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Yeah I meant iPad.
I mean this kde plasma tablet thing looks good in the screenshots here, but it's just playing catchup with iPad for consumers. Sure it may get used elsewhere, but to be honest, when processing photos in a shop to obtain instant photos I don't care if linux is powering the photo developer or not.
Edited 2010-08-16 13:40 UTC
iOS is not a BSD Unix with a proprietary high level layer. It's a mach kernel with a BSD subsystem, all that subsystem does is provide text userland tools and services. It is BSD. It could be ripped out and replaced with the GNU userland. The graphical environment is also a subsystem.
Um, the kernel of Mac OS X and iOS is called XNU. XNU combines code from Mach with code from 4.3BSD. Mach itself is also derived from a BSD kernel (even though much code was replaced in the meantime, but FreeBSD is not different in this respect), making XNU a direct descendant of the original BSD.





Member since:
2005-07-06
Everyone else will stick with iTablet
I don't know what an iTablet is. A cheap knock off of the iPad from China I assume. Though I have no idea why a cheap knock off should prevail.
Free Software is actually dominating the current tablet landscape. iPad's iOS is a BSD Unix with an proprietary high level layer. Lower level layers like LLVM, WebKit, Bonjour, etc. are all FOSS with contributions by Apple to the appropriate upstream projects. In fact it's likely that FreeBSD 9 will move to the LLVM-based compiler infrastructure Apple is developing for iOS applications (clang).
On the Linux side the future looks promising as well: Android is already in use on Archos tablets with more on the horizon with Android 3.0.
MeeGo has also gathered some followers from the industry.
And webOS will power HP's upcoming Palmpad.
KDE's Plasma is only one player in the diverse FOSS landscape that runs on almost all tablets.