PineTab 2 (tablet review)

★★★½☆ The PineTab2 is not a great computer. But it is a hyper-mobile Linux tablet that can run desktop and command-line apps natively, with a touchscreen and an optional physical keyboard, for a budget price. As a touchscreen tablet, it should be running Plasma Mobile (preinstalled) or Phosh, but they’re both slow enough to be frustrating. So I usually run it with LXQt, which is lightweight enough to stay out of the way even though it’s a desktop environment. Of course that limits its usefulness as a tablet. The touchscreen is okay. There’s no fancy drawing stylus like the Surface Pen or Apple Pencil, but you can use a generic stylus. There are two USB ports, one for data and one for power. Three years on, I can get an average of 5 hours of use out of a full charge, and the battery is still holding onto its charge when I turn it off completely. Writing The keyboard case is a bit bulky, but it has a decent keyboard and trackpad. Mine has a flaky “D” key, so if you see a word on my…