Are Linux Tablets Still on the Way?

By Natasha Palumbo

If you’re a Linux user, and if you like tablets, it’s hard to say whether these are the best of times or the worst of times. While some initiatives to put Linux on tablets appear to be making steady progress, other open source projects in this vein have stagnated or disappeared. Read on for an update on where Linux currently stands in this niche, and the direction in which it might be headed.

2012 suggested a bright future for Linux on tablets. As I wrote last March, the Vivaldi Tablet promised to bring real, genuine Linux–not Android–to tablet hardware. At the same time, work including KDE’s Plasma Active interface was in the midst of developing a more tablet-friendly desktop environment that could serve many open source projects. Then, last fall, Canonical’s dash into the tablet space with a commitment to making Ubuntu run on Google’s Nexus 7 tablet inspired even more hope within the Linux community.

Hopes, Dreams and Realities

Today, that hope hasn’t entirely dissipated. But neither has it ascended beyond the realm of experimentation and proofs-of-concept. Instead, the current status of the initiatives discussed above has changed little from last year:

It’s also worth noting, as Sam Varghese has, that the ZaTab, the Android-powered tablet from open source hardware vendor ZaReason, is no longer for sale. ZaReason first introduced the concept way back in 2011, but it’s not clear at this point whether the initiative is still alive.

All in all, then, Linux on tablets remains very much a wait-and-see affair. The concept still holds a lot of promise, but we’ve yet to see anything in the way of production-ready tablet hardware powered by Linux. 2013 still has a long while left to run, and it may yet hold some major advances in store. But there’s nothing worth holding one’s breath for yet.