Purism Announce New 11-Inch Linux Tablet

thehatfox@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 160 points –
New 11-Inch Linux Tablet Announced by Purism - OMG! Linux
omglinux.com
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I’m really excited about Linux tablets, but quite apprehensive about Purism as a company. Starlabs’ new tablet does also seem like a compelling package, luckily.

Pine64's pinetab 2 also looks pretty good

From this blog review on June 2023, it seems that camera, WiFi and bluetooth are still not working properly.

PineTab2 seems more like a developer tinkering/testing device rather than a Linux tablet alternative for Android/iPad.

Yeah, that's generally the idea behind Pine64 devices. Also note that they encourage you not to order if you expect refunds for issues like broken pixels.

They're very cheap because of that though.

True. I just wanted to add that comment just because the other poster make it sounds like PineTab2 is an alternative for Purism tablet - which is competing with iPads and Android tablet. It gave me false hope for a moment until I searched some reviews online and see it is a totally different device category.

So I just replied to clarify just in case other people got the false impression too.

Correct. They used an old Android wifi/BT chip that had a driver for an old kernel, but it tends to run slow and crash on the newest kernels. The devs are working on wifi first and then will start doing the others.

Since I don't know either: could you tell me a bit about your thoughts about Starlabs and Purism?

Purism’s corporate charter recognizes them as a social purpose corporation, it sounds very good in theory, but I think it’s been a struggle for them to pull off. Under this charter they’re supposed to value creating products and services that benefit society more than simply making profits. Unfortunately, I think being so idealistic has caused them to over promise and under deliver, as was the case with the Librem 5 phone imo.

In addition to what the other commenter said: AFAIK Starlabs is the only Europe based manufacturer that makes their own Linux based laptops (non Clevo/similar computers). I personally don’t have any experience with their stuff though, but I’ve never heard similar complaints about them that are levelled at Purism.