Let’s see if I can keep this relatively short:

I’m a woodworker, I do my design work in FreeCAD and then I print out my drawings on paper to carry out to the shop with me. It would be nicer if I had a shop-proof device to run FreeCAD in the shop with me because over the past year I found myself saying the following things in the shop a lot:

  • “Wait, let’s go in and look at the 3D model.”
  • “Ah dang I forgot to note this particular dimension on the drawing, let me go fix that.”
  • “I’ll measure this part up then go in and do some drawing.”

So what does “shop proof” mean exactly?

  1. Wood shop be dusty. Last year I hauled 250 gallons of sawdust to the dump. To me this means that a physical keyboard needs to be able to function if it’s been packed with dust and/or needs to be vacuum cleaner proof. I also think cooling fans are probably a bad idea; a passively cooled device is probably preferable.

  2. Not many outlets in the shop, so it needs a good battery life. I actually don’t need a tremendous amount of performance, I’ve used a Raspberry Pi 3 for the kind of CAD work I do.

  3. FreeCAD does not ship an APK so Android is no bueno, it’s gotta be GNU/Linux.

  4. It needs decent usable Wi-Fi because I envision using Syncthing to keep my woodworking projects folder synced between my desktop and this device. It doesn’t necessarily need to get signal out in the shop (my phone barely does; I lose signal if I stand behind the drill press) but it does have to connect to my Wi-Fi when I carry it into the house.

I think this means I’m looking for an ARM tablet that can competently run Linux. Is there such a thing?

ADDENDUM:

Thanks to everyone who commented, I think I do have a plan of action: I’m gonna buy a used Lenovo!

To answer the question I posed, no it doesn’t seem that a Linux ARM tablet is really a thing yet. Commercial offerings that run Android or Windows on ARM are often so locked down that switching OS isn’t a thing, the few attempts at a purpose built ARM tablet for Linux like the PineTab just are not ready for prime time.

In the x86 world, it basically came down to 10 year old Toughbook tablets or 4 year old low-end 2-in-1s, and I think the latter won out just because of mileage and condition. A lot of the toughbooks out there will have 10 year old batteries in them, and they’ve been treated like a Toughbook for some or all of that time. The few Lenovo’s I’ve looked at are barely used, probably because of how Windows “runs” on them.

I’ll eventually check back in with progress on this front. Would it be better to add to this thread or create another?

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    Yeah I’m with you; I’m also in the resurrecting old hardware with Linux club.

    If I treat the little Lenovo tablet like a laptop, well…it is one. it’s a small, low-end x86 PC. Standard install images work fine, it installs .rpms and flatpaks just fine, FreeCAD launches and operates correctly…with the keyboard attached.

    Snap the keyboard off and it performs a heartfelt but untalented impression of a tablet. Gnome is still Gnome, it still wants to be a mouse and keyboard UI, but it has had touch support bolted on after the fact and it works about as well as tits on a fish. It’s got a lot of the problems Windows 8 had in trying to be a desktop OS that can also run on tablet, but without the schizophrenia. A lot of the UI elements are still quite small even when upscaled to 200%, you can tell by the way certain UI elements fail that it doesn’t like being scaled like that especially in portrait mode, and it still interprets touch inputs largely as mouse inputs. So if you try to scroll through a PDF file, you might scroll, you might highlight a bunch of text which causes it to scroll strangely.

    FreeCAD has paid even less attention to touch compatibility, I’ve noticed that sometimes interacting with some elements via touch will cause the view controls to break until the app is restarted. The UI isn’t built for fat fingers, a lot of stuff is designed for shift+clicking or for keyboard only controls, and I had a dimension dialog box refuse to accept input from the onscreen keyboard.

    The hardware might be able to do what I need, the software almost certainly can’t.