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I’ve been thinking about a Linux tablet and a convertible would be perfect.
But man it’s gonna be pricey af isn’t it
But I know, there’s the Pinetab (or Pine Tablet?)
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Framework
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Do the research first. Surface tablets make decent Linux devices.
There's a few Linux distros with the Linux Surface Kernel rolled in. My personal favourite is Nobara, it's from Glorious Eggroll, who does the ProtonGE fork. It's a fork of Fedora.
If one of the ones with LSK rolled in doesn't suit you? It's super painless to add it to any distro you prefer.
Thank you for the suggestion! Though I’ve selectively ignored the Surfaces cause Microsoft. I’m not in a rush to get one, and I’d rather support other vendors if I could, and wouldn’t even get a Surface off someone else just so that I don’t advertise for Microsoft. All the more reason to do so given the current political climate (I’m not from the US).
Yeah, I'm from Canada and live in the UK. Grabbed my surface off eBay a year and a bit ago, slapped a big ol' 🖕 sticker over the windows logo on the back. And don't really take it out the house.
If you can find one at a good price they're good value for spec, and with the LSK patches make for a decent Linux platform.
Totally understand not wanting to spend on an American product, even used. Was doing some looking around last night. I'd seen a post about CatchOS's latest update, and in the patch notes they mentioned adding ASUS Armoury driver support. I run Garuda on my ASUS TUF laptop, mostly everything just works, but fan control and power management is noticeably worse than with winblows. The ASUS kernel patches also add support for a lot of the features on their....uhhh... can't remember what they call them...where the screen rotates and turns it into kind of a fat tablet. So might be another option for a non-US manufacturer that isn't doing Linux-specific hardware.
I do like stuff like framework, but it suffers from the same issue that most Made-For-Linux™ stuff does, if not as severely. My main issue with MFL stuff is it tends to be expensive for what's in it. That's not a manufacturer specific issue, it's a market issue. There's not going to be near as many people buying a Linux specific system compared to one for windows. The market is just way smaller. So the price has to be higher per unit to cover initial expenses of R&D, tooling, etc etc etc. Just not far enough along the curve of market saturation.
I like the idea of putting a 🖕or 💩 over the logo, so I’m gonna steal it for if and when a US-made laptop flies to my doorstep.
I’ve had an ASUS convertible at one point a long time ago (probably 6 years ago now) that I wanted to put Linux on, but it was pretty terrible, but you’re right, I could give these a try again after a bit of research. I generally don’t mind a bit of degradation and am quite comfortable with tinkering with the system to get what I want, but was just burned enough to not try for a while and wait it out. But thank you for mentioning CatchyOS, which I’ve not heard of. I might give that a try. I would’ve just tried slapping plain Arch on it myself otherwise.
And yeah, I get that MFL just doesn’t have the market share to get the benefits of economies of scale. It’s disappointing, but a reality nonetheless.
I've heard good things about Catchy, if I get bored and start having the ol' distro-hop itch I'll probably spin it up on the DT. As I've not tried it yet, I can't say one way or the other if it's any good though. If you're interested in an Arch based Distro, I can however strongly recommend Garuda. They've got more flavours than you can shake a flight-stick at. The documentation is expansive. The forums are highly active. And the Devs/mods are really on top of looking into issue posts. There's been two times since I started using Garuda, about 3 years ago, where I had to make a post asking for clarification/help. The first time I had a response within 5mins, the second 45mins. And having looked through other issues posts that seems like the norm.
Dev/mod response time is, from what I've seen, within an hour or so.
The ASUS Armoury driver patches and LSK patches are distro-agnostic, so easily implemented regardless of what you decide to install, which is how it should be.
As a long time Linux user, and now having Linux as my only operating system for my personal devices. I really want to buy a MFL device, just to add to the numbers so the economy of scale numbers change a bit. I'm also broke AF....
Price???
Probably too much.
Framework says it won't share the modular machine's full spec breakdown, ship date or pricing until it's available for pre-order. So, you won't know how "entry-level" it is until the clock is ticking to reserve one.
Framework needs to stop just making new products and instead focus on bringing costs down. They're basically destroying their entire business with this fragmentation. Their CEO needs a reality check.