I'm not so thrilled about mobile operating systems... mostly because of the shrinking choices I seem to have about what apps I can run, where I can get them, what permissions I give (or deny) them, and the feeling that privacy is simply "less of a thing" on mobile devices. Is there a tablet that:

- can reasonably run a non-tablet-specific distro of Linux (preferably plain old Debian)
- can be carried around in a small napsack (ie: no fan)
- has enough battery life to get me through most of a day (anywhere near as good as my old Pixel 4a/5G would be great)

I mean I really just want to offload most of my typical phone based tasks (not calls or texts) to a device that I feel like I have more control over. Am I kidding myself or is this actually a *practical* thing?

#AskFedi #Privacy

@jmhorner
I know a @fun who uses a Samsung tablet from 2012 running postmarketOS (Alpine Linux for mobile devices) and is pretty happy with it.

@jmhorner @mobian exists and worth checking out, but @postmarketOS is likely the project with most mobile hardware support out there.
As for the "mobile feeling" this entirely depends on what desktop environment you want to use on top of those two distros. There are some more mobile focused, including GNOME and KDE that have a mobile friendly alternative, but all the traditional one should work as well (but might be not super usable when you miss a keyboard and mouse setup)

As another point of view, I remeber a German company selling tablets with Ubuntu touch preinstalled. (Found it https://volla.online/de/shop/volla-tablet/ )

@portaloffreedom I had a quick look at Mobian, but it is just like most mobile interfaces (a home screen with a grid of icons). I'd prefer a window manager like Openbox with no desktop environment. In fact, I guess I'm not really looking for a new OS, but rather really scaled back hardware to run my current OS on.

@jmhorner may I suggest something completely different then? https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform

@moses_izumi @jmhorner yes, I run postmarketOS with sxmo/sway. Main issue with it is it's old and I get reminded of it being old as soon as I launch firefox. Otherwise it's pretty decent!

@fun @moses_izumi I think the trouble in having is that I don't want a mobile OS, but can't find a small device that can reasonably run a desktop style operating system. :-(

@jmhorner @moses_izumi What do you mean? postmarketOS can be considered a mobile OS because it runs on phones, but we don't lock you down to a single UI experience - it's pretty standard linux after all, with a package manager, openrc/systemd init system, everything you've come to expect from a "regular" linux distro.

check https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Interface for a list of what UIs are "officially" supported by postmarketOS. Among this list are Phosh and Plasma Mobile, which obviously try to be mobile UIs based off iOS/Android. But there is also Openbox, WindowMaker, xfce4, all that good stuff. Also, if a DE you like isn't in this list but is in the alpine repos, it's not hard to manually install it.

With the standard Linux environment postmarketOS provides, the possibilities are simply endless.

Some people use postmarketOS to repurpose their tablet to be a writerdeck, others use it for homeassistant dashboard, others literally run kubernetes and docker on their phones! I could go on and on for hours

As for my daily driving, my tablet runs sxmo/sway. Basically, think of it as a bog standard sway, which is a tiling window manager (https://swaywm.org) and a bunch of scripts and tools (sxmo) to glue everything together and add gesture-based navigation to make it usable on touchscreen-only devices (so I don't have to carry around a keyboard all the time, though when I do, my keybindings are the same as sway on my laptop :)

I know a few that also have tablets about as powerful as mine and daily drive standard xfce4 or mate on them. Of course, you may also choose to not have a UI at all, and just use the tty, that's totally an option too. (an onscreen keyboard is also available, but again, it is optional)

In fact, you can absolutely use the exact same apps you use on the desktop. For web browsing, I just run desktop firefox (well, librewolf, but same thing, occasionally I use NetSurf too for lighter browsing). For editing, I just use vim. For taking notes, xournalpp to the rescue. For IRC, just ssh and tmux attach. I could go on and on but basically the point is I use this thing the same way I use my laptop, with mostly the exact same apps. I'm really just treating this tablet as a small linux-based netbook (remember those? :D)

@fun the vast bulk of information I can find about postmarketOS is pre-setup desktop environments on phones, with the typical "home screen" design. Thing is, I'm not really looking for an OS (or a distro)... I'm looking more for a fanless piece of hardware that can run basically any Linux but that has better portability and battery life than my laptop. I'd like to dd an ISO on to a USB stick, jam it in to a (preferably non-UEFI) device, setup my own partitioning with FDE (without LVM), install a basic system with no GUI and sysvinit, manually install xorg, openbox, alsa, and tint2 (no display manager), add my custom theme, install some applications like Gajim and SeaMonkey, and carry it around in a mini-napsack instead of a phone.