I can't speak to your tablet use-case but as a general statement Atom is absolutely fine, even great under linux.

Intel actually has long had some of the better Linux support in the market in general, especially when compared to the early Zen hardware which needed a few years to build up critical mass (and of course it dumps all over the ARM-based experience, having a non-x86 processor is several notches upwards in complexity/difficulty of the experience). In particular they were an early mover on the open-source graphics driver thing (several years ahead of AMD), and their Linux driver has been the gold standard for stability/specs compliance for a long time. The chips underneath them aren't the fastest but the driver is clean and sensible.

The era where it was bad though, it was phenomenally bad. Before the present era of Intel-designed graphics cores in Atom chips there was a range of atom chips in some netbooks and tablets that used PowerVR graphics, and these machines were absolute horror shows.

Fair enough, I guess that's the difference then. I've always used the ones with Intel graphics.

Linux support for x86 tablets has improved a lot as of late. There are a few problematic chipsets, e.g. with PowerVR based graphics, but they're rare.

The PowerVR issue was much bigger when netbooks were all the rave. They were usually sold with XP Home running on 256-512MB RAM which was barley enough to run the base OS let alone a single program. The first thought was to toss Linux on the system but you were immediately thwarted by missing graphics drivers. So you had to run in vesa mode resulting in worse performance than Windows XP. Shame because a friend had a nice Toshiba that was completely useless from the day he bought it and wound up tossing it after just a year. So many useless netbooks...

This. I don't think someone designing an ATM cares if the CPU can run Crysis.