GeckoFood's Journal: [geek] Dual-Boot 2-in-1 Tablet

I recently acquired a 10.1" tablet with a break-away keyboard so this little beast can be either a very small laptop or a full-sized tablet. The keyboard is nice and it is very solid, so this is a great solution for my needs. I have wanted one of these for a long, long time, and now I have one.

Where it gets interesting, though, is that it can dual-boot into either Android or Windows. My first thought was that, since I have an Android tablet already, this might be a good candidate for running the last few Windows applications I rely on, which would allow me to convert my Windows system into another Linux workstation, probably for development. I like my laptop, and it works well enough with Windows 10 on it but I am no fan of Windows 10. So, I booted the tablet up in Windows and looked around.

With the release of Windows 8, I wanted a Windows tablet. It seemed like a good system that would work well for me. I had a touch-screen laptop that came with Windows 8 preinstalled (but has since been migrated to CentOS 7) and it was not as bad as I expected - the interface actually made some sense to me and I did not mind it at all, though I definitely preferred the older Windows 7-style desktop. I had a Windows 8 phone at the time which I bought on a whim and it was the easiest phone to use I had ever owned. So, the Metro desktop on a tablet seemed like a good way to work.

Windows 10, not so much.

As a desktop OS, Windows 10 is not totally unreasonable though it is not my first choice by any means. It's not the best version of Windows, and even though I am primarily a Red Hat kind of guy I definitely prefer Ubuntu's interface to Windows 10. But, on the desktop Windows 10 is workable. On a tablet, though, Windows 10 is a big goose egg. It's clunky, it is harder to use and it takes up too much in terms of resources. So, this dual-boot tablet will be in Android the large majority of the time.