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Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what would you like to see?
In this thread, I would like to collect some ideas about what would comprise a good, "usable" open operating system running on a tablet.
Here's my situation: I'd originally planned on diving into writing apps for the Jolla tablet, which I'd hoped to have received last summer. But, of course, it's now winter, and given current circumstances, I'm not sure I'll ever receive the tablet. So, I'm trying a new tack: I'm now planning on picking up a cheap Nexus 7 tablet, and installing something other than Android on it. If this requires me to do some UI coding myself, so be it; I might as well spend my energies on that, if Sailfish is going nowhere fast... So, here are some questions to consider: 1) Use Mer or not? I think there are a number of advantages with Mer, but given that the initial target here is a tablet, maybe a full-blown desktop distribution of Linux would be doable... 2) Assuming Mer is chosen, what UI to use: a) Sailfish? I'm kinda hesitant about even touching Sailfish at this point, as it may soon end up entangled in Jolla's death-throes, and is in any case way too big for just a handful of open-source advocates to maintain. But it really is a beautiful UI... b) Nemo? Support for this UI seems to have dried up, but it is cleanly open today, and seems more lightweight than Sailfish. I want to at least give it a try. c) Hildon/Cordia/etc.? It'd be really nice to see a Maemo-ish interface come back again. (And it includes stuff that I really like: extremely light-weight UI elements, lots of support for alternate input methods -- such as stylus and keyboard, support for widgets, etc.) 3) Given a particular OS and UI, what features are essential? I myself demand a decent terminal and shell. ;) But my guess would be that tools like a web browser and e-mail client would be significant for most users. Media players as well. Again, I'm not a tablet user, so I don't have a good feel for what people do with these things... 4)The fun question: what could we do differently? For example: one thing that absolutely every phone OS designer has chosen to do is to kill tasks whenever a memory overrun is threatened. This is, of course, to ensure that you can always use the device to send and receive phone calls. Without the need to protect the phone functionality, a tablet UI could reasonably return to standard memory paging techniques to bring true multitasking back to mobile devices... Anyway, let me throw the floor open for comments here. If you had the chance to put together your own tablet with your own OS, what would you want to see? :) EDIT: I don't think I put enough of an emphasis on the idea that this is a question about what you, yourself would like to see in a mobile OS, not what you think would sell as an OS for the general market. :) So, I've modified the thread title a bit... |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
I fear that engaging this lot will end up in the same mess that plagued Jolla. The too many cooks syndrome. But what the heck, here's my tuppence.
For starters, I think a tablet is much closer to the desktop than to a phone. I think the major mistake all tablet OS producers make is to use the same UI on the tablet as they do on the phone. So perhaps the best starting point would be to look around the existing desktop environments and seeing if any of them could be suitable on a keyboardless touchscreen device with minimal changes. The second thing I would suggest naturally comes from the first anyway but I will spell it out just in case. Focus on function, not the form. No facy animations that slow down the work flow. No unnecessary transparencies. Really count the number of taps (swipes, key presses...) it takes to do each task. Case study: the N900 keyboard. I know, I said keyboardless. This is just for illustration. I do not know about other language variants but the English keyboard has the dot in the main layout. No shifts, no symbols. So far so good. BUT - consider a text entry box that accepts only numbers. The numbers on the N900 keyboard are on a symbol shift, which is helpfully pre-selected for you when such an entry box receives a focus. The trouble is, the dot (in this case, the decimal point) now requires pressing the sym shift key. Annoying as hell. Good old Palm did that just right: the dot was a dot without a shift in both the letter and the number mode. Why? Because they cared about workflow down to the minute details like that. |
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Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
I'll just note that there is the Fedlet project that aims to bring Fedora to Intel Bay Trail based tablets.
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Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
I'm all for mer based os running...
but for gawds sake make it a rr. that way it doesn't become a nightmare in upkeep. I love arm and all... but if you have the serious hardware...use it. Base it off Debian... make it an rr ... throw, mer into the mix, and then you have a bloody unstoppable tank of a distro .. clean, spartan and not top heavy? antix is a good debian rr example. absolutely fab. runs on a bloody toaster.. old hardware or new hardware... looks beautiful, runs beautiful... I don't suggest making any distro that can't be applied to as many devices as possible...nor would I suggest a distro which has a lifespan of 6 months or 2 to 4 years tops...with nothing but headache along the way... I suggest another way after seeing (pretty much) a decade of the same problems attempted to be solved using the same solutions over and over...with the same result. Inevitably I believe that making mer or fremantle or hildon or diablo ...essentially a maem-esque distro properly laptop/tablet compatible is the way to transcend the limits of the initial devices they were built for... which is what solution we should (and seem to ) be running toward. I think that making things more complicated than necessary esp concerning onscreen keyboards...welllll... I do think utilizing existing (very plentiful) brand model devices which are as open and ...um hm...receptive...to linux is important.. the nexus line is a good example. in particular..some device brands appear to work well until looking under the hood and there is something ugly like broadcom wifi chip or some other component that doesn't play well. As far as tablets go... I would seriously suggest a convertible hybrid which has a keyboard. It isn't that I'm biased to my fav. and I'm extolling it's virtues due to a brand loyalty. If any other product did what my hybrid does and can do...I'd happily be saying the same of it... but my fav became my fav because of everything it contained, how well it's internal bits got along with one another and how well it got along with linux distros compared to sooo many laptops, hybrids and tablets I have used in the last 2 decades... I've used uncomfortable desktops, netbooks, clunky and sleek laptops, antiquated (now) umpc's, the early tablets, recent tablets too, with and without attempted physik keyboards ...and hybrids...hybrids with docks that have the keyboard, hybrids with docks that have the optical bay...etc... best model I've used in my time is the toshiba portege m700 m750 and m780 (i7 is my latest and last model they made)...everything in the brute. the stylus is nice...it's great to use it as a proper laptop..it's great to flip the screen around and use it as a pure tablet....it gets the job done..it works with just about every flavour of linux I have thrown at it.. I rarely use the optical drive ....if ever... 8 gb of ram, a tb hard drive internally ...purely for easy casual storage... and I have a second hard drive caddy for the optical bay which I pop in and out as the desire suits me to play with any of 4 or 5 hard drives with various distros ( I don't know how many I'm currently playing with...I've lost count..) I shove in and spark it up for... So in all... I think It would also be a contender device line I think... they are plentiful and cheap enough... But no matter what decisions are come to (if any are actually to materialize...) concerning the next steps with distros and such... I do hope sanity is a primary ingredient when considering the end result and what legacy it will have...if any... |
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As for Fedora, it already works on various arm boards, but given the condition that the target device must be able to run mainline kernel then I'm afraid we would not see it officially on many mobile devices any time soon due to the overall kernel forking madness. Also I don think anyone has used libhybris with Fedora so far, but even when he did I'm not sure this would be supportable as an official Fedora project deliverable. But I could imagine a libhybris using Fedora spin/remix - if enough people from the Fedora community would be interested working on it. Quote:
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Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
is it just me or does gnome 3 not remind us all of Hildon?
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Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
I still think libhybris is a game changer for supporting other devices. I'm seriously thinking about a pi2 with touchscreen at the moment for testing my *little* side project, but if I can get it to a reasonable point I will be looking more at libhybris for other devices. if a decent, open intel x3/x5 based tablet with intel supported gpu driver comes along...
A tiling WM could work quite well if allowed to do full and horiz/vert split. Just needs a little UI polish compared to some existing ones. As some of you know I've been experimenting with hildon/gtk3. At the moment it is still running on a matchbox2 based hildon-desktop. One idea I had as a possible future direction is to take inspiration from Harmattan and Budgie and use mutter. I have a very small test app that literaaly just gets mutter running but has no ui elements (taskbar, switcher etc) using Budgie as a reference. Obviously there are a few gnome dependencies, as there are with Fremantle, but mutter could make a good start for you. Alternatively, my other option should GTK3 prove too much of a hassle was to dump everything gtk and follow the Maemo>Meego path and use qt+qml. Down this route I was thinking what about expanding the qmantle2 demo (if you can find the source code, might have to contact rburchell directly). It uses lipstick iirc so you get a qt5 wayland based ui. I did have the source code but have misplaced it or deleted it by accident. You could mix in either stock qtcomponents or create a custom set based on marxians hildon versions. anyway, thought I'd share some of my ideas wih you. also just reminded me i still haven't pushed mb2/gtk3 to github. one day i'll remember.. |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
If I remember right, the guy, who made campaign of tablets with QML based DE long time ago on TMO and as far as i remember(I might be wrong) was involved in mer or it was based on mer, now have few interesting projects :)
Qt(QML)+Wayland and all this have pretty nice UI already. It's all opensource and on github (btw maybe worth to open new thread for that one). anyway here are projects: http://www.maui-project.org/ http://hawaiios.org/ |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
m4r0v3r: I can see that. Needs hildon-menu support for title bar menus though. at the end of the day its only gtk2+tidy vs gtk3+st (derived from mx..from tidy).
hell you could just try running gnome3 on a tablet. |
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The thing is, it works great with keyboard shortcuts but I'm not so sure about touch input only. It is usable with mouse, but mouse has right button. |
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Which is why most Linux window managers suck. The only ones that do not are those that mimic something that has been developled by a big company with a lot of specialists whose only job it to study users' behaviour, use patterns and workflow. Something like Windows 95/XP/7. That kind of layout - mimicked in KDE, Gnome 2 or LXDE, to name but a few - is not just a random concoction, put together because Microsoft could not come up with anything better. It is a result of a careful study and is the ideal solution for a desktop that has survived mostly unaltered for 15 years.Just look at the disasterous results when some developers or PR executives decided to move away from that. Unity, Gnome 3 and Metro (in that order) are glaring examples of how not to do a desktop environment. Their only justification for existence is that they are different, but literally no thought has been put into their design other than the looks. Sadly, the same layout would not be as suitable for a tablet. Fat fingers need a different approach than a precise mouse cursor or a stylus. Luckily, there are other desktop solutions that are better suitable for a touchscreen interface. EasyPeasy comes to mind, for example. Or Gnome 3. As bad as it is on a desktop, it may actually be not too bad on a tablet. However, the more I think about the topic the less I am convinced that the idea itself is sound. I think we are already zoomed too close in. We need to take a big step back and ask, what do people need a tablet for? Web browsing, watching Youtube videos, reading emails, playing games? There are already existing solutions that may not be perfect but are Good Enough™ and are already established too well to try to push them out. Some serious field work? But what? What can an alternative tablet offer that cannot be solved with an existing solution? Remember to replace a well established solution you cannot be 50% as good (that was Jolla's problem). You cannot be 90% or even 110% as good as the existing solution. No, you must be at least 3 times as good. Other than the server niche, can you name a single thing where Linux offers the end user a three times better solution than Windows, Mac, Android or iOS? A three times better browser, email client, office suite, video editor...? Linux is mostly used by geeks and yet it does not even have a good programming IDE, for Pete's sake! I am afraid that to make a successful Linux tablet, you first need to make a successful Linux desktop. As we all know, that has not happened in 24 years. It looks like we still have a long way to go :( |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
tbh, id be happy with a qml/qt version of hildon. If I remember rightly the actual components for qt4.8 i think exist. so porting them forward, and then just creating hildon in qt. but seems like a lot of work either way, but its atleast a solid "spec" to follow, rather than the community having to make a choice on how something should be, since itll just take too long imo.
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Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
I do wonder whether we can use the jTab adaptation on other Bay-Trail Z3735F SOC based Tablets, as there are a few around, although hard to find one with a decent screen...
There is already decent work on getting mainline linux to work on these Bay-Trail based devices so it would be a good place to start I think. |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
if i go down qt route, my aim would be to forward port marxians work whilst at the same time trying to find a way to remove maemo specific qt module or make it external to the main qt library, like qtx11extras.
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You say Linux does not have a successful desktop environment. That it doesn't have a good programming IDE. On the other hand, I have to say that I've been using various Linux desktops for, well, two decades now. And that I do the majority of my coding in a shell in Vim. I honestly don't understand why I would want to use an iOS or Android like GUI, or a graphical IDE. I've been told over and over again that those environments are better for users; but all I see is that they are better for novice users. Once you get up to speed, the workflow actually becomes impeded by the amount of hand-holding provided by the environment. Rather than create a UI tailored for the "average" user, I'd kinda prefer a UI that just tries to stay out of the way as much as possible. Maybe something like this: by default, dedicate the entire screen of the device to the app that currently has focus. All single-finger gestures, and pinch/zoom gestures, are routed directly to this app. For system commands, two-finger gestures are used: a two-finger swipe up from the lower half of the screen brings up a "command center", with the on-screen keyboard, settings, and anything else absolutely necessary to managing the device. Two-finger swipe back down to get rid of it. A two-finger swipe down from the top half provides access to the menu bar of the running app. A two-finger swipe left or right allows you to switch between running apps. There would be no built-in e-mail service: that would be provided by an app. No built-in browser -- also provided by an app. No built-in app launcher! That would also be an app. All that the GUI provides is the absolute minimal amount to manage running apps, and otherwise gets out of the way. Essentially, the display is entirely handed over to the current app, with the bare minimum of extraneous UI elements provided as an "overlay" on top of that app... |
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(Please let me know if any of this is inaccurate.) |
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On the other hand, what little I do know about it makes it look very much like Android. Which isn't bad; I was planning on using Sailfish pretty much as just a launcher for my favorite Linux apps, and I suspect I could do that with Plasma as well. I'm just kinda not interested in all the extra gunk that comes with a beautiful full-featured mobile GUI. :) I just want to run my favorite apps, and otherwise have the UI get the heck out of my way... ;) |
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I think its perhaps even more immature than Ubuntu Touch, but in terms of a UI that isnt integrated into a full distro its likely the best bet at this point |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what is needed?
Plasma Mobile is still in early development, so the way it looks is really an ugly prototype. I'm sure it will change a lot.
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(Actually, I think you did, I may have gotten carried away a tad ;)) I absolutely agree with the minimalistic approach. Even Jolla came with too much bloat IMO. The only application a tablet needs out of the box is the application manager. (OK, a phone may be different for legal reasons as you must be able to make at least an emergency call but there is no such requirement for a tablet). |
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If you yourself could create the perfect mobile UI for your own needs, what would it look like? And really, given the demise now of FirefoxOS and the continuing troubles at Jolla, there seems more space than ever for folks uninterested in the Apple-Google duopoly to just give up and create their own personal mobile OS. That's certainly what I want to do. :) And that also means that there's no longer any need to slavishly follow the path that Apple and Google have blazed; no need to spend massive amounts of time and effort on making the thing pretty, or incorporating a long list of features popular to average users, or really doing anything you'd need to do to satisfy investors. I guess what I really would like to know, is what people here, in their heart of hearts, would really like to see in a mobile UI: does the iOS / Android interface really appeal to you, or do you have a radically different view of what would be good? :) |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what would you like to see?
SailPi tablet concept can adapt to variety of choices, just say the word and I'll try to cook up something cool for RPi 2 with touchscreen. Its also quite DIY'able.
I've tried Nemo, for example, but the touchscreen only worked on pressing for a long time, gotta debug that at some point. |
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I do wonder, though, as to the legal status of Sailfish going forward. I was sort of thinking that using the Mer base, and putting something minimal but open on top of it, would be a safer way to proceed... (And I also have to admit, I'm not a hardware guy. The idea of trying to piece together a tablet of my own using RPi parts seems downright frightening. ;) But yeah, I should probably try it out eventually...) |
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:eek: Edit : seeing me restarting gnome shell on a tablet every 4 hours |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what would you like to see?
thats why i'm thinking of getting one. pi2, case, charger usb wifi and screen is about £100. unfortunately it is getting harder to find decent n900s for use as development test bed and i can't risk damaging my daily.
if all you want is an app manager, I'll have to get working on HAM port. |
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Also at least right now Gnome Shell is still much more stable than Plasma 5, which still has some severe stability and usability issues. But that should hopefully improve as Plasma 5 matures. |
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Not really happening on my laptop, tho *evil_grin* (j/k) |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what would you like to see?
is it first an idea to ask: what is the future of Mer?
who uses Mer other than Sailfish? there was a time i think when Tizen was based on Mer, is this still the case, and do they contribute? does it matter that ubuntu has it's own mobile 'platform', and that kde have decided to use ubuntu's? does Mer have a future (as opposed to a present), without substantial Jolla contribution? if the outcome of all this is positive (inc Jolla's ongoing contribution as the happiest outcome), then yes, by all means let's discuss some new mobile UI/distro built on the Mer platform... |
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This is not a problem for Mer, which is open. It doesn't really matter if everyone working on Mer leaves the project; you can still pick it up yourself, use it, modify it, or distribute it without being sued. (So long as you follow the terms of the open license.) Of course, if your only worry is about how many people are actively working on the project, may I ask: what is wrong with iOS or Android? Those OSs have enormous numbers of folks working day and night to maintain and improve them... ;) |
Re: Mer-based OS on a Tablet: what would you like to see?
Mer still made some bad decisions such as using some outdated core packages because of avoiding GPLv3 (for example bash). I hope they'll address that.
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https://projects.kde.org/projects/kd...CMakeLists.txt Qt modules:
Plasma frameworks components required:
So...quite a lot. How much modification would be required make it touch friendly for a tablet is another matter. Also, I brought it up more as an argument against IDEs being necessary than because I think you'd want those apps on a tablet. However, a text editor similar to Kate would be great. One of the nicest things about it is that it's quite simple (doesn't try and close quotations for you like Notepad ++ and some other apps on Windows), and it has great syntax highlighting. BTW Pichlo, I'm also a novice programmer (C++ and a little bit of Perl). I don't feel comfortable using an IDE until I understand what it's doing/don't need it! I'd rather learn how to do it manually before adding another layer of abstraction. Also, there's enough to learn about the language and Qt without learning how to use the gui for Qt Creator at the same time. |
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Otherwise, it will be ****-talked to death because User X wanted Option Y for... reasons. |
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