Hacker News Reader

Comment by kposehn | Hacker News Reader

As a long time iPad user I’m apprehensive. As others have noted, Linux based touch experiences have so far been lacking.

That said, I love the thought of it. I’ve recently started using my iPad Pro as my daily driver (replacing a Mac Studio M1 Ultra no less) and haven’t looked back. The only gripe with iPadOS is it took me a while to get a smooth vscode setup for development - having that be easier out of the box with the StarLite is quite appealing.

View on HN

What? How?

I have an m1 iPad Pro. It mostly collects dust. It’s just atrocious to use for anything more than playing games or basic web browsing. Multitasking makes me want to pull my hair out. Window behavior is horrific. Why doesn’t stage manager allow me to actually resize window and put them where I want them to go? File management is garbage, too. There are just so many weird limitations and missing basic functionalities to make it a viable DD device.

I tried multiple times to make android tablets work for me before Google apparently gave up on them. Never could, but even back in the Xoom days android tablets offered more functionality than my current iPad does.

And this comes from someone who dumped android for iOS years ago.

The iPad is just a disgustingly gimped product.

I’m using iPadOS 17 and it is vastly better than 16, so once it comes out you should give it a shot. I can absolutely understand being unhappy with it before. What makes 17 so much better is that you have the freedom to move windows around where you want, but it also does a great job of managing focus and organizing them. I’ve used full-screen exclusively on Mac since Lion, but now I’m all Stage Manager all the way.

I do agree about file management, but I don’t really work with files at all on my device anyway - code is in the dev box I SSH in to, and everything else is in Google Drive.

For reference, 80-90% of my work is slack/gmail/gdocs/zoom. The rest is development work done using a PWA for VSCode, code-server on my dev box and Blink Shell for SSH (I would prefer Termius but I can’t have SSH port forwarding done automatically). This works quite smoothly and gives me access to pretty much everything I need.

I’ve been running iOS and iPadOS beta 17 since day 1. It’s nominally improved stage manager window resizing, however it broke:

iCloud sync (won’t sync my photos until I restart).

Sharing (can’t email stuff unless I restart. Just stays at the “preparing” stage).

Search (both iMessage and spotlight).

Safari is incredibly unstable and tabs or the whole browser crashes all the time.

Interesting! That is not my experience at all. My only issue has been the right click contextual menu behavior being inconsistent with google docs and VSCode. I hate to say this but have you tried a fresh install? I did to that and it resolved the issues I had early on, and then once I restored my backup it was fine.

Yup. My iPad running ios17 is nominally more stable than my iPhone but both have similar bugs.

> Linux based touch experiences have so far been lacking

My Librem 5 works fine with the touch screen.

I was referring to tablets but thanks for pointing out the Librem. I’ll check it out.

“Smooth vscode setup for development”

I assume you’re using some sort of remote dev server?

Yes. I have an instance running on the dev box. The only issue has been an issue with the right-click in Safari not properly handling PWAs like VSCode, causing it to show the iPadOS context menu over the VSCode menu.

It has been resolved in Webkit proper, but isn’t yet resolved in iPadOS, so I use a workaround to deal with it. I’m also enjoying trying out micro, helix, neovim and emacs as well for purely terminal based editors.

Of course an Apple fanboy shows up with this comment. ChromeOS on a tablet is a perfectly fine experience, gesture navigation and all.

(And, very important to me, runs a "real browser", not some limited mobile variant. And the full Linux CLI environment.)

iPadOS Safari is just as capable as desktop Safari. Why do you think otherwise?

Also, it’s not 2006 anymore, maybe stop calling people “fanboy” for preferring a different computer than you.

What motivated me to want a "real browser" was bookmark management. Managing & reorganizing bookmarks on mobile Chrome was frustrating.

And I absolutely will label anyone a fanboy if they barge into a Linux conversation going "Rah rah Apple best Linux sucks" without actually contributing anything insightful, useful, or specific. Please don't just repeat the age old "Apple did it best" line, we already understand you think so. To people actually interested in the topic, all it seems like is you wanted to mention Apple for the sake of mentioning Apple, and that's why I called you a fanboy.

I'm not the person you responded to. I don't think "Rah rah Apple best Linux sucks" is a good characterization of his comment though. "This looks interesting but Linux has historically been a worse touch experience than iPad" is a better paraphrase, and I think the sentiment belongs in this discussion (because any entrant to the tablet market is competing with the iPad, whether you like it or not).

Once again, ChromeOS on a tablet is a perfectly fine experience. If you, or anyone, wants to argue about why a specific Linux-based desktop on a tablet isn't great, do that, don't just restate generalizations like "Apple is best and everything else is unusable and it's always been like that", that comes across as FUD based on opinions and fanboyism.

I've used ChromeOS tablets for years. I haven't tried KDE/Gnome on a primarily touch based device, just ChromeOS, so I can't speak for those, but I see no inherent reason why they'd be worse. There is an iPad some 30 feet from me right now, so I think I am in a position to be able to compare to that.

> iPadOS Safari is just as capable as desktop Safari. Why do you think otherwise?

That would be an incredibly negative statement on the state of desktop safari if this was true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com