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Google and 3M are helping to produce an open specification for styluses that can be used across different touchscreen devices:
The humble pen isn't dead — or at least the stylus isn't. Because styluses remain a big piece of the mobile accessories market, Google and 3M have joined the Universal Stylus Initiative (USI), a collective that aims to create an open, non-proprietary active stylus specification. The standard will be designed for manufacturers to create and promote styluses that are compatible with various touchscreen devices, including phones and tablets.
To accomplish this, the standard uses two-way communication instead of just one. Ink color and stroke preferences are stored in the stylus, which can be taken across different devices, while up to six styluses can operate simultaneously on a single device. The USI standard supports 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity (the same pressure level as Samsung's S Pen and Microsoft's Surface Pen) and 9-axis inertial measurement to follow and track complex movements precisely.
Also at Ars Technica.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday February 02 2018, @12:51PM (12 children)
I'm feeling the need to retire my ancient workhorse Thinkpad at some point. I've seen a few students (high school and university) using Surface-style tablets/notebooks, and felt impressed with the shiny-ness of them: far more polished that the resistive-touchscreen-based N900 that I had back in the day. But I'd be looking at the second-hand market with my budget.
The thing is, I know that I won't be happy without a physical keyboard on the device. It's also well over a decade since I dumped the Windows partition on my personal computers (leaving Slackware/XFCE in charge), and I don't really want to jump back into the closed-source box.
So Soylenters, how practical is a stylus-based device under Linux these days? Would I have to distro-hop to get things working? And do you feel the benefits would be worth it?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @01:16PM
Assuming the stylus just uses the existing touch screen drivers, should be plenty of support. I usually keep one box running the very latest kernel release, and the support is very good and constantly improving.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday February 02 2018, @02:17PM (5 children)
How about a different strategy along the lines of portable bluetooth keyboard support under linux is excellent?
Some of the kids at my kids school have their tablets in a tablet case with a built in keyboard. Congrats kids, you just clumsily re-invented the laptop.
Speaking of laptops people freak out about chromebooks because of lack of network connectivity, but owning a chromebook teaches you very quickly that you're never without connectivity if you want it enough, and that and $50 for a raspberry pi and some parts means you're never more than a SSH or VNC session away from a raspi linux box, so ... One thing to worry about WRT chromebooks is crappy screens, trying to ship 720 pixel screens in 2018 WTF, check the fine print to at LEAST get 1080 pixels.
I verified the specs to make this post, and my laptop, which is a two year old Acer CB3 model with 10 hours of battery life, has 57 GHz of processor speed times cores, 320 gigs of memory, and 12 TB of hard drive. Oh wait thats the specs of my allocation on the vmware cluster that I can VPN into, although if I tried to use 100% of my shared allocation, people would freak out. Anyway, yeah, buy a nice screen and a nice keyboard and whats attached to it doesn't matter as much.
If you have substantial server resources, chromebooks work great with "Apache Guacamole" which is a HTML5 based SSH/VNC/rdesktop/telnet server which is LDAP aware for AAAA and configuration.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday February 02 2018, @02:55PM (1 child)
An interesting twist there, thanks. A chromebook should be easier to convert to Linux than a Microsoft Surface device, at first glance.
Sadly, since partially outsourcing IT services my access to server resources isn't as easy as it might have been a decade or so ago, but it's still worth considering.
A nicer screen is one thing I'm really looking forward to: 1024x768 with a dingy backlight is less retro and more restrictive.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday February 02 2018, @07:50PM
You could... but the easiest way to use a chromebook's LCD and keyboard to access a linux box remains duct taping a ras-pi to the back of the chromebook and using SSH/VNC.
I did the "crouton" thing for awhile on the chromebook to prove I could do it, but its a huge slow PITA and all I ever did was run SSH and a web browser anyway, so I converted back to being a chromebook.
In 2018 its very easy to get a local personally owned headless battery powered portable linux box for $50 or rent a powerful network accessible virtual server for $20 from linode or whatever, and its very easy to get a non-linux laptop for $200. But getting a linux laptop can still be difficult and expensive.
The biggest chromebook problem I had was for reasons unknown the keyboard layout is NOT IBM PC style and theres just enough missing keys to make using it somewhat challenging although you eventually get used to it. In that way, people who connect a IBM-layout bluetooth keyboard to their SSH/VNC running tablets have a slightly easier time than chromebook users.
In the long run I'm going to make my own laptop out of a Rasp-pi and a USB to PS/2 converter (not adapter) and an IBM model M keyboard like I'm typing on right now and a high res monitor. Eventually. In my infinite spare time. It helps that I don't have apple-itis so I don't care about thickness as my sole metric of success, and I don't use laptops without plugging them in so I don't care about batteries either. My case will be a probably rather ugly woodworking project. Ugly because I'm not sure from a woodworking perspective how to make something that'll hold those parts in the correct positions, strongly and durably, without being hideously ugly. I might compromise and make something like an Osbourne or TRS-80 4P style transportable in the style of campaign furniture. Is that a campaign furniture lapdesk from 1890s? Naw thats my fire breathing laptop-like PC that happens to be in a campaign furniture style case.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday February 02 2018, @04:07PM (1 child)
It's really not. Especially if Network Manager is in the mix. Reconnecting issues on reboot is common with Linux. Windows & Mac generally have no issues with this. But they also can expect sound to work after a system upgrade too so... yeah Linux still has quite a ways to go.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @08:10PM
I've never had an issue with Bluetooth, don't use network manager though, I just use bluetoothctl, it works. Never have issues with sound either... Let me guess, pulseaudio?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @10:02PM
Agree on screen resolution, especially on bigger laptops. I had an Asus Chromebook Flip, with 1280x800, and that's just bearable on a 10.1" display. Lately, though, I've been using a Samsung Chromebook Plus (Rockchip SOC; the Chromebook Pro is the same chassis with Intel SOC); 2400x1600 in a 12.x" display is quite comfy.
The Chromebook Pro/Plus have a Wacom stylus, too, so it might be just the thing for Kazzie. I just use it as a normal pointing device; I don't do any note-taking and such, so I can't comment on application-level support for the stylus in ChromeOS (or anything else).
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday February 02 2018, @02:36PM (4 children)
Maybe try adding a Wacom tablet or something. They work pretty well, and you can avoid Gorilla arm syndrome.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday February 02 2018, @02:45PM (3 children)
That's a good idea for a desktop setup (I've used my wife's Wacom Bamboo in the past for some photo touch-ups) but it doesn't really suit my use case of a portable replacement for a laptop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @03:24PM
Paper notepad beats everything. Scan later the notes if you really need it.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 02 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)
What's wrong with just using a laptop? They're portable, they can be had with nice high-res screens in various sizes, they have an actual keyboard (not some sheet of rubber), or worse an on-screen keyboard, and they have more CPU power than thinner stuff. Unless you're some weakling who thinks a half-pound savings is somehow significant, there's no downside to a laptop over these other things, if you want something you can actually do real work on. (Tablets are fine if you just want to read an e-book or watch a movie or something passive like that.) And some modern laptops are truly thin and light, though you usually sacrifice serviceability for that.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday February 03 2018, @10:02AM
A laptop is still my default option for my laptop replacement. I'm just wondering about touchscreen/stylus interfaces on laptops...