I was shocked, in 2026, to know how hard it is to find a good tablet. iPad is out of question for me, gifted mine to my gf (the only apple device I ever bought).
Landed on a Lenovo Idea Tab pro, which has so much junk pre-installed that keep installing other malware on it.
We need rules that take companies responsible when they trick people into hands of scammers.
As long as I can't unlock its bootloader, it's not much better than that iPad.
I just did something similar to bring mainline Linux to my Daylight DC-1 [1] [2], although possibly more difficult since I had to start from scratch.
I can guarantee the same amount of work, without AI, takes probably 10x or more time (I did it in the past w/ the Google Pixel C [3]).
Unfortunately it looks like pmOS is against AI [4], so I'll likely switch away from pmOS and never contribute a single line in the future.
Too bad, I was a huge fan [5].
Because one of the biggest hurdles to porting the Linux kernel and device-specific software to more hardware and making existing hardware work better is one of the things that "AI" can (seemingly, caveat) do surprisingly well?
Not to say PM (or any other project) should/shouldn't use AI. There are plenty of other salient reasons to reject AI. But given (from what I remember) postmarket's goal is basically saving as many phones from becoming ewaste as possible, well, an LLM could actually be a formidable way to get more hardware than ever running.
Couldn't these concerns be addressed through two potential angles ?
- You make your AI do all that work, pay xxx tokens worth to get something running and you can use your old phone while taking full responsability for your vibe code. Each user will have to do it, but the whole path could be optimize LLM side as well, after all you're just renting it.
- You use AI to find a working solution but vet it and write everything's needed to meet the submission standard. You put the time needed for it to be accepted as non AI, and proudly put your name on the line as the final author of everything you submit.
Why would you waste 2 years to port Linux to an old / a device when you can literally do it in ~10 days and save many devices from turning into e-waste?
I really don't get their approach. Besides, Linux (and Linus) accepts and are doing AI contributions, so their argument makes no sense (since they're a Linux distro)
>I really don't get their approach. Besides, Linux (and Linus) accepts and are doing AI contributions, so their argument makes no sense (since they're a Linux distro)
Sometimes the base has to fight the insanity coming from the top down.
I would also add on top of those points that nobody will ever get paid for mainlining old phones, these are side projects by nature, meaning, not full time.
And since it's such a hard task without AI (and it's still not easy even with it), almost none will ever be mainlined just because of the size of the task
Except nothing about AI produces properly open source code? You can't prove it didn't pull from closed source code, no more clean room approaches if everyone just wants to bow to the LLMs.
Even beyond all the other ethical issues I don't see how the open source world accepts this.
Same reason/way projects like ReactOS/Wine and friends exist in a world where source code from early 21st century Windows is literally sitting in a bunch of 6+ year old Github repositories, I guess. Or any number of other proprietary codebases. Legal limbo, effectively.
I'm not saying that's an equivalent problem to LLM taint, but it's not exactly unrelated, either. It may be the case that all LLM output is tainted, but it's also likely the case legally that you can't meaningfully prove that contributions from random people to FOSS aren't tainted.
Legally proving that an LLM hasn't pulled from proprietary software is probably in the same ballpark as proving some Wine contributor hasn't looked at any of those Github repos.
I dunno how ReactOS/Wine manages that threat/exposure. But I'm pretty sure both have fairly liberal contributor policies. They're not Compaq reversing the IBM PC BIOS.
Yes, the difference here is that most projects don't have to accept that (level of) risk, while ReactOS/Wine don't have a choice. But they do still trudge on regardless.
I guess in the same way we accept that the open source & licensed code was used to train the models, or in the same way we accept that Google / Meta / Anthropic and all the others use copyrighted material to get the degree of intelligence that it needs.
If you extend this thought and this rationale to humans as well, we shouldn't be allowed to "get smarter" by consuming copyrighted content (movies, books) or anything really - as we might end up referencing them.
I think copyright laws are being bended a lot here - and I don't think (as a copyright holder myself) I'm too concerned about that - if this then allows humanity to move forward. It's a philosophical topic really, more than a legal one
In your case, it seems you had an automated (semi-automated, maybe?) feedback loop. In my case, I was the feedback loop :D which ended up being the bottleneck for some parts...
Yes! Removing the human in the loop speeds up the process. Models are better than the average SW engineer nowadays, so this isn't _that_ unsafe... and it really speeds things up
Wow! Serendipitous, I was just doing the same thing on my duet (trogdor) but I was focused on using Claude to enable the camera (missing in the device tree). I taught it to use depthcharge to reboot into the previous Kernel if a build failed; otherwise boot and start the same Claude chat so I could just let it iterate for days. It took a day to get something usable, pretty amazing.
Then I setup `howdy` to use the camera for auth.
now I’m just trying to figure out if I’m allowed to submit this upstream. Postmarketos explicitly rejects LLM submission, but I can submit it to linux-next. Seems to me a shame, this enables folks who have devices and want to fix things (but lack the time/knowledge) to use these LLM powers for a very good cause.
Plasma mobile has been really great for me, you should try it out!
I tried (and gave up) to do the same on my trogdor with postmarket because it was the only thing really missing for it to be a daily driver. Any chance you could publish what Claude did ?
This article and thread tells me there are more people hacking on the duet than I thought. Maybe we'll be a handful to use your patch.
I have an Acer Flip 1 (4GB, passively cooled Intel CPU). And I find GNOME to run really well on this. Compiling large C++ codebases is where the slowness gets in the way. Even VS Code kinda ran. Mostly used this in a lab for data logging, note taking.
Just want to say this because the popular "GNOME is heavy" argument is not something I've experienced myself. GNOME 3 is already so old, maybe it was heavy when it came out, like how Crysis was heavy but will now run on anything and pretty well too.
I went to LinuxFest Northwest a few months ago, and there was a booth giving away Chromebooks that had been wiped and had a version of NixOS installed on there for free. I very seriously considered grabbing one, but I was only traveling with a backpack which was already pretty full, and I think my wife would (rightfully) give me a dirty look if I hoarded more tech that I'll only use like twice a year.
I kind of regret it now. Oh well, I'll probably come across another cheap Chromebook soon enough to play with.
Cool but my Duet is the later generation with MediaTek Kompanio 838 :(
I really like the form factor. I use my PC at home and corp laptop for work, and I don't need another powerhouse laptop. A lightweight 2-in-1 tablet works well for me. But I never found an OS doing well in both desktop and tablet modes. Most Windows and Linux apps are for desktop. ChromeOS with ArcVM is supposed to work but the performance is terrible. I hope Android desktop mode would do better.
I recently put Debian on an old 13" Asus Chromebook. It was surprisingly easy! I don't remember doing much other than removing a screw and installing a UEFI firmware on it. Everything worked out of the box.
It works pretty well too, as long as you temper your expectations around 4GB of RAM and aren't expecting to watch YouTube on it. (Older machines and phones are just not at all happy about 60fps videos.)
The lowest spec machine I have been able to get 60fps 720p video out of Youtube is a 2nd Gen i5 2.4Ghz. Anything lower and the frames start dropping.
It is funny that during that time period, Intel's media decoders got significantly faster in a very short period of time. My 4th gen 2Ghz i5 decodes video better than my 2nd Gen 3.8Ghz i7.
I actually just pulled out my old Duet and took a quick look to see if I could just put proper Linux on it. Didn't seem feasible for the amount of effort I was willing to put into it, so I bailed. Reading this, though, I now see I was definitely right and I'm glad I didn't sink much time into the endeavour lol
Note that postmarketOS is proper Linux. It runs almost-perfectly (sans camera) out-of-the-box on most Duets, and has for a while. Once you enable developer mode in ChromeOS, the install process is just like a PC laptop. The article seems like more of a sidequest to (promote AI and) install Ubuntu specifically by getting uboot and a UEFI environment, but postmarketOS doesn't need that because it can boot from ChromeOS' bootloader. Installing postmarketOS on my Duets (homestar and wormdingler) was probably the best decision I've made with those devices, and they might be some of the best arm64 devices of that form factor to run Linux on.
Yes, this was definetely a side quest, but postmarketOS indeed is a real Linux distribution that is perfectly usable! I just want to experiment with this tablet, and with U-Boot providing an EFI environment now adapted, I (or anyone) should be able to boot any distribution (Arch Linux ARM, Debian, etc). Ubuntu was just my personal choice here :)
This is too cool. I actually have this exact tablet, and have basically barely ever used it because ChromeOS just crawls no matter what you do with it on that device. Every once in a while I do a search to see if anyone has done anything interesting with it, and it seems that day has finally come. I will give your image a try later tonight!
Recently I was in the market for what I would call a 'low cost linux netbook/tablet' and settled on the Chuwi Minibook X. It has an Intel N150 processor, 16GB of memory and a 512GB nvme drive. For less than $300. I am wildly impressed by it. Touchpad is really terrible but otherwise it is a surprisingly compelling little device. I am still fine tuning the tablet mode stuff -- it doesn't have any hinge measurement sensors it relies on an accelerometer in each half. Codex has been helping me write some cool tools to debug and parse those raw readings into "im in laptop mode" or "im in tablet mode, disable kb/touchpad". I just installed KDE Plasma Mobile yesterday which is quite a cool alternate DE that is more suited to tablets. Here is a video of that codex tooling to help debug the hinge situation: https://www.threads.com/@whalesalad/post/DdYNriIAFO4
I've been thinking about getting one of these. I'm currently using a Surface Go 2, and I'm addicted to the small form factor, but it's not as quick to open and start typing as a laptop would be.
How is the battery life and fan noise? Not sure I can go back from fanless.
I was shocked, in 2026, to know how hard it is to find a good tablet. iPad is out of question for me, gifted mine to my gf (the only apple device I ever bought).
Landed on a Lenovo Idea Tab pro, which has so much junk pre-installed that keep installing other malware on it.
We need rules that take companies responsible when they trick people into hands of scammers.
As long as I can't unlock its bootloader, it's not much better than that iPad.
I have the Idea Tab (not pro, 10"), and yeah there's a lot of junk.
The only way to keep these usable is to not use the google sign-in, disable as much as you can, sideload F-Droid, and install a lightweight launcher.
I just did something similar to bring mainline Linux to my Daylight DC-1 [1] [2], although possibly more difficult since I had to start from scratch.
I can guarantee the same amount of work, without AI, takes probably 10x or more time (I did it in the past w/ the Google Pixel C [3]).
Unfortunately it looks like pmOS is against AI [4], so I'll likely switch away from pmOS and never contribute a single line in the future. Too bad, I was a huge fan [5].
[1]: https://daylightcomputer.com/product
[2]: https://x.com/DenysVitali/status/2091238391710888416
[3]: https://github.com/pixelc-linux/documentation
[4]: https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/develop...
[5]: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/
Sometimes I have to log in just to ask:
Why would you think one of the more beloved projects for linux mobile phones would be pro-AI?
Because one of the biggest hurdles to porting the Linux kernel and device-specific software to more hardware and making existing hardware work better is one of the things that "AI" can (seemingly, caveat) do surprisingly well?
Not to say PM (or any other project) should/shouldn't use AI. There are plenty of other salient reasons to reject AI. But given (from what I remember) postmarket's goal is basically saving as many phones from becoming ewaste as possible, well, an LLM could actually be a formidable way to get more hardware than ever running.
Couldn't these concerns be addressed through two potential angles ?
- You make your AI do all that work, pay xxx tokens worth to get something running and you can use your old phone while taking full responsability for your vibe code. Each user will have to do it, but the whole path could be optimize LLM side as well, after all you're just renting it.
- You use AI to find a working solution but vet it and write everything's needed to meet the submission standard. You put the time needed for it to be accepted as non AI, and proudly put your name on the line as the final author of everything you submit.
This.
Why would you waste 2 years to port Linux to an old / a device when you can literally do it in ~10 days and save many devices from turning into e-waste?
I really don't get their approach. Besides, Linux (and Linus) accepts and are doing AI contributions, so their argument makes no sense (since they're a Linux distro)
Correction:
Linux accepts AI assisted contribution. A human still has to review the output before submitting the code.
This is a big difference as it prevents raw genAI code to be part of the codebase.
pmOS might accept this in the future, as it is slowly becoming the standard.
>I really don't get their approach. Besides, Linux (and Linus) accepts and are doing AI contributions, so their argument makes no sense (since they're a Linux distro)
Sometimes the base has to fight the insanity coming from the top down.
I would also add on top of those points that nobody will ever get paid for mainlining old phones, these are side projects by nature, meaning, not full time.
And since it's such a hard task without AI (and it's still not easy even with it), almost none will ever be mainlined just because of the size of the task
Ever? Nobody?
Except nothing about AI produces properly open source code? You can't prove it didn't pull from closed source code, no more clean room approaches if everyone just wants to bow to the LLMs.
Even beyond all the other ethical issues I don't see how the open source world accepts this.
Same reason/way projects like ReactOS/Wine and friends exist in a world where source code from early 21st century Windows is literally sitting in a bunch of 6+ year old Github repositories, I guess. Or any number of other proprietary codebases. Legal limbo, effectively.
I'm not saying that's an equivalent problem to LLM taint, but it's not exactly unrelated, either. It may be the case that all LLM output is tainted, but it's also likely the case legally that you can't meaningfully prove that contributions from random people to FOSS aren't tainted.
Legally proving that an LLM hasn't pulled from proprietary software is probably in the same ballpark as proving some Wine contributor hasn't looked at any of those Github repos.
I dunno how ReactOS/Wine manages that threat/exposure. But I'm pretty sure both have fairly liberal contributor policies. They're not Compaq reversing the IBM PC BIOS.
Yes, the difference here is that most projects don't have to accept that (level of) risk, while ReactOS/Wine don't have a choice. But they do still trudge on regardless.
I guess in the same way we accept that the open source & licensed code was used to train the models, or in the same way we accept that Google / Meta / Anthropic and all the others use copyrighted material to get the degree of intelligence that it needs.
If you extend this thought and this rationale to humans as well, we shouldn't be allowed to "get smarter" by consuming copyrighted content (movies, books) or anything really - as we might end up referencing them.
I think copyright laws are being bended a lot here - and I don't think (as a copyright holder myself) I'm too concerned about that - if this then allows humanity to move forward. It's a philosophical topic really, more than a legal one
In your case, it seems you had an automated (semi-automated, maybe?) feedback loop. In my case, I was the feedback loop :D which ended up being the bottleneck for some parts...
Yes! Removing the human in the loop speeds up the process. Models are better than the average SW engineer nowadays, so this isn't _that_ unsafe... and it really speeds things up
For x86 based ChromeOS devices check https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html It allows installing a standard UEFI environment if supported.
Wow! Serendipitous, I was just doing the same thing on my duet (trogdor) but I was focused on using Claude to enable the camera (missing in the device tree). I taught it to use depthcharge to reboot into the previous Kernel if a build failed; otherwise boot and start the same Claude chat so I could just let it iterate for days. It took a day to get something usable, pretty amazing.
Then I setup `howdy` to use the camera for auth.
now I’m just trying to figure out if I’m allowed to submit this upstream. Postmarketos explicitly rejects LLM submission, but I can submit it to linux-next. Seems to me a shame, this enables folks who have devices and want to fix things (but lack the time/knowledge) to use these LLM powers for a very good cause.
Plasma mobile has been really great for me, you should try it out!
I tried (and gave up) to do the same on my trogdor with postmarket because it was the only thing really missing for it to be a daily driver. Any chance you could publish what Claude did ? This article and thread tells me there are more people hacking on the duet than I thought. Maybe we'll be a handful to use your patch.
Absolutely I plan to! I think I’ll just publish a quick and dirty repo of patches and work on mainlining the camera driver separately.
IMO it’s a waste for folks to not share, which is why I’m bummed about the pmOS LLM rules
https://github.com/jesse-osiecki/trogdor-bootstrap
I have an Acer Flip 1 (4GB, passively cooled Intel CPU). And I find GNOME to run really well on this. Compiling large C++ codebases is where the slowness gets in the way. Even VS Code kinda ran. Mostly used this in a lab for data logging, note taking. Just want to say this because the popular "GNOME is heavy" argument is not something I've experienced myself. GNOME 3 is already so old, maybe it was heavy when it came out, like how Crysis was heavy but will now run on anything and pretty well too.
I went to LinuxFest Northwest a few months ago, and there was a booth giving away Chromebooks that had been wiped and had a version of NixOS installed on there for free. I very seriously considered grabbing one, but I was only traveling with a backpack which was already pretty full, and I think my wife would (rightfully) give me a dirty look if I hoarded more tech that I'll only use like twice a year.
I kind of regret it now. Oh well, I'll probably come across another cheap Chromebook soon enough to play with.
Cool but my Duet is the later generation with MediaTek Kompanio 838 :(
I really like the form factor. I use my PC at home and corp laptop for work, and I don't need another powerhouse laptop. A lightweight 2-in-1 tablet works well for me. But I never found an OS doing well in both desktop and tablet modes. Most Windows and Linux apps are for desktop. ChromeOS with ArcVM is supposed to work but the performance is terrible. I hope Android desktop mode would do better.
I recently put Debian on an old 13" Asus Chromebook. It was surprisingly easy! I don't remember doing much other than removing a screw and installing a UEFI firmware on it. Everything worked out of the box.
It works pretty well too, as long as you temper your expectations around 4GB of RAM and aren't expecting to watch YouTube on it. (Older machines and phones are just not at all happy about 60fps videos.)
The lowest spec machine I have been able to get 60fps 720p video out of Youtube is a 2nd Gen i5 2.4Ghz. Anything lower and the frames start dropping.
It is funny that during that time period, Intel's media decoders got significantly faster in a very short period of time. My 4th gen 2Ghz i5 decodes video better than my 2nd Gen 3.8Ghz i7.
IME it's generally trivial for x86 Chromebooks, but still hit-and-miss for ARM.
I actually just pulled out my old Duet and took a quick look to see if I could just put proper Linux on it. Didn't seem feasible for the amount of effort I was willing to put into it, so I bailed. Reading this, though, I now see I was definitely right and I'm glad I didn't sink much time into the endeavour lol
Cool post nonetheless!
Note that postmarketOS is proper Linux. It runs almost-perfectly (sans camera) out-of-the-box on most Duets, and has for a while. Once you enable developer mode in ChromeOS, the install process is just like a PC laptop. The article seems like more of a sidequest to (promote AI and) install Ubuntu specifically by getting uboot and a UEFI environment, but postmarketOS doesn't need that because it can boot from ChromeOS' bootloader. Installing postmarketOS on my Duets (homestar and wormdingler) was probably the best decision I've made with those devices, and they might be some of the best arm64 devices of that form factor to run Linux on.
Yes, this was definetely a side quest, but postmarketOS indeed is a real Linux distribution that is perfectly usable! I just want to experiment with this tablet, and with U-Boot providing an EFI environment now adapted, I (or anyone) should be able to boot any distribution (Arch Linux ARM, Debian, etc). Ubuntu was just my personal choice here :)
This is too cool. I actually have this exact tablet, and have basically barely ever used it because ChromeOS just crawls no matter what you do with it on that device. Every once in a while I do a search to see if anyone has done anything interesting with it, and it seems that day has finally come. I will give your image a try later tonight!
This is a great write-up about installing Linux on Chromebook.
Thank you for sharing it!
someone needs to do this for the arm Surface Pro 11.
Recently I was in the market for what I would call a 'low cost linux netbook/tablet' and settled on the Chuwi Minibook X. It has an Intel N150 processor, 16GB of memory and a 512GB nvme drive. For less than $300. I am wildly impressed by it. Touchpad is really terrible but otherwise it is a surprisingly compelling little device. I am still fine tuning the tablet mode stuff -- it doesn't have any hinge measurement sensors it relies on an accelerometer in each half. Codex has been helping me write some cool tools to debug and parse those raw readings into "im in laptop mode" or "im in tablet mode, disable kb/touchpad". I just installed KDE Plasma Mobile yesterday which is quite a cool alternate DE that is more suited to tablets. Here is a video of that codex tooling to help debug the hinge situation: https://www.threads.com/@whalesalad/post/DdYNriIAFO4
I've been thinking about getting one of these. I'm currently using a Surface Go 2, and I'm addicted to the small form factor, but it's not as quick to open and start typing as a laptop would be.
How is the battery life and fan noise? Not sure I can go back from fanless.
[dead]
Got my Minibook X U300 yesterday and I’m facing the same issues. Please share your findings as you go, this a cool little machine for Linux.
kinda cool, looks like a laptop