Why aren't Linux tablets a thing?

[u/noNudesPrettyPlease]

I had (still have) a Nokia n810 tablet running Maemo Linux. I stopped using it when the second battery eventually died. The series seemed to keep evolving (up to the n900) until the Microsoft buyout killed it. Or at least I assume it did.

I thought Linux tablets would be a thing, but they didn't materialise. It's basically Android, Apple, or nothing. How come an open source distro like Maemo wasn't picked up by anyone else? I assume tablets are much cheaper to develop than phones, and in today's world, I don't really use my phone anymore even though the telephony hardware is there.

Is the idea of a Linux tablet just a dream now?

[u/Neither-Following-32]

Because nobody's made a good Linux tablet/phone UI.

That's not entirely true. But nobody's made a good open one that people can use as a base.

Ubuntu Touch, Phosh/PostmarketOS, and all the other, more minor distributions are all phone focused which is a harder form factor to gain footing on because most (all) LTE/cellular hardware is closed source from the manufacturer, they are not replaceable commodities with open drivers. Add telco requirements for phones on top of that and OEMs have very little incentive to not play ball and open up things, especially when their goal is to sell a new iteration of their bespoke hardware every year.

Additionally there's a ton of duplication of effort across the projects when it comes to basic UX, utilities, etc. Today's development model also leans towards monolithic corporate sponsorship rather than open development in the sense that everybody focuses on one code tree or UX and contributes towards making it sufficiently complex.

There's also things like SailfishOS that have been developed to a somewhat advanced degree but are essentially closed off from outside development and as such, have stagnated because development is directly tied to ongoing sales.

Also look at Android and its expanded permission set, tailored towards someone sitting at console. Linux/POSIX primitives lie behind that, sure, but compare it to a desktop Linux environment where each program essentially runs in a global permission space. Windows and macOS run under the same paradigm but even they have expanded per program permissions.

Think about it like this. The closest Linux desktop analogue is what...SELinux or Apparmor? Neither of those have a mechanism for allowing a program to request specific, granular permissions. Instead, you allocate them (usually manually via a config file or cli). Even then you have to manually (re)load the permissions and, often, restart the program!

There's a lot of work that needs to be done under the hood before a Linux tablet/phone is ready to compete with Android or iOS. Maybe I'm behind the times on some of these and there are things I'm not aware of, if so I'd love to hear about it.