Re: [PLUG] Linux friendly tablet?

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 7:40 AM, David Coulson <david@davidcoulson.net> wrote:
> I'm a Linux guy, and I have an iPad - IMHO, superior user interface and in
> general it's more consistent than Android. That said, I don't really care
> what it's running under the hood - As long as it works for me 100% of the
> time so I can get my job done with it, I'm happy.

Perhaps, but I figure that on the Phila LINUX User Group mailing list
it doesn't hurt to care what is running under the hood...

Beyond running Linux the Android tablets are also largely open-source,
which is also something that may matter to many people (granted, many
in this case probably amounts to 0.01% of the population, but most of
the people in my G+ circles).

I've only messed with iOS a bit here and there, but in general I find
it much more annoying than Android and fairly limiting in terms of
multitasking/etc.  The one thing they REALLY get right is giving
task-scheduling priority to the UI.  I don't care if the only thing
that happens when I touch a button in an app is that it starts showing
a progress bar, but when I touch the screen there should be feedback,
NOW.  On my phone I end up wanting to throw it across the room when
I'm not sure if it registered the touch or not and then when it
finally wakes up it starts playing back buffered events like some
terminal from 1983.  Come on, Google, put the UI in a separate
realtime thread, and when I select some core OS UI-element (like
display menu, or drag notification bar, or hit home) then there is no
excuse for it not immediately doing what I told it to.

On the already off-topic subject of phone OS gripes, my other
compliant is that the phones of today are like Windows v3 or MacOS
pre-v8: they rely on well-behaved apps.  When my battery runs down to
fast, it is the OS's fault, not the application's fault, just as when
a whole computer crashes it is the OS'es fault and not the fault of
the app that jumped into the middle of the data segment.  Google AND
Apple both need to start out with the premise that the phone exists to
run the pretty OS and that the primary purpose of applications is to
steal data/money, drain the battery, deceive the user, and spread
viruses, and that any user benefit from applications is purely
accidental.  Then, with the applications running in their nice little
user-empowering jails everybody can be happy.  When a user has a bad
experience with an App the answer isn't to tell the user to not to use
the App, because ALL Apps are designed to have bad experiences and if
they succeed it is only because the OS isn't working right.  That's
how you do good security, and that is how you make application
experiences good.  Once desktop OSes started embracing this the
computer because a LOT more usable, and the same will happen with
phones.

Rich
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