m4r0v3r: I can see that. Needs hildon-menu support for title bar menus though. at the end of the day its only gtk2+tidy vs gtk3+st (derived from mx..from tidy).

hell you could just try running gnome3 on a tablet.

this.........
The thing is, it works great with keyboard shortcuts but I'm not so sure about touch input only. It is usable with mouse, but mouse has right button.

You need to engage the users. You need to watch them and note down their assumptions, blunders and sources of frustration. You need to go around them not by trying to educate the users but by trying to educate yourself. You need to forget your own preconceptions.

Which is why most Linux window managers suck. The only ones that do not are those that mimic something that has been developled by a big company with a lot of specialists whose only job it to study users' behaviour, use patterns and workflow. Something like Windows 95/XP/7. That kind of layout - mimicked in KDE, Gnome 2 or LXDE, to name but a few - is not just a random concoction, put together because Microsoft could not come up with anything better. It is a result of a careful study and is the ideal solution for a desktop that has survived mostly unaltered for 15 years.Just look at the disasterous results when some developers or PR executives decided to move away from that. Unity, Gnome 3 and Metro (in that order) are glaring examples of how not to do a desktop environment. Their only justification for existence is that they are different, but literally no thought has been put into their design other than the looks.

Sadly, the same layout would not be as suitable for a tablet. Fat fingers need a different approach than a precise mouse cursor or a stylus. Luckily, there are other desktop solutions that are better suitable for a touchscreen interface. EasyPeasy comes to mind, for example. Or Gnome 3. As bad as it is on a desktop, it may actually be not too bad on a tablet.

However, the more I think about the topic the less I am convinced that the idea itself is sound. I think we are already zoomed too close in. We need to take a big step back and ask, what do people need a tablet for? Web browsing, watching Youtube videos, reading emails, playing games? There are already existing solutions that may not be perfect but are Good Enough™ and are already established too well to try to push them out. Some serious field work? But what? What can an alternative tablet offer that cannot be solved with an existing solution? Remember to replace a well established solution you cannot be 50% as good (that was Jolla's problem). You cannot be 90% or even 110% as good as the existing solution. No, you must be at least 3 times as good.

Other than the server niche, can you name a single thing where Linux offers the end user a three times better solution than Windows, Mac, Android or iOS? A three times better browser, email client, office suite, video editor...? Linux is mostly used by geeks and yet it does not even have a good programming IDE, for Pete's sake!

I am afraid that to make a successful Linux tablet, you first need to make a successful Linux desktop. As we all know, that has not happened in 24 years. It looks like we still have a long way to go

tbh, id be happy with a qml/qt version of hildon. If I remember rightly the actual components for qt4.8 i think exist. so porting them forward, and then just creating hildon in qt. but seems like a lot of work either way, but its atleast a solid "spec" to follow, rather than the community having to make a choice on how something should be, since itll just take too long imo.

I do wonder whether we can use the jTab adaptation on other Bay-Trail Z3735F SOC based Tablets, as there are a few around, although hard to find one with a decent screen...

There is already decent work on getting mainline linux to work on these Bay-Trail based devices so it would be a good place to start I think.

if i go down qt route, my aim would be to forward port marxians work whilst at the same time trying to find a way to remove maemo specific qt module or make it external to the main qt library, like qtx11extras.

would be pretty awesome not gonna lie

Hmm. Honestly, this is really the opposite of the way I'm thinking. Here's my question: why would I be interested in making a device for "average users", tailored for content consumption? Apple and Google have already perfected that device.

You say Linux does not have a successful desktop environment. That it doesn't have a good programming IDE. On the other hand, I have to say that I've been using various Linux desktops for, well, two decades now. And that I do the majority of my coding in a shell in Vim. I honestly don't understand why I would want to use an iOS or Android like GUI, or a graphical IDE. I've been told over and over again that those environments are better for users; but all I see is that they are better for novice users. Once you get up to speed, the workflow actually becomes impeded by the amount of hand-holding provided by the environment.

Rather than create a UI tailored for the "average" user, I'd kinda prefer a UI that just tries to stay out of the way as much as possible. Maybe something like this: by default, dedicate the entire screen of the device to the app that currently has focus. All single-finger gestures, and pinch/zoom gestures, are routed directly to this app. For system commands, two-finger gestures are used: a two-finger swipe up from the lower half of the screen brings up a "command center", with the on-screen keyboard, settings, and anything else absolutely necessary to managing the device. Two-finger swipe back down to get rid of it. A two-finger swipe down from the top half provides access to the menu bar of the running app. A two-finger swipe left or right allows you to switch between running apps.

There would be no built-in e-mail service: that would be provided by an app. No built-in browser -- also provided by an app. No built-in app launcher! That would also be an app.

All that the GUI provides is the absolute minimal amount to manage running apps, and otherwise gets out of the way. Essentially, the display is entirely handed over to the current app, with the bare minimum of extraneous UI elements provided as an "overlay" on top of that app...

Is Plasma Mobile (http://plasma-mobile.org/) an option? I really don't know much about it, but is seems like the benefits include:

• Open source
• Actively developed by a dedicated team
• Supports X and Wayland
• Configurable user interface
• Ready to be tested now
• Qt / QML

(Please let me know if any of this is inaccurate.)

Absolutely! Yeah, I also haven't been following this very closely, as I've been more-or-less interested in the Maemo-Meego-Mer world. And I've become a huge fan of Qt as well, so I really should investigate it a bit.

On the other hand, what little I do know about it makes it look very much like Android. Which isn't bad; I was planning on using Sailfish pretty much as just a launcher for my favorite Linux apps, and I suspect I could do that with Plasma as well. I'm just kinda not interested in all the extra gunk that comes with a beautiful full-featured mobile GUI. I just want to run my favorite apps, and otherwise have the UI get the heck out of my way...