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Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux
- bee_rider 10mo agoSo it is vim on the eink screen, mostly? When writing a lot of LaTeX I wished I had an eink monitor. LaTeX already takes a moment to compile. I’d probably want vim on a conventional monitor.
- yolkedgeek 10mo agoIt's text on the E-ink screen mostly, be it in the browser, a plain text file, Logseq, Obsidian etc. But sometimes simple writing can be done too. I wouldn't suggest writing code because of the high latency. Most of my work is reading rather than writing so when I want to read something I use the E-ink screen.
- jwrallie 10mo agoI’d really like a Linux laptop with an e-ink screen. I’m well aware of the downsides. It seems Android tablet with a keyboard or Windows laptop with double screen exist but to live with the limitations of such a screen, nothing would top having full control of the OS interface.
- larodi 10mo agoincredible, isn't it, that no single usable e-paper device is being sold. like no Mac with e-ink, no Surface with e-ink, no ASUS with e-ink, even though this is the best thing an operator can do to his tired eyes.
- ablob 10mo agoI'd wager that the whole modus operandi for desktop environments is not made with e-ink in mind. E-ink fits in a situation where only a few updates are ever required, and completely breaks down for anything requiring higher framerates. The market might just not be big enough to warrant creating a product.
- fragmede 10mo agohttps://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-paperlike-103-the-worlds-first-60hz-e-ink-monitor https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-paperlike-103-the-wo... This is that product. A 60 Hz eink monitor, for $340.
- nihiven 10mo agoI have one of these. It's only 'ok'. There is significant ghosting and it's not very good when the scene is dark, but it's much better than my BOOX tablet. I just got it so I'm still experimenting with different uses. Here's a clip of it playing video: https://youtu.be/povlk3hKTVA https://youtu.be/povlk3hKTVA
- j_bum 10mo agoWow that’s far more impressive than I expected. I want a laptop with this for programming…
- danparsonson 10mo agoI had no idea such a thing existed, thanks - did you need to install anything to get it working or does it just plug and go like a normal monitor?
- nihiven 10mo agoIt functions like a normal monitor. It connected to my Macbook air (M2) and Windows machine without installing anything. It has a USB-C video port, but an HDMI->USB-C converter works too. It has an 1872x1404 (4:3) resolution, which is why I used Miami Vice for the video. It would not connect to my PS5, which I think comes down to the PS5 only supporting 16:9/21:9.
- OtomotO 10mo agoOn the product page "Linux is not supported"... What a bummer!
- dotancohen 10mo ago
- baobun 10mo agoI think PineNote qualifies by now? https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/ https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/ Also https://usetrmnl.com/ https://usetrmnl.com/
- larodi 10mo agoindeed i should've said "save for some smart tablet offerings such as PineNote and Re:Markable". but these are not so useful for data operators, unless keyboard via bluetooth etc.
- shakna 10mo agoWhilst they're certainly not Apple, you can walk into most retailers, and out with one of Boox's offerings. (Just be aware they're open GPL violators.)
- Zambyte 10mo agoI'm replying to this comment on a Daylight Computer.
- norman784 10mo agoThis sounds like a good opportunity for a 3rd party e-ink screen for the framework laptops.
- ryanckulp 10mo agowe (TRMNL) have a working demo, debating what to do with it. unlisted: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qs7JeK11Cxc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qs7JeK11Cxc
- prmoustache 10mo agoIs it me or there is a lot of ghosting?
- gunalx 10mo agoThere was this one thinkpad that had a eink screen as its keyboard. Pretty cool, and you could use it as aregular display as well. dunno how linux would react though.
- moneywoes 10mo agoAny suggested eink tablet with higher refresh that this would work better for?
- RossBencina 10mo agoMany if not all of the current generation Boox devices. Choose comparison category "Refresh Time" here: https://www.mydeepguide.com/daf-tool https://www.mydeepguide.com/daf-tool Be aware that Boox runs Android apps. Many other brands do not.
- cons0le 10mo agoI use the Boox 10.3 for reading emails, text-based sites like this, and manga. Its bliss and has replaced 80% of my ipad. The experience of using it outside completely trounces normal screens. As soon as they make larger, better 60hz panels I will 100% switch all my monitors over. I think making videos look worse is a positive. We don't need doomscrolling. We don't need 60fps react buttons with smooth gradients. We don't need to HDR the entire web. I primarily use text based sites anyways, so eink is perfect for me.
- Zambyte 10mo agoI'm writing this on a Daylight Computer. It's been my primary mobile device (instead of a smartphone) for all of 2025. I cannot recommend it enough.
- RossBencina 10mo agoThe main thing I'd miss with this, versus using an actual e-ink monitor, is the ability to refresh/clear ghosting from a keyboard hotkey.
- exasperaited 10mo agoHow long will the display last like this?
- ashirviskas 10mo agofrom 6.7 to 42 would be my guess. But being serious, I personally have not seen a degraded e-ink display.
- Groxx 10mo agoI've seen a couple minor, older-hardware cases when they've been powered off with something on the screen for years, but that's about it. in theory they can also "burn in" by not clearing the display occasionally (afaict it has something to do with accumulating charge) but most or all of those should clear eventually after cycling a bunch (afaict, though it can definitely persist to a minor degree for dozens of full refresh cycles). extreme ghosting, basically. they seem pretty durable to me.
- sgt 10mo agoEven in a lot of direct sunlight or leaving it out in the heat?
- ashirviskas 10mo agoNo clue, I've only seen either fully working or physically broken ones. Oldest one I have still has mini-usb and no degradation can be seen. Though I only rescued it this year, it seems like it was used pretty roughly.
- edent 10mo agoI've been using an eInk screen for over 12 years - it is refreshed multiple times per day. It is as crisp and clear as the day I got it. Admittedly, I'm not trying to run video on it constantly and it doesn't get hot. But eInk seems remarkably durable.
- exasperaited 10mo ago
- ChuckMcM 10mo agoI backed this project: https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor on Crowd Supply to see how close they can come to a "monitor" experience with an e-paper display.
- disdi 10mo agoSame here. I saw a demo in Fosdem which was pretty smooth.
- skeptrune 10mo agoOoh, crowdsupply looks interesting. This is my first time seeing it.
- iamflimflam1 10mo agoCrowdSupply is great - I ran a successful project through them. And I would definitely recommend anyone doing some hardware taking a look. There are a couple of things to be aware of - everything is shipped to the US and then distributed from there (using Mouser US). From the project point of view this means, depending on where things are manufactured) tariffs can come into play. The terms of shipping to mouser are delivery duty paid - so it’s the shipper who pays. For backers it does mean people outside of US can pay quite high shipping costs. The other thing from a project point of view is that mouser is a distributor. They want a reasonable (around 40%) margin on the things they ship. With CrowdSupply there are two sets of orders: Orders placed during the campaign - the project gets the full money (minus fees etc…) Orders placed after the campaign and any additional bulk orders - the project gets the wholesale price. I wrote a fairly detailed write up of it here: https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro
- eggfriedrice 10mo agoThis was a really interesting read! Back in the day a friend and I started a company and Kickstartered a RPi add-on. The kickstarter campaign failed, but we ended up building anyway after one of the silicon manufacturers spotted the project and provided some FoC devices which changed the economics. We spent oodles of time on it, learned lots, build a fairly simple product but ended up selling it through some of the bigger RPi retailers. It was all an excellent learning experience, and ignoring our time we made about 50p out of the entire batch of a thousand. Factor in our time and it was a complete financial disaster, but we were young and carefree and had fun doing it!
- simlevesque 10mo agoI see btop in the video, I'd like to see a video of btop on that screen.
- hartator 10mo agoThere are directly ekink monitors now. Dasung 13k color is workable-ish even on MacOS with no tweaks.
- yolkedgeek 10mo agoWell this is no replacement for them! The monitors you mention are from 700$ (Dasung 13k is 750USD currently) up to 2000USD. This is an old tablet you maybe have lying around or can get for 200USD maybe? And this is more than a monitor. the VNC provides you with an interface. you can use your tablet as the input device. and it's also portable.
- ahamilton454 10mo agoReading this on my eink Bigme Hibreak pro :).
- niceguy1827 10mo agoDasung 253 is a 25.3 inch eink display. https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-paperlike-253 https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-p... I bought it two years ago for over $1800, and I have to say, it was worth every single dollar. I can read on it, work on it, (kind of) watch youtube videos on it, play (some) RTS game on it. And mine only had 33hz refresh rate, not the latest 60hz.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoI want one of those but I keep waiting for the price to drop significantly. Seems like it'll take forever.
- danielsokil 10mo agoDoes it support linux based systems?
- captn3m0 10mo agoPage does mention Linux but there’s a separate Mac variant (which also needs an app) and a warning never to plug a Mac on the standard variant. What about people who use both?
- b112 10mo agoWhen I tried (and returned) one of their monitors, it was absolutely horrific with ghosting. This was perhaps 5 years ago. There was no manual, and it had a closed source application to time or force refresh. Of course, being closed source it wouldn't work on a Pi (arm64), nor did I feel comfortable about unknown code, or it working in a few years on a newer version of Linux. It was all exceptionally poorly done. Amazon says it was a Dasung E-Ink Paperlike 3 HD Front-Light and Touch 13.3" Monitor. If the app had been OSS, or it had an open API via the cable, I could have scripted an auto-refresh upon scrolling in vi or some such. Or just hacked into something seeing change scope under X. Point is, I could have made it work for me. The default modes were terrible. I hope things are better, but no way will I install some weird closed source client. I have a fairly new tablet, and it handles refresh incredibly well, but I'm sure that's with strong integration into the display stack. Which is fine, of course, but that doesn't help me with coding. EDIT: one of the things which makes some of these e-ink tablets incredible for refresh, is partial, very well done sectional refresh. So if a small part of the screen changes, BAM!, it's refreshed instantly for ghosting. Again, I suspect this is tied into the display stack. The monitors I've seen don't seem anywhere as good. I'd love to to be wrong on newer models.
- knubie 10mo agoI've tried this setup (and a different setup using a capture card) with a BOOX Note Max but the input latency is just too high to be usable, even for simple cli work. Are the dedicated eink monitors (like Dasung) better in this regard?
- yolkedgeek 10mo agoI've been using this solution for about 4 days now. It's not meant to be used as your main monitor. I use it only when I want to read something I or someone else has written. I think it's also good for simple writing too. But if I try to use it as my main monitor, browsing the web, writing code, etc. it will become a real headache because of the latency. One huge plus is that it isn't *just a monitor*. because of the VNC connection, I just pick up my tablet and roam around the office while reading something, even making tiny edits, It can be also used as a great drawpad. I use it to explain things to my coworkers, since drawing freehand diagrams, shapes and text isn't very easy with a mouse.
- timeforcomputer 10mo agoHow is the latency for drawing? I am going to start doing this, but it makes me think, it would be nice to have a way to disable full refresh while drawing, and doing tablet-side drawing over the current VNC frame while the stream is paused, and asynchronously forwarding the input which will hopefully recreate the same drawing path on the server.
- yolkedgeek 10mo agoI don't know how to do what you are describing, but right now, the drawing is OK. it's not instantaneous but good enough for me, not creating artworks. just doodles and scribbles. I just don't look at the tablet screen for drawing. I only use it as an input because the refresh rate is low for this. but the VNC latency itself is not annoying (I would guesstimate ~0.2s), although I think there are ways to make VNC latency less.
- knubie 10mo ago
- somat 10mo agoI don't really want an e-ink "monitor" as that does not really play into the advantages of an e-ink display. By the time the e-ink display is uprated enough to act as a monitor It feels like a lot of the advantages of e-ink are lost and the display server does not really downrate enough to utilize e-ink's strength. But an e-ink "terminal" would be nice, not an actual tty but something more like a tablet form factor that has a few buttons, little to no internal smarts and you can push images to it.
- bgnn 10mo agothis would do? https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-paperlike-103-the-worlds-first-60hz-e-ink-monitor https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-paperlike-103-the-wo...
- ahoef 10mo agoNo HDMI is really sad. This means there are probably closed source drivers. Linux is not mentioned as supported, so I suspect crapware.
- ibrahima 10mo agoFunnily you're describing https://usetrmnl.com/ https://usetrmnl.com/ which also happens to be pretty hacker friendly.
- wiether 10mo agoUntil now, I had resisted the urge to order one But now that they have a bigger version, with controls and a clear case... I'm not sure that I should be thanking you for making me spend money!
- ibrahima 10mo agoYeah... I bought the regular version a few months before the bigger one was announced. Now I kinda want it but can't really justify it at this point. It's a cool product though and a lot of the code is open source or has open source alternatives (e.g. the official backend is not but they have sponsored the development of open source alternatives so that if they go out of business or something you can host your own backend).
- sgt 10mo agoWhat's the cheapest eInk display one can get, like phone sized or tablet sized? I mean just for experimentation.
- IshKebab 10mo agoI'd look for an Inkplate on ebay. I got the 10 inch one for about £60 which is very good.
- quijoteuniv 10mo agoI wonder if xpra can be used for this, seems to work really nice on thin clients
- butz 10mo agoI love when a blog post starts with demonstration of end result.
- kalek 10mo agoSince Boox runs android, you can also run a shell on it using termius and simply ssh to a host device instead of setting up vnc, if you have a terminal based workflow.
- b112 10mo agoBoox devices are riddled with phone home to all sorts of domains, including to .cn domains, just run tcpdump on your firewall and watch. You should do absolutely nothing security conscious with them. For example, like putting keys on them, or sshing into a box with them. At least with vnc, you could create a private network between the boox and your linux box, and it'd be sharing the screen. Still an issue, but passwords and hidden fields would be typed on the keyboard on the Linux box, not the boox. I rooted mine, and installed afwall, and still won't ever used it for anything security conscious.
- shekharupadhaya 10mo agoBenefits aside, but the latency / refresh rate makes it not usable for practical purpose, ergonomics nightmare.
- hexo 10mo agoThis is basically impossible due to **** animations everywhere.
- bmsleight_ 10mo agoI hacked together a HDMI e-ink monitor https://barwap.com/projects/okmonitor/ https://barwap.com/projects/okmonitor/ I wanted an e-ink screen I could just plug-in. Versatile, big and cheap. Connection is via a VGA or HDMI. Works like an appliance. All automated. Wireless. Specifications: 1024x768, 6fps, lag: ~1.2s, Connection: VGA or HDMI Specifications Single Screen: 1024x768, 5fps, lag: ~1.2s, Connection: VGA or HDMI
- engr 10mo agoWhat I really want is an A3 e-ink display that is designed to have a pdf loaded onto it, then can be disconnected and taken around a machine shop. No WiFi or Bluetooth etc
- malfist 10mo agoYou'll pay out the nose on that. From what I understand, the larger the e-ink screen is the harder it is to manufacture. Which is why small tablet ones reign supreme, and larger monitor sized ones are shockingly expensive, somebody else here has already linked to a 25 inch display for $1800
- pluc 10mo agoUsing white text on a pink background? No wonder you need an e-ink tablet
- cramcgrab 10mo agoThat’s pretty neat! I’ve been looking at ESL e-ink displays for a while as a more static status display, but the lack of standards and open source software is a problem.
- nanomonkey 10mo agoAs much as I like e-ink, it has terrible refresh rates. I'd love a larger version of the Sharp Memory display technology that could support at least 80 characters wide, and perhaps 8 bit greyscale. The current ones support 60hz refresh and sip power but are limited to black and white only.
- vmbm 10mo agoI have trouble sleeping, and it gets particularly bad in the winter. I have figured out that at least one of the triggers for poor sleep has been evening screen time. Redshift style apps help a little but barely. I can get away with some light usage of my phone on the dimmer settings, but if I sit down at my multi-monitor desk setup I will be wide awake all night and feel terrible in the morning. And this is with redshift and screens set to their lowest brightness levels. So I spent a fair amount of time looking into e-ink options as a potential solution. I eventually settled on a refurbished Lenovo Thinkbook Plus G4, which has a flip-able screen with e-ink on one side. I paid around $800 which was less than a dedicated e-ink monitor, and only slightly more than some of the higher end large tablets/e-readers. So it was a hard deal to pass up. I am happy to report that using the e-ink in the evenings has helped quite a bit on the sleep front. And while the laptop is pretty nice, e-ink in general requires a fair bit of compromise and the laptop in particular has some rough edges. You definitely need to spend some time on your display settings to make things work (high contrast, cursor and pointer visibility, font color in IDE and terminal apps, etc...), but for the most part I can make it work. And while I don't work in sunlight often, e-ink can really shine if you are outdoors (I have the sun shining on my screen right now as I type this and it is super readable.) Anyways, I guess what I am trying to say is that I really hope more investment gets put into e-ink. I think it is a pretty awesome technology and would love to expand my usage of it. But at least for now it is mostly something that I am tolerating for the sake of sleep.
- grapehenderson2 10mo ago[dead]