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by firmgently 2928 days ago
On my Android tablet I run Debian in chroot. Full LAMP, i3wm, choice of terminal emulators, Vim, git, real Firefox, real Chromium.

I use a Bluetooth keyboard with a trackpoint built in (alternatives with trackpads are available for people who prefer those). Or a Bluetooth mouse of course. I recently bought a Thinkpad Bluetooth keyboard so interface-wise, once I start X I'm basically on a Thinkpad.

In the winter when I have to get by on small amounts of electricity (all solar powered here) I use my tablet almost exclusively and earn money with it.

I use a bendy arm with a clamp to hold the tablet at a good ergonomic height and closer to my face. In a pinch when power is really low I actually do the same with my Android phone with all the same software, which works surprisingly well at 1920x1080. It ends up filling a similar proportion of my view to a 15" laptop (at the laptop's normal working distance) - although then it's only a few inches away from my eyes when using the phone (shortest focusing distance I can do) so wouldn't be healthy long term.

I can plug in my DSLR via a USBOTG dongle and grab photos from it. Or use a MicroSD in the camera via a full-size adaptor, then slot the MicroSD directly into the tablet. Then I can edit directly from RAW in Snapseed.

The biggest shortcoming is that I can't use Photoshop as I have an ARM processor. The armhf Debian distribution and packages are amazing and almost everything is there. WINE works but it would need some x86 binaries to run Photoshop, that just don't exist because it's ARM.

Artflow in Android is great, as is Snapseed and PhotoEditor (for resizing and basic image adjustments, including batch mode etc). I can run GIMP and Inkflow in Debian but after 20 years using Photoshop they don't come close for me. So when I really have to use Photoshop I have to save up some juice and fire up the laptop.

This is all on a 5-year old Sony Xperia Tablet Z. It was good for its time but nowadays there are faster machines with more RAM available. I'm looking forward to when I can justify an upgrade (this is a great tablet in many ways, I have lots of things I need to spend money on and I have been adjusting my work/life balance a lot in recent years so don't earn much).

I'm no Google fanboy, for me Apple/Google are just different flavours of very horrible. The difference with Android gear is that the potential is there to use it the way I want - it's possible (and not even that hard). I can root, I can use a pointing device, as opposed to Apple's approach.