In a long post titled “Our commitment to Windows quality,” published on Microsoft’s website and sent via email to millions of members of the Windows Insider Program, Windows boss Pavan Davuluri laid out a laundry list of changes Microsoft plans to make in Windows 11, starting this month.
What’s most remarkable about this post is what it doesn’t contain. Here’s how Davuluri kicked things off:
Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows. And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.
That paragraph belongs in the non-apology Hall of Fame, with a cross-reference to “Friday news dump” – a classic PR technique that aims to minimize media coverage of the awkward news being released.
Have you tried another good drawing tablet you could boot linux on? Now, I’m no artist, but I have heard good things about krita?
Krita is awesome. Tablet options not so much. Many Intel based tablets are rather heavy and clunky comparatively, or have poor digitization. Touch screens aren’t the same as digitizer pen support. Some like the surface tablets are proprietary enough that you have to jump through many tech hoops just to set it up. And then there’s the cost. You can do it but its expensive in money and time. It has to be something you want to do for yourself. Because it will not make monetary or otherwise.
Android tablets are again loaded down with tech hurdles. Can they be unlocked? How hard is it? And what special hardware might you need to do it? Then you have to consider how hard is it to flash a different operating system onto it. And finally, how much of the proprietary hardware is just not going to work, and is that a deal breaker.
There is a version of Krita for Android. But the few devices I have that can launch it. The UI is unusable. Everything else works. You just have to fight the UI hard.
I got an older ARM based chrome tab for about 40 dollars. Went through the hoops to put postmarket is on it. Only the camera doesn’t work. But the 4GB of ram is the biggest bottleneck. CPU cores are fine. But just sitting idle at the desktop a little under 1/8 of the ram is already used up. Open Firefox or chrome and you are already swapping hard likely. Krita works well with the USF pen support. But the ram again is a heavy limit on document size. It’s definitely not for most people.
I desperately would love a good affordable Linux tablet platform. KDE plasma’s touch experience has been really good. Not perfect, but most of the hitches are edge enough cases in daily use. If someone would make a shell with just a full HD screen and pen support capable of using a compute module SOC. Raspberry pi or other compatible SOC. That would almost be ideal as long as they could meet a decent price point. Which is always the thing that tends to kill these concepts.
I have tried other tablets. The response is nothing like an iPad. Also I need to have at least one apple product just to use Apple TV (and validate anything Apple) which sucks hard.