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Dies buying a risc-v tablet make sense for real world use?

Huge fan of risk-v and massively overwhelmed by analysis paralysis. I‘m in the market for risc-v hardware to develop on and play around with.

After some consideration, I will get an sbc for the hard tinkering and low level stuff and I‘m thinking of getting a tablet for regular use (browing, ebook reading, controlling smart home devices) as well as development and packaging stuff.

My reasoning for using dev hardware on a daily basis is that for myself to be able to use features, I need apps which I am incentivised to compile and package for risc-v.

I‘ve seen very promising risc-v videos but I‘m not sure what to expect from a tablet. To add to that the pinetab v is out of stock which was a strong candidate.

I know there is the new tablet from deepcomputing but its in preorder and the shipping to germany is pretty expensive. (100$ plus). The HD display is pretty awesome compared to the pinetab v but afaik the pinetab comes with accessories.

Any experience with risc-v tablets and which other offers do you consider good?

6 comments

ramble81

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Don’t have a risc tablet but the consideration is the same as any other type of chip: what distro are you using and do the apps you want to use offer packages or source code for it? Before ARM took off this was the same problem. I was able to run an ARM version of Debian that had most packages I wanted and for others I could find precompiled ARM deb packages, but for a non-zero number I couldn’t find any and would have to compile from source code if available.

You’re gonna run into the same issue here, unless you find a lot of precompiled packages for what you want. Expect to do a lot of your own compiling.

haui_lemmy

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Thank you very much for sharing your experience. That is completely within the acceptable range for me. I am fully prepared to compile and tinker.

I guess I was hoping for someone saying: „I did it with THIS risc v tablet and it works great“ or „there is a problem that you will not overcome likely at this point in time“ like the cameras in postmarketOS are a roadblock rn.

ramble81

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Ah my bad. Sadly I don’t have any experience there. Good luck though. Sounds like a fun project!

haui_lemmy

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Thank you very much. I will update on my progress for sure.

phanto

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I'm not at the level where I compile packages, I'm totally dependent on you techier guys, but I grabbed a Nezha SBC a couple of years ago, downloaded their version of Debian, and... Not much. I could get a desktop, but couldn't surf. No sound. No WiFi.

I think I may fire it up again, or grab something newer at some point in the near future. I was eyeballing the Musebook laptop, but it's too pricey at the moment for what I expect I'll be getting.

I'd love to know if it's a better experience out there now!

haui_lemmy

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Good luck! I appreciate your praise. Its nice to be seen for the stuff we do.

That said, you‘re doing a great thing if you try and hit the edge of your comfort zone.

For me it is running postmarketOS on a pi with plasma since only 50% of things work and I‘m likely going to try to get the rest working too. Currently, sound isnt working either, resource monitor doesnt work and streaming 1080p content is about 3SPF.