
Why the Vivaldi tablet never came to market - Tsiolkovsky
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/606100/1bc685b18f0f85bc/
======
616c
I am about to give up on Android. I have an Android phone. Once the new
Phoenux (GTA04) brings pure Linux back to a mobile phone, I will ditch that as
well. I have an old Android tablet, and I just never got into it. And I love
Linux variants and playing.

It is just too much cruft on top of what I care about. So if Vivaldi will not
come to be, and the alternatives are so so (I did see that project to make a
RPi into a tablet with a custom shell; very cool), I am definitely going to
pony up the money for a tablet laptop with a touch screen and just spend a
little more and save myself the hassle.

I have seen decent reviews of the Yoga 11s. I think I am going to splurge on
that. Honestly, it is not much more epxensive than a high end of the line
Android tablet, but with no one of the flexibility I waste my time on Linux
for so.

So yeah. If someone makes Vivaldi I would be super happy. But I have come to
see the truly open tablet as the year of the Linux desktop, in terms of them
being pipe dreams, and I would rather focus on things I can use instead of
praying for hostile industry players to begrudgingly give me and then make me
do a song and dance to get back to root for.

~~~
pessimizer
Support [http://neo900.org/](http://neo900.org/) if you want a traditionally
Linux phone - it's another GTA04 project. Right now it's my best prospect for
a Linux phone, piggybacking off the huge N900 community.

I have fears that the software porting effort is lagging far behind the
hardware effort, but I'm putting the odds of getting a usable jessie or Maemo
phone a bit higher than the odds of Jolla retreating from the iOS/Android
strategy of sandboxing the user for business purposes.

~~~
616c
Yeah, thanks for clarifying the neo900 or Pheonux project or whatever they
call themselves now are what I am waiting for.

If I had money, I would pledge but I am tight on cash and 500-900USD promise
of a phone is out of my league for the coming year.

------
anon4
This kind of project might see more success if it was made to work on Android
devices. I'm cautiously optimistic that once KDE works on Wayland and Wayland
works with Android drivers (or there are good quality mainline video drivers
for the various chipsets), we would be able to root most any Android tablet
and install a KDE/Wayland stack on it.

I think that enabling that kind of thing - running an alternative environment
on already existing hardware is a better goal than making your own hardware
from scratch. Better as in more realistic to gain a userbase, I mean.

~~~
xanderstrike
> I think that... running an alternative environment on already existing
> hardware is a better goal.

I agree, and we know for a fact that it's a good goal because it's pretty much
been the strategy of every desktop Linux distribution for decades. You don't
need to own the hardware, you just need to make it work on someone else's.

~~~
zanny
Consider though that having the software only gets you so far, though. the
modern Linux desktop languishes from a lack of any compelling vendor options
for Linux powered devices. You don't get mindshare and take over the personal
computer world if nobody can get your software. And having to manually install
the OS instantly knocks out 99% of potential users.

So I do think at this point desktop Linux is at a crossroads where someone
really needs to throw the money in to take over the personal computer space
that Chromebooks are already dominating. Except instead of ChromeOS, throw
around some Fedora, Lubuntu, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, etc devices. Same general idea,
just without saying "were Google, use our cloud stuff because your computer
can't do anything else", instead "heres a computer that does all the things
the Windows machines do, except on ARM CPUs that cost a third as much and
don't compromise".

I guess for that, though, you need freedreno and lima to get some love so we
can finally have some first class mobile GPU Mesa drivers, because the binary
blobs are hopeless wrecks even if they ran fine in a classic X or Wayland
stack.

------
DiThi
> Seigo also concluded that trying to deal with Asia while resident in Europe
> was a mistake.

Just as it happened with the OpenPandora.

~~~
Pxtl
There must be US/European companies that will manage this relationship for
you.

~~~
bradfa
Yes, such as Dragon Innovation:
[http://www.dragoninnovation.com/services/manufacturing](http://www.dragoninnovation.com/services/manufacturing)

But you can also find a few US or EU based contract manufacturers who have
very good partners in Asia such that you start low volume runs and work out
the issues close to home and then transition to Asia for the low cost labor
once all your manufacturing is working well and has good yields. But this is
also not free in cost or time and some companies cannot afford to bear it.

------
rburhum
To the risk of sounding completely insensitive, I honestly don't understand
why they did not invest $5k in a good Kickstarter video and campaign. This is
exactly the kind of project that has people automatically drop money on for
two factors: 1) geek factor and 2) philosophical factor. It is a no-brainer.

~~~
rasz_pl
Your takeaway from a failed hardware project is that authors should sucker a
ton of people out of money using crowd funding in order to not be in debt when
project inevitably fails?

Brilliant! You want a thermal camera with that (muoptics)? or maybe a smart
watch (ostro)? or a magic nano ultra capacitor AA batteries?

Main problem was economies of scale, no experience with manufacturing, NIH
syndrome, and no market.

1 NOBODY wants a tablet with 2 year old specs.

2 almost nobody wants a KDE/gnome/firefox tablet.

There was nothing stopping them from simply ordering 1000 (pretty standard moq
for crazy low prices in $30-50 range) already shipping tablets, and porting
their code over.

~~~
zanny
> porting their code over.

They have been stuck with x86 based hardware since the ARM GPU drivers are a
collective wreck and they use X, so the shitty Android blobs aren't even close
to being an option.

I think it was just premature. We need Lima / Freedreno / that open Tegra
project to mature into their own, so we can have first class Mesa GPU
acceleration on ARM systems, before we can try bringing desktop Linux to said
devices. It is the same mistake Canonical made with Mir, and I think it is a
mistake with Wayland - the Android GPU stack is a lost cause, and trying to
work around it and have the tumor of Qualcomms / ARMs shitty blobs is doomed
from the start.

------
talles
For who is wondering how it looked like:
[http://bit.ly/1tsn8aK](http://bit.ly/1tsn8aK)

(photo not mine)

~~~
j_s
aka [http://www.netbooknews.com/wp-
content/2012/04/vivaldispark-5...](http://www.netbooknews.com/wp-
content/2012/04/vivaldispark-550x341.png)

~~~
toni
Just a couple of days ago I was DDGoing a phrase like "Debian cheap tablet" or
such and found this page[1]. I still can't understand why there is no market
for a Linux tablet.

[1] [http://www.gregwar.com/posts/debian-on-a-low-cost-
tablet-50](http://www.gregwar.com/posts/debian-on-a-low-cost-tablet-50)

~~~
01Michael10
Why does Linux always have to be associated with "cheap"?

There is no market for Linux devices because everyone wants them to be
"cheap". I would like a high end tablet that runs Linux myself...

~~~
keithpeter
Linux does not _always_ have to be associated with cheap, I recollect that
Dell's 'Sputnik' tie up with Canonical wasn't at the $350 end of their laptop
range.

I read the grandparent comment along the lines of 'I want to see how to put
Linux on a tablet. People will be hacking this with the possibility of
bricking the device. I'll search for cheaper devices'

~~~
toni
My sentiments indeed. I will not dare to hack on a $400 Android tablet, but
gladly brick a couple of $50 tablets in order to learn one thing or another.

------
donniezazen
I think KDE has a long way to go before I should jump into mobile market.
There are problems in both technological level and philosophical level.
Technologically, developers need a great platform, sound APIs and good design
guidelines along with specialized tool to make it happen. On a philosophical
level, it would be a nightmare to use KDE on tablets. KDE is nowhere polished
or simple for touch screen. Grossly put KDE is an orgy of settings. Open does
not mean that you can put any crap on user's plate. And one ring to rule them
all principle is that the most important factor is monetization. If
developer's are not making money no development will happen.

~~~
zanny
I don't think Plasma Active has ever been about "da apps". It also doesn't
hurt that inherent to its design, you bank on the same demographic that Jolla
and Ubuntu Touch do - Qt mobile apps. Any of those that ran on any of the
above platforms, which would also run on iOS and Android, would _also_ run on
Plasma Active. And all the desktop OSes as well.

Also, mobile is the perfect direction for a perceived "top heavy" desktop to
move towards, because it requires you to simplify your UI to accommodate it.

The thing in the KDE world to understand is that QML changes everything. The
Plasma widgets we have _now_ were built on top of Qt4 series technologies and
were often language hodge podges of Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, etc. They weren't
hardware accelerated, and the standard toolkit was lacking compared to the
QtQuick Controls of today.

And the entire QML thing is about fluidity. Whereas old Qt Widgets let you
build wildly complex UIs that were pretty much static, QML is best suited to
simple parts doing crazy transitions and fancy effects. Even if you convey the
same complexity, the appearance difference can be enough to be intuitive for
some where, say, kdenlive is not.

So I don't think Plasma Active is a "mistake". It is a great place to see the
next geenration of applications for KDE in general come from, since they have
to be focused. It is slow, and it is not going to see any market adoption any
time soon, but trying to aggressively take the mobile market I feel is a
mistake right now - it needs mindshare that requires Qt5 adoption which
requires the KDE5 series to get into its stride first.

