4mo ago

Is a tablet that doubles as a USB-C second laptop display a (FOSS) thing?

Really only interested in something like Graphene, Lineage, or a Linux mobile tablet that can work with a typical Linux distro and display over USB-C. It is just a casual conversational ask. Maybe one of y'all has tried or knows the answer. I won't use anything that runs google stuff or is a pain to load a custom ROM.

25 comments

I wish there was a way to subscribe to posts on Lemmy so you would get notifications for replies, even if you didn't create it.
- I usually just leave the post open in a tab and come back to it eventually. Sometimes that's a couple of days later…sometimes months.
  
  Doesn't work in the app so well. Additionally, there's no read history, so if you click away from a post and close the app without commenting or voting, and have posts marked read hidden automatically, it's gone forever
- The connect app offers a subscribe button for posts. Idk if that's helpful?
- @remindme@mstdn.social 1 day
- it might just be an mbin thing but I thought it was fediverse but I have a little bullhorn icon I can click to get that. it also has a mute.
- To be fair, Reddit can't do this, either, as far as I know.
  
  It could do that :(
Apparently the Lenovo yoga tab 13 (now really old) and the Lenovo tab extreme (out of stock near me) have that feature.
- geez if I had known this I might have been inclined to check those out. thats a pretty huge feature for me. so useful for trouble shooting. gonna check the lenovo tab extreme. EDITED - doh seems to be a software thing so even if it was available not what I thought. I took the OP's thing to be such it could even see like the bios of a host. Like an external display in every way.
Are you talking display out or display in?
Display out? https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-tablet-11-be0097nr
This thing actually runs windows and is x86 so you can run a Linux distro in theory.
Display in, I will edit this post but that's not as common
- Display-in is the app of interest
- The max-boox-pro series had a HDMI-input to have an external eINK-screen and doubled as android laptop. Quite expensive though, and not that useful.
Does it necessarily have to be an independent tablet when not connected to your laptop? If not, then look into a "portable monitor". That should do what you're looking for. USB-C on both ends. Plugs into your laptop and can be used as an external display / secondary screen.
- The utility of having both would be enough for me to consider purchasing a tablet when I will not otherwise. It should only be a small amount of code in AOSP to work with any device. I am also half ass shining a spotlight on the ridiculousness of this not existing by default on all devices. There are even protocols for display over micro USB. At the very least this should be a F-Droid FOSS app. All devices should go as far as having this potential functionality like an EOL where the modem can be disconnected along with all other apps and only run the device as a video pass through so that no code vulnerabilities from abandoned orphaned kernels can run exposed to external sources. Then the user could safely select to continue using any Android device as a display.
  
  Man, 100% agreed. Devs didn't think about EOL at the time, but hopefully someone will implement this at some point because environmentalism has been growing bigger than ever.
  Surprisingly, even for interactive screen-mirroring, there is still generally only scrcpy—which is even used by giants like SideQuest for Meta Quest VR headsets (since they're Droids). Previously there was Vysor.io, but that's closed-source and for-profit.
  Anyway, this totally reminded me that I once really tried to look into this but found that the only solution in the entire known English-speaking world for this is currently the closed-source, freemium Spacedesk + a rooted tablet. I gave up because at the time I didn't wanna try to root the tablet due to the mandatory factory reset, but I eventually caved in to install Kotatsu lol. Haven't retried...
What you could do is get a USB c capture card and use something like vlc. Latency would be there but itd work.

25 comments