHz CPUs with 1GB of RAM. new smartphones and tablets are coming out on dual core CPUs. the memory usage of the Shell is between 150 and 200 megs of RAM; anything more is a bug. the real issues arrive when you start the web browser, but that has nothing to do with GNOME.

so, you're essentially wrong: GNOME works fine on netbooks and tablets.

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Aug 30, 2011 23:18 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

I'll bite.

What exactly is GNOME going to do about web browser as core functionality the GNOME OS future? Html5 based apps are only going to grow in importance, especially in the infotainment consumption use case that the tablet form factor seems to fit very well.

Amd there's still a significant point that GNOME as a project needs to address concerning the definition of a coherent API and SDK story that can be breadcrumbed to application developers. Application developers will need to reuse as much of the code silo that underpins Shell to minimize resource consumption as application developers build task specific applications for the post-desktop form factor usage cases. Android and iOS both lay down a pretty strong preferred SDK storyline for incoming application developers.

-jef

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Aug 31, 2011 3:09 UTC (Wed) by bronson (guest, #4806) [Link]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=697592 Only happens in gnome shell.

So, you're essentially wrong: GNOME needs help on some netbooks and tablets.

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Aug 31, 2011 18:14 UTC (Wed) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]

> [...] the memory usage of the Shell is between 150 and 200 megs of RAM; anything more is a bug. the real issues arrive when you start the web browser, but that has nothing to do with GNOME.

So, Shell is eating a sizable fraction of RAM, but hey, it's other people's problem to try to make their applications fit in the remaining space? Because, you know, people run computers and tablets to experience the GNOME brand, not to actually *do* anything...

Having the shell eat 15%-20% of system RAM on a 1GiB tablet is not "doing fine" by any reasonable stretch of the imagination.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Sep 1, 2011 16:11 UTC (Thu) by mvaar (guest, #75742) [Link]

>> MeeGo, he said, was not really even worth mentioning; it is a "puppet" of Intel without any real community governance.

How do gnome fanboys get to make FUD like that without questioning ? I bet the only reason he's saying that is because meego did not adopt all of gnome crap. Which in itself should make meego more compelling.