I hope tablets aren’t offtopic :p
What would be a small tablet with the following?
- good mainline kernel support (don’t really need camera or sensors)
- aarch64 architecture (if there’s something with another architecture that works well for the other points let me know anyway)
- mobile data, preferrably 5G, would be fine with 4G if that is not yet a thing
- USB-C
- working suspend
I just want something to occasionally read blog posts and Piefed/Lemmy on.
It has to be small. I prefer 8" tablets. 12" tablets are really not for me. Perhaps I could grudgingly accept 9"…
I currently use a Dell Venue 8 Pro 5585, it’s previously been a Windows tablet. It works well, although something crashes occasionally that makes it unable to display the batter percentage. Build quality is thin plastic and I always worry about it breaking, so I never carry it with me.
Distro support is not required, I want to port Mobian if I find a suitable device. I’ve previously done that for the Pixel 3a, so I know what I have to do.
12 Nov 2024
I know. Not much has changed since then that I’m aware of, outside the BRAX Open Slate. GNU/Linux first tablets is currently a slowly evolving category
Tablets seem like an even more challenging space than smartphones for open devices.
Recently read about the Brax open_slate (pre-orders, supposed to be shipping in late 2026), but it’s a 12" device:
Curious what other alternatives people can suggest. I am also looking for a smaller 9" device.
There are some kinda DIY raspberry pi tablet things.
Yeah, I know, but that’s more fiddling around than using it. :p
Well you said you wanted Linux
Microsoft makes a small tablet, surface go 2/3 which can run Linux. There are some compatibility issues with LTE if I recal, so when I was looking for something similar I went with a pixel tablet with graphene os.
I think they have a tablet or two on the site, but I do think the mini laptops are super interesting. https://www.crowdsupply.com/laptops-and-pcs
Tablets are shit these days. The first version of the Galaxy Tab S6 was good hardware but terrible software, saved with LineageOS. An SM-P610 might be good if you can find one and flash it. But I couldn’t use it for work. The Pixel Tablet is probably the best compromise esp since it takes Graphene.
