Looking for a shop computer/tablet that probably doesn't exist - eviltoast

Let’s see if I can keep this relatively short:

I’m a woodworker, I do my design work in FreeCAD and then I print out my drawings on paper to carry out to the shop with me. It would be nicer if I had a shop-proof device to run FreeCAD in the shop with me because over the past year I found myself saying the following things in the shop a lot:

  • “Wait, let’s go in and look at the 3D model.”
  • “Ah dang I forgot to note this particular dimension on the drawing, let me go fix that.”
  • “I’ll measure this part up then go in and do some drawing.”

So what does “shop proof” mean exactly?

  1. Wood shop be dusty. Last year I hauled 250 gallons of sawdust to the dump. To me this means that a physical keyboard needs to be able to function if it’s been packed with dust and/or needs to be vacuum cleaner proof. I also think cooling fans are probably a bad idea; a passively cooled device is probably preferable.

  2. Not many outlets in the shop, so it needs a good battery life. I actually don’t need a tremendous amount of performance, I’ve used a Raspberry Pi 3 for the kind of CAD work I do.

  3. FreeCAD does not ship an APK so Android is no bueno, it’s gotta be GNU/Linux.

  4. It needs decent usable Wi-Fi because I envision using Syncthing to keep my woodworking projects folder synced between my desktop and this device. It doesn’t necessarily need to get signal out in the shop (my phone barely does; I lose signal if I stand behind the drill press) but it does have to connect to my Wi-Fi when I carry it into the house.

I think this means I’m looking for an ARM tablet that can competently run Linux. Is there such a thing?

ADDENDUM:

Thanks to everyone who commented, I think I do have a plan of action: I’m gonna buy a used Lenovo!

To answer the question I posed, no it doesn’t seem that a Linux ARM tablet is really a thing yet. Commercial offerings that run Android or Windows on ARM are often so locked down that switching OS isn’t a thing, the few attempts at a purpose built ARM tablet for Linux like the PineTab just are not ready for prime time.

In the x86 world, it basically came down to 10 year old Toughbook tablets or 4 year old low-end 2-in-1s, and I think the latter won out just because of mileage and condition. A lot of the toughbooks out there will have 10 year old batteries in them, and they’ve been treated like a Toughbook for some or all of that time. The few Lenovo’s I’ve looked at are barely used, probably because of how Windows “runs” on them.

I’ll eventually check back in with progress on this front. Would it be better to add to this thread or create another?

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    Thanks @yojimbo@sopuli.xyz ! Absolutely perfect.

    At first I didn’t know whether to be more impressed with how light FreeCAD is or how far low-end CPUs have come. So then I looked up a comparison between that Pentium Silver N5030 and my 2014 era Dell’s i7-4510U. And they’re actually pretty close. That’s six years of progress for you I guess.

    Yeah I think I’ll pick one up, several are available.

    I’ve seen some folks have some issues with suspend and such running Ubuntu on the thing, all good in Fedora? I’ve been a Mint guy for 10 years now and I have no experience with Fedora.

    • yojimbo@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Damned, now I am afraid that I’ve oversold the thing. I’d hate if it came in the mail and you ended up disappointed.

      Edit 2024-08-31: I’ve reinstalled the thing w/ Fedora 40 cca 3 mnts ago, I think I can safely say the “jerking” is gone.

      There is actually one significant glitch with the picture jerking up and down on the display.

      I believe it is a software glitch because I can fix it by maximizing a window on the screen or tilting window left / right. I never get to see it really, because right after login Mattermost client fills half of my screen.

      Now i believe this has actually worsened since before. On previous versions (not sure 37/38) this has happened only seldomly, you had to play with the device a bit to replicate. But I believe it happened both in landscape and portrait mode.

      On Fedora 39 it is absolutely unavoidable in landscape mode - it starts immediately sometimes “jumping up/down” angrily, but does not happen at all in portrait mode.

      I’ve tried to replicate by booting Fedora 38 workstation live from flash drive - but I don’t thing that was a good method looking into it - the “autorotate” didn’t work whitch I am sure works after installation and I couldn’t replicate the jerking at all and I am sure it was there already before. I haven’t done full reinstall since I got it, it is possible it has already gone throught 37 upgrade 38 upgrade 39 and this is something I’ve picked up along the way but I’d be surprised. (Also don’t use Unetbootin to create Fedora boot drive - I keep learning that over and over again.)

      When you mention susped - I’ve never bloody noticed - it does not suspend automatically! My xfce systems have “presentation mode” always activated so I thought it is something i’ve switched on - but if so - I don’t see obvious way to switch it off. I may have seen some error messages about suspend in the past? I press the power button shortly and it suspends light blinking, i press it again and it goes on again. This feels fixable but I don’t mind atm. It suspends reliably when the keyboard folio closes over it too.

      Finally when the keyboard is away on BT for long it runs out of juice. You have to reconnect it to charge up for few seconds and then disconnect/reconnect again to make it work.

      The chasis feels sturdy enough to me, but it ain’t as sturdy as a tablet (iPad / Boox ) with one piece metal backplate. Bottom half of the device back connecting kickstand is made of metal (I suspect that is where the heat exchange happens) and that is where a lot of it robustness comes from.

      I am an admin by trade so I may not be objective. I have heard about but have never used Mint - I love my “xface”. I do exist in deb based environment like you though and I do know default Ubuntu. I’ve played with Fedora before because curiosity and I think the switch is painless. Pretty much same systemd, same Gnome 3, just watch out dnf update upgrades packages unlike apt. Installing this thing I haven’t done a single “smart” thing. Out of the box it was better user experience than installing windows and everything except that jerking whitch before I had to notice over time worked marvelously. I think I recall looking for activation of hw acceleration in firefox and finding out it was already on. I may have used nmcli to set my wireguard vpn profile but that may have been the total I’ve done in shell except using dnf for speed and using ssh / tmux.

      I recall trying Ubuntu on it but while not useless it was far from Fedora. On Ubuntu I kept oscilating between x11 where everything worked but the touch interface was jerky and somewhat useless or wayland where touch was fine but not everything worked as I wanted. Under both scenarious the bluetooth keyboard didn’t work over bluetooth - only connected, and the auto rotation was a no-go. (No “jerking” if I remember correctly!). Fedora provides the best Wayland experiece I’ve seen. IMO well worth learning to deal w/ dnf - even though it’s only one device.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        I’ll try a few different distros on it, see what works best.

        I’ve never actually used Wayland; between my Nvidia GPU in my desktop and preference for Cinnamon, I’ve only ever used x11.

        Once the machine arrives I’ll make another post about it, see what I land on.

          • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            Okay, some feedback from having used this little tablet PC in a wood shop use case:

            First of all I don’t have anywhere to put it. a piece of paper can just sit on my workbench surface and who cares if I get boards or tools on it, a tablet feels more precious than that. This may be less of a factor in a larger shop.

            MEMS sensors were a mistake. Take me back to 2007 when my convertible laptop had a button on the bezel to rotate the screen.

            While we’re turning off automatic features, turn off automatic screen off/suspend. This machine takes a full 8 seconds to wake back up, and when I’m in “Okay that step is done, next step, how long do the rails need to be?” mode I’m pretty sure I could chew through my own forearm in the time it takes the screen to come back on. Like I say, easy solution is don’t turn the screen off. It seems to have enough battery life.

            I briefly tried three DEs with this little touch screen, Mint Cinnamon is not up to it; it’s 100% a desktop UI that will let you click on things by poking a laptop touch screen, it is NOT mobile friendly. Fedora KDE is willing to try but it’s still desktop first, Gnome is a tablet OS that remembers when it was a desktop OS slightly too much. I would honestly rather have the “switching between apps” workflow you get from Android than the “workspaces” of Gnome because it doesn’t leave enough touch gestures for applications. Just trying to scroll through a PDF, it wants to click-drag-highlight rather than just scroll.

            FreeCAD continues to be second only to GIMP as “FOSS software that is amazingly powerful at what it does with the UX of a colonoscopy.” It works surprisingly well on touch screen. It’s not even in the same time zone as good or usable, but “works surprisingly well.” It starts up, runs, opens files etc. quite competently but it’s outright combative when it comes to looking at different parts of a model, switching modes, switching workbenches, looking at dimensions, selecting geometry etc. I’ve had it not accept input from an onscreen keyboard, so I outright couldn’t change a dimension.

            I’m a little tempted to build my own furniture CAD package in the Godot game engine. I don’t know how to do 90% of that but I’m about to try.

            The core of the idea does work though: it has been very nice being able to take measurements in the shop, put them in CAD right there, walk into my house, and then that file is just on my desktop. My favorite thing about the whole experience is Syncthing.

            • Casey @mander.xyzEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              I installed Gallium OS on an aging Chromebook that was no longer offered support from Google. I’ve been able to run FreeCAD on it with no problems.

              The little Acer I bought years ago is spill proof and designed to be fixable. I think it was initially intended for kindergarten classrooms.

              Initially I bought one for my dad because he was constantly getting his computer infected with viruses due to forwarding emails. This little Chromebook fixed 90% of those problems.

              I loved the Chromebook so much that I bought myself too. I was disheartened when Google stop supporting the hardware but then when I found out about putting that specific version of Lennox on them it gave them new life.

              • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
                2·
                5 months ago

                Yeah I’m with you; I’m also in the resurrecting old hardware with Linux club.

                If I treat the little Lenovo tablet like a laptop, well…it is one. it’s a small, low-end x86 PC. Standard install images work fine, it installs .rpms and flatpaks just fine, FreeCAD launches and operates correctly…with the keyboard attached.

                Snap the keyboard off and it performs a heartfelt but untalented impression of a tablet. Gnome is still Gnome, it still wants to be a mouse and keyboard UI, but it has had touch support bolted on after the fact and it works about as well as tits on a fish. It’s got a lot of the problems Windows 8 had in trying to be a desktop OS that can also run on tablet, but without the schizophrenia. A lot of the UI elements are still quite small even when upscaled to 200%, you can tell by the way certain UI elements fail that it doesn’t like being scaled like that especially in portrait mode, and it still interprets touch inputs largely as mouse inputs. So if you try to scroll through a PDF file, you might scroll, you might highlight a bunch of text which causes it to scroll strangely.

                FreeCAD has paid even less attention to touch compatibility, I’ve noticed that sometimes interacting with some elements via touch will cause the view controls to break until the app is restarted. The UI isn’t built for fat fingers, a lot of stuff is designed for shift+clicking or for keyboard only controls, and I had a dimension dialog box refuse to accept input from the onscreen keyboard.

                The hardware might be able to do what I need, the software almost certainly can’t.