Chaos - StarLabs StarLite MkV

Thingy?

Some thoughts (not exactly a review, not exactly not a review) on the StarLabs StarLite MkV after using it for a few months and taking it on a trip to a con.

(And then, because Everything Happens So Much, a few months more loosely poking it at home before I could finish this writeup.)

It's a tablet that is natively built for Linux®, that I got mostly because apparently I dithered too long about Surfaces Go and they stopped making any of the ones people managed to get Linux® running on.

(as caption)
The StarLite MkV, sat upon a folding soft tablet stand I find useful to also support and control the kickstand it laptop mode, sat outside by some flowers. The screen is at maximum brightness and if you look real close you can just about make out this article, and a terminal.

First impressions and build

It's very Linux®.

The very first thing it did upon powering on was drop into an EFI shell, at which point I needed to attach the keyboard-case-hybrid cover and go look up the instructions to boot the rest of the way from StarLabs' site.

Photo of the EFI shell
A welcoming out-of-box experience.

Being such an early boot shell, you can forget about virtual keyboards or Bluetooth® pairing, so you'd be scuppered without the (optional!) keyboard cover or a wired or dongle-wireless keyboard—and probably a USB-C to A adapter to attach it. I have no idea why it shipped like that, and update-grub did indeed fix it, but StarLabs are a small company as far as I can tell and these are the tradeoffs you get from that.

It's a bit big, and very slippery. Kind of too big and slippery; actually holding it in your hands without the cover—and since it's a keyboard cover, you kind of need to undock it to use it just as a tablet—can be difficult, and propping an edge against a surface won't even save you if that surface is something like a shiny hard countertop or silky tablecloth. It's not helped by not having a huge border on the front—if you want the most amount of screen, these are all great attributes, and very modern, but otherwise you really have to figure out how to brace it against you properly.

The keyboard cover

The keyboard cover is a mixed bag. It could really do with a magnetic clasp or something; the way it's kept closed is a big elastic fabric loop, like a page-holder on a paper diary, and it feels like an afterthought fix and like something you're going constantly in risk of losing (I recommend immediately transferring it to around the hinge-down section when you open it up). It also acts as the kickstand for the tablet, which means you can only prop it up if you also have the keyboard sticking out front. There's no way to fold it back behind the tablet out of the way. This can be a bit awkward if you just want to park it on your lap or chest when you want to crash out in a hotel bed and watch something. It does work, slightly grudgingly, as a laptop if you can get the hinge to fit on your knees; it's not the best ergonomic experience in the world, and flexes almost enough to be concerning, but it's very portable and you can touchtype away on it. If you only want a laptop, a small ultraportable would be better, but then you wouldn't be looking at a tablet.

The stylus loop is dangerously useless; the optional pen StarLabs will sell you is a near-featureless smooth cylinder (too smooth: the side buttons are really easy to lose track of), and the loop only just has enough elastic tension to hold on to it casually. The first time I actually took it somewhere, it immediately fell out, and thankfully a friend noticed and I remembered to enact my plan to move it to a zip compartment in the art satchel I was carrying. Do not rely on the stylus loop, it will lose or break your expensive accessory. On top of that, it sticks out from the side awkwardly when trying to put the tablet in things, and is just generally attached to the wrong part—you want the stylus with the tablet, not with the keyboard cover, which has a functional (if not amazing) trackpad of its own. Because the cover is also a keyboard and attaches to the tablet along the inside edge, it can't pull the same trick pure-tablet covers do of tucking the stylus in the inside groove, and there's no way to make a cavity large enough in modern tablets, so I'm not sure what a better fix is here other than just carry the stylus alongside in a zipper pocket. I can't say I'd trust a magnet much more, but I definitely don't trust the loop.

There's some silly stuff that's somewhere in firmware-software land. The keyboard has function keys as "special" keys by default, but gained Fn-Lock functionality recently—documented only in a GitHub issue as far as I can see. The problem is that that state is held in the keyboard as far as I can tell…which loses it and resets to default every time it's undocked. (The backlight also turns on every time.)

(Incidentally, finding actual release notes for the firmware is weirdly hard. They show up if you click the right things in the firmware updater, but the online pages and GitHub repo for them are badly out of date. The latter is weird for something boasting about how it's so open-source it's built on coreboot.)

The keyboard cover also seems to easily press keys and then wake the tablet back up from sleep when folded and squeezed even slightly—say, from putting it into a bag. Wake-from-keyboard probably just shouldn't be a thing on a tablet, given it has a power button for that. (You can actually turn this off under Windows® using Device Manager for most computers, so possibly there's a way to fix this in software here too.) There's supposedly a lid-closed sensor, given there was a firmware update to add an option to disable it, but it neither seems to invoke sleep nor—more importantly—inhibit wake.

And sometimes it just doesn't recognize properly when attached; rarely the keyboard won't power up, and more like one time in ten the trackpad won't.

But can it do art?

Yes!

I'm actually really glad this is a positive, because it's i) the thing I got it for ii) the thing at most risk, because nobody else I'd seen talking about the pen had done more than the most perfunctory "yeah I can make lines with it I guess? for note-taking?" testing iii) as the above section may have suggested, you take on a lot of tradeoffs getting a small company's first tablet running on a pile of open source desktop software rather than a Sansmaug or an Æpple. I'm actually pretty happy about buying this thing because it works for what I got it for, even if this page is mostly nits and frustrations.

As noted, the side buttons are a little fiddly because they're so slim into the body of the pen they're easy to lose and require you to flex your thumb a bit to press the right one inward. An active matrix rather than needing an AAA battery would obviously be better.

But the actual registration and responsiveness is pretty good; the parallax does shift with rotation but is small enough to just start transparently compensating for it (I actually find, combined with the large and slippery hold, it's easiest to use it portrait, braced against your torso). Palm rejection is not great; the most reliable way seems to be to make sure the stylus is registering a hover before your ham touches down. (Unlike my old ThinkPad X201 Tablet, it never gets too hot to the touch, nor the screen obscured by the greasy smears of your sweaty flesh being lightly cooked.) Or, just get a half-glove that makes your palm and lower fingers slippery and non-touch, which is what one art friend I passed it to to try pulled out. Some things just are best fixed in hardware.

So how much art do I mean by art? Well here's the doodle Burquimera (the friend with the glove) made in about ten minutes, being quite happy with the experience:

My character LP-202 doing a silly blep
A majestic idiot.

I went for a real-boy Linux tablet because I wanted to run full-bodied art software that wasn't locked to a tablet environment, proprietary formats, or subscriptions. Krita has absolutely knocked it out of the park here; it's got a great brush engine, a ton of great layer features (transparency masks! color tagging!), and a fullscreen mode that works pretty well with a tablet given it's first-and-foremost desktop software.

It's not without caveats—nothing with this is. The GNOME onscreen keyboard just straight-up never appears when in Krita, either because it's a Qt/KDE-flavored app, or because it's using the stylus. So you're going to have a lot of "New Layer"s until you park it into the cover to name them, and it's a good idea to name your file to save first. On GNOME it also seems to go unresponsive if you have the canvas-only mode go fullscreen, but that's fixed under KDE. A bluetooth keyboard, or some kind of macro pad even, might be a nice addition, but Krita's remarkably good at giving stylus-only ways to do things that might otherwise require modifier keys, like change if selection is additive, subtractive, or replace, or making a scaling operation preserve aspect ratio or not.

Some tweaks I recommend:

Even if you're not sold on the hardware (after all this kvetching? how could you not be!), definitely give Krita a go. The most important freedom is data freedom: having your files, and in a format you can always open.

The default OS install

I ordered my StarLite with the default Ubuntu option, because I wanted to be able to check all the hardware was good before I added "maybe the kernel I'm using doesn't support it" problems into the mix. It's Ubuntu with GNOME, and is what I ran with for the con.

It's surprisingly janky, given Ubuntu used to be the "just work" distribution years ago, and rotted out with junk like "Pro" paid update channels. Quite often GNOME will reject the login/unlock password the first time for unclear reasons; it does not believe in useful error messages. Caps Lock sometimes ends up on only in certain contexts (no, this isn't the cause of the password thing). Sometimes the trackpad stops working, and is only fixed on a reboot; undocking and redocking the keyboard cover isn't enough.

All the Linux power management jokes from the 1990s remain true, which is disappointing for a device built to run Linux and with coreboot-based firmware, rather than the understandable nightmare of trying to get whatever ACPI crimes whatever vendor tested only against then-current Windows to work. Along with the slow wakeup, and aformentioned insomnia which may be the keyboard case, it also sometimes dies in its sleep with the sleep LED pulsing, but just completely unresponsive to the power button until held long enough to force it off. Battery life is decent enough—three hours of Krita—but seems like that's poor in comparison with "normal" tablets.

Snap remains just a worse way to get software than normal Debian packaging, or even something more common like FlatPak, and includes bizzare and unhelpful design decisions like tarballing up software when you're trying to uninstall it. (Which I did with Steam before running a "going to reinstall with something else" backup, only to wonder why it was still churning one core at 100% CPU minutes later. Single-threaded gzip in 2025 to create a file I didn't even want because the whole point of uninstalling it was to reclaim disk space…)

Modern GNOME is annoyingly constrained. There's lots of stupid little missing things. You can't minimize something by pressing the tray icon again. The filer is clumsy and seems embarrassed to be one; I particularly hate the modern Gtk+ buttons-in-titlebar UI pattern. The omnipresent top bar stupidly steals the mile-high space from things like the Firefox tab bar (and remember, you're trying to control the cursor with a fairly mediocre trackpad half the time). The onscreen keyboard is terrible and doesn't work properly in terminals (let's have problems with backspace like it's 1980 and we're doing "^H^H^H" jokes in newsgroups), and missing important keys like Control. The Power Statistics application meanwhile is very un-GNOME in all its details about the battery charge/discharge model, but as a result real neat to see.

The other hardware

The screen DPI is very high, but not a huge problem for a device held fairly close. DPI scaling under GNOME is really not up to the task, but 100% is readable, and it's nice to have the pixel density for art.

The webcam is bafflingly awful. I had a USB webcam in the '90s for my Win98 ThinkPad, and it's about that quality; muddy, single-figure framerate, barely usable to be a recognizable figure in a video call. The reverse camera is no better; this is definitely not a tablet to take photos with. I'm actually surprised they make webcams this bad any more, since you'd think the cheap, plentiful kind would be at least budget-smartphone average.

(as caption)
Sat by a fireplace in my hotel by the con, looking nonplussed at how grainy and dim the image is, while the flames are completely washed out. This one was taken in preinstalled camera app Cheese on the stock Ubuntu install, so should be reasonable to assume it's set up correctly.
(as caption)
The same plants the tablet was pictured with earlier, taken with the rear camera. That photo was taken with a Fairphone 5, itself not exactly blessed with a stellar camera, lagging behind generations-old flagship phones. But this is early digital camera quality; giving it good light to try to stay away from grain has just made it wash out and bloom.
(as caption)
A front-camera selfie by the plants. I a full of bees and overexposure.

There's quirks with the charging. Occasionally it won't light the charging LED until I swap USB port, and as far as I can tell the (OEM) cable and adapter are fine and getting a good connection. There's a very almost-hobbyist trait that after the color LED switches to "fully charged", a while later it'll switch to "overcharge protection", which feels like a concept from the NiCad days if I'm supposed to care about unplugging it again (but support says I'm not, this is normal).

Worse is that it's fussy about chargers. I have an Anker that does dual-mode Quick Charge and Power Delivery (and a pox on the parties that mean USB-C is such a miasma of substandard sub-standards). It'll charge everything else USB-C, including a chunky M1 MacBook Pro, but the StarLite doesn't want to know, and goes into an error-loop state flashing its lights if connected…unless I connect it via my USB-charging debugger dongle. Then it works, and stays working for a bit.

The support interaction on that one was again very small company: I'm pretty sure I had an e-mail exchange with the engineers working on the firmware for negotating USB-C charging (and if not, the support folks must have been talking to them), which is great and obviously not a thing large companies scale to. Conversely, while they were helpful at explaining/confirming the details, the end result is that they can't afford to test and support a wide range of chargers (Anker are hardly obscure), so it's probably not going to get fixed. I'm pretty sure there's a firmware bug here somewhere, but not at all sure if it's an Anker one that gets lucky with other, more conventional phones and laptops and just not Linux (see also: ACPI), or a StarLite one, nor do I have the narrowly specific skills (or time to develop them) to go answer that and contribute a patch if it's the latter.

Install Debian on it

Everyone knows the best way to spend a Saturday night is installing Debian.

Debian 12 (current stable) with KDE seems to work OK, or at least not really any less OK than the OEM Ubuntu install. I ended up setting it up as a dual-boot with the major share of the SSD in the end since I have some confidence I can expand to consume the remaining Ubuntu space some day if needed, and in the mean time I still have that stock install as a fallback for firmware updates or the like. I needed the Bluetooth and display rotation fixes others have posted about: blog 1; blog 2; official instructions; and the kernel seems to get stuck dumping a bunch of wifi errors (but not quite a panic) about one boot in ten, and rarely on shutdown. About one in twenty times, the KDE panel doesn't think there is a battery in the device, despite System Monitor measuring it. I did give the current backports kernel a go to see if that helped anything, but it was actually worse, losing the wireless adapter. I'm crossing my fingers that I won't have that problem when the time to upgrade to Debian 13 as stable rolls round, since "backports broke a thing" is very "yeah, there's a big warning that they'll do that" news.

Picking KDE as the full-fat desktop envrionment of choice rather than trusty old modular and UNIX-y XFCE was largely thanks to the Steam Deck showing me that we've got past the growing pains of Plasma and it's actually…good again. DPI scaling works a lot better than GNOME, and it autoadjusts the spacing of things when undocking the keyboard and deciding its a tablet. The configuration philosophy is the polar opposite, from "even fewer options than Apple" to full-blown Win9X-era preferences galore. You can turn the power button into a sleep button, but it's still a gamble if it'll actually do that, and if it'll wake back up after.

On-screen keyboards remain a disaster. Rather than the GNOME one that was borderline useless and only showed up sometimes, there's a more complete one that shows up once per boot, then breaks (maliit); and a login screen one may or may not work (qtvirtualkeyboard with SDDM). Both needed manual setup, and as far as I can tell from posts (normal session; login screen) this is just the state of things at the moment. The mallit only-appears-once bug has been open since end of 2022. A particularly comical case was trying to install Kamoso to take webcam photos, only be confused by the root escalation prompt in Discover rejecting my password. Unhiding the password revealed that even when Mallit was switched to uppercase, for this password field it was sending lowercase characters. (At least being KDE-world, when it is working, it works with Krita.)

Given all the folks Linux-ing their Surface Gos, I'm kind of surprised the state of on-screen keyboards is still this bad in both mainstream desktop environments—I don't see how this can really be hardware-dependent.

I haven't played with Waydroid yet, but it does seem I'm running Wayland without having to do anything special. (I mean there's some video-related errors to the console as it boots, but that's just Tuesday for Linux.) The real sink-or-swim on that being usable is going to be whether Android apps get an Android keyboard, given the Linux-level one doesn't work. But for now, I don't really have much use case for running Android apps on a tablet, else I would have just…got a much cheaper and less janky Android tablet.

Vague, unsatisfying conclusion

So despite all that, I'm mostly happy with buying the StarLite. (I definitely came back from the con glad I'd got it in time.) A lot of this is because I knew what I was getting into—I've been running Linux on random laptops for a couple decades now and know how stuff is broken (although I held out a bit more hope power management might work this time), and gets freshly broken (the miserable march from ALSA+dmix to a not-ready-yet PulseAudio to a not-ready-yet PipeWire is a strong example). I also don't hold particularly strong hopes that Open Source will magically fix things, or that a small company will have huge resources to pour into doing so, even for a product they sell. But there's more hope than if this were proprietary. Maybe if lots of folks with kernel power management debugging chops grab these and set to work fixing them for themselves. If that's you, uh…this post is a tempting exciting puzzle to tackle, not discouragement to buy it, right? (I also don't hold a lot of illusions I'm gonna find the time and energy to work out how desktop input methods work on Linux this year and write/fix the virtual keyboard, especially knowing I'll have to redo that work when someone reinvents it all next year.)

But let's be unfortunately clear: if I wasn't braced for this, I'd consider it overpriced and unfit for purpose. You need to specifically want a Linux tablet and know what that entails for this to be a good buy. If you do then, well, alternatives are narrow, and the hardware mostly seems good (that webcam…). The parts that suck are the Linux parts.

But those Linux parts also mean I can (and have):

It's a tablet computer that's actually a computer, and that is worth something.

Addition: Debian 13

Updating to Debian 13 ("trixie") obviously broke things, because Linux. (It was actually fine on my XFCE VM that's been through a bunch of upgrades, which gave a false sense of "maybe it won't waste hours".)

Plasma 6 is impressively broken on upgrade, and required some old-fashioned "make a shortcut on the desktop and aim it at xterm to be able to recover it", because Ctrl-Alt-F1 isn't a thing any more in this modern Wayland world it seems.

But the biggest mess, by a long way, is input methods. ibus, maliit, and fcitx all fight for dominance, and none of them were working properly. The best solution I found in the end was to tell im-config to explicitly override to nothing, which is different from auto; then explicitly set the keyboard layout in both KDE and fcitx's separate UIs, then reselect maliit, which until then was blocking all *real* keypresses when used, and crashed and restarted during typing the toot about it. There's so much to fix in this space, but all people want to do is write new lightware input method frameworks that don't work. (You cannot remove ibus without ripping out a bunch of packages that depend on it.)

apt autoremove will try to take out iio-sensor-proxy, so install that explicitly to make sure it sticks around, else screen rotation will stop working.

And finally the Bluetooth firmware is present in Debian 13! I finally got another little Rii blutetooth keyboard that I use with Raspberry Pis and the like without issue. It won't pair because there's a bug only fixed in kernel 6.17. Ho-hum.