It's interesting that in the early 2010s, both halves of the ecosystem were talking about "convergence:" Ubuntu wanted to make its Linux render a single column on a handset and with floating windows on a larger screen. Motorola had a similar project based on Android.
A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. Ubuntu gave up. Mobile-targeted Linux distributions aren't good (missing functionality, mobile UX, or both). The linked distribution is running Debian in a container for desktop on top of Android. The rumors about the future of ChromeOS are imagining something similar.
Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most.
Adapting desktop Linux to mobile seems to be impossibly hard with the amount of resources those distributions have.
I really wanted the Ubuntu phone to succeed. I backed the Indiegogo for their fancy phone, and when that failed I installed Ubuntu OS on a Nexus 5 to play with.
I never activated any phone service on it but I think I would have enjoyed it if I had. It was kind of neat to have a smartphone that didn't hide the fact that it was a computer. Even without plugging it in to a monitor or anything, I was able to play with the Chrome dev tools on the fly and it was pretty fun.
I ran Ubuntu Touch briefly on a Nexus 5 as well. IIRC the two issues I had were:
1) calls and MMS not working well.
2) Instead of a normal GNU/Linux OS Ubuntu Touch tried really hard to have an Android style immutable OS. Kind of the worst of both worlds since you have a difficult to work with OS but without the app ecosystem of Android that some people believe makes it worth using.
After that I kind of just gave up on the idea that I owned my phone at all and a few years later I gave up carrying smartphones entirely.
I used to use Ubuntu Touch on my OnePlus One for quite a while and it was very nice! I had to switch away because it didn't really support group MMS (still doesn't from what I can tell), and then later US carriers started requiring VoLTE which it didn't support for a while either. But I still hope to switch back someday, that was the most enjoyable phone I'd used since the N900.
I haven't tried to use it full time for the same reason that I haven't tried to take the plunge to the dumb-phone world.
A part of me occasionally considers buying one of those cheap KaiOS dumbphones, because I figure that the stuff that's missing could be supplemented with my laptop. The problem I'm always afraid of is that I'm afraid that I'll be missing something. I'll start a job and they'll require some specific proprietary 2FA app, for example. Also, I don't think Signal has a dumb phone app yet and that's basically all I use to communicate.
Similarly, I haven't done anything but play with Ubuntu Touch, because I know there would be an app missing that I would need, so I'd be forced to have an Android or iPhone for those edge cases anyway.
Startup costs are enormous to break into the smartphone world now, at least if you want to penetrate into the "non-tech-enthusiast" market.
IMO it comes down to marketing: can't have the kayfabe of selling something that is "not a computer"/"new kind of computer" and have it act like a "computer" too
Not a phone, but I really liked the Blackberry Playbook's QNX system. It was extremely smooth and easy to use, and was fairly easy to develop for.
They shit the bed by betting on Flash, which was a dying tech, but I was pretty sad when Blackberry just went to "another Android phone", since I thought what they had was pretty neat.
Blackberry definitely had much better marketing than Ubuntu has ever had, and for reasons probably too complicated for me to fully understand, they're sort of a joke now.
I think it's more than phone hardware is still really locked down/non standardized, so there aren't a lot of viable options to get alternatives on there without also being a hardware designer and having the bank to go with that. Need a big country to force a standardization on the hardware interface/bios and an opening up similar to what we have in pc components and this will get a lot more interesting. Sadly the chance of that happening is near zero and the interests of google and apple lie in more lockdown, not less.
I think the true reason is that onñy a small fraction of people are interested in convergence and most people are fine, or even truly desire, to have different devices and experiences.
Millions (billions?) of people are happy to leave their phone in another room when working on their computer and vice-versa. Sure you could use a do not disturb button but it would be a major PITA to have enough granularity to allow or disallow certain app/services to notify you and you would be certain to forget to activate/deactivate it when you really want.
I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS based on Debian. No Android dependencies and possibility of full desktop mode. How is this not a success?
That being said, obviously the Librem phone is missing functionality.
Most computer users are goo goo ga ga level users. Most people in the US use iMessage, for example.
It's not the best messenger, not even close. It's not the most ubiquitous either - doesn't even break top 5 globally. Doesn't have the most features. Not the fastest. Not the most secure. Not the easiest to use.
They just use it because it's already installed and right there. That is how deep their understanding and comprehension can go.
glad to see I'm not the only one, if you don't mind me asking, what OS did you settle on? I'm using mint w/ auto-cpufreq on a donki nanote next right now but it's not perfect.
I use Artix on everything these days. It used to Alpine (and before that I was just making my own distros because I didn't like the decisions eg Debian was making.)
For Operating Systems and Ecosystems, Popularity == Quality. The more popular a software is, the more edge cases it encounters and solves issues. More people will write software, plugins, tools for it.
Are you saying that Windows is the most high-quality operating system in the world? This is not even funny. Did you hear about the concepts of walled garden and network effect?
People don't want to quickly turn their phone into a desktop, they want to quickly turn their phone into a laptop. Apple's laptops are over 75% of its sales. And if you have the screen and keyboard of a laptop, why not put a CPU, battery et al. in there?
then I guess we'll have to wait for companies like huawei with their mate xt, or more likely given friendshoring, the samsung trifold to give people phones that turn into tablets and have a companion keyboard for them to feel this is enough of a threat to address
Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for. Indeed I don't think it's reasonable to then also make it work on some completely different phone hardware that has a operational life of like 2 years + full of closed source hardware and drivers.
If you want users, the thing has to be usable. For the thing to be usable it needs software with perfect hardware support. Google, Android vendors and Apple (and to some extend System 76) understand this.
For Linux to gain 5% marketshare, I really doubt it "barely works" on a "limited set of hardware that it was designed for". It can run headless on basically anything better than a Pentium, and it mostly just works on average hardware (except fingerprint sensors and Nvidia). I've had no problem with Linux on all my hardware, and I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.
Linux didn’t work reliably on my laptops in the past 10 years. And I mean basic things, like booting up, or showing a desktop without serious glitches. And all the time problems were non deterministic, and printing just generic unhelpful “something is wrong” errors, if there were any. I try it every year, whether the situation is better, and in the past 25 years, the answer is that barely. Yes, you can have terminal with very basic settings almost every time, but if you want anything more, even just like proper resolution, then it’s still a lottery. The interesting thing is that before that I was luckier, I could hack Linux to many things (I would definitely not say “install”).
And of course like in the past decades any time, you can always use Linux in VMs. Very reliably. So I stick to that.
> Linux didn’t work reliably on my laptops in the past 10 years. And I mean basic things, like booting up, or showing a desktop
Which laptops? Do they all have Nvidia graphics? This is really vague. Your comment is not helpful, and it just looks like usual Linux bashing from people who don't know what they're talking about.
And how it would be helpful for me to specify? Do you think that I just gave up immediately, and didn’t try to solve it for days and weeks? Do you think you can help me more than that without the exact errors which I got? Do you think I care about a solution to laptops which I don’t even have? Do you think any kind of blanket term like “NVIDIA whatever doesn’t work” would be even true?
I specified a few times, and I got zero relevant information. My time is more valuable than reading comments which are like “it worked for me with <something-which-is-not-even-in-my-spec>”.
FWIW I have Mint on two grandparents laptops and I agree with the parent comment. I gave up doing any updates on them, I just wipe off everything once a year and reinstall from scratch. Even though it's only browser and music player and nobody touches the settings (unless there was a misclick) yet still last time the desktop came to show through the application windows so I had to wipe it again and lo it worked.
2. It seems you're using hardware designed for Windows. It's like trying to install Windows on a Macbook: You're on your own here. Don't blame Microsoft or Apple for your issues.
You know, reading through your replies in this thread is kind of just sad. You selectively pick only tiny parts of comments to reply to, while ignoring the points that are made and the plethora of very, very common issues highlighted.
Sadly, it's also a very expected answer from someone who probably likes Linux a lot. No matter what argument is made, no matter what examples or proof are included, irregardless of the number of such things, it's all just user error in the end.
When the argument is that Linux only _properly_ supports a small subset of devices for _desktop computing,_ and the counter-argument is that it does, yet a person mentions very, very incredibly common issues . . . Is the proper response to say, to effect, you're the one at fault by not using the right hardware? No, no it's not. Given that so, so, _so_ many experience these kinds of basic UX problems means that either Linux doesn't actually properly support a lot of different hardware (despite what many obsessed Linux users screech/preach) or it supports them perfectly fine and the tons upon tons upon tons of people who experience these issues are all the ones at fault and in no way, shape or form does Linux lack from a well known general UX problem.
Even worse is this, honestly, moronic take:
> 2. It seems you're using hardware designed for Windows. It's like trying to install Windows on a Macbook: You're on your own here. Don't blame Microsoft or Apple for your issues.
If I wasn't before convinced that you aren't completely out of touch, I am now. The primary subject of _desktop_ users _are_ Windows users with Windows machines. Goodness gracious, I honestly do not understand this take. Most of Linux's not-always-optimal desktop hardware support comes from a plethora of formerly Windows machines.
It's honestly just so weird to argue that installing Linux on a Windows machine is in any way shape or form as bad as installing it on a Mac.
Even more, Linux-only devices, as in Linux-first devices, are more of a newer thing. There have been initiatives before, that have fallen through or not gained a lot of traction. It's not until relatively recently that companies making Linux-first devices for _desktop_ computing became a real thing. And even then, the Steam Deck blows them out of the water by mostly _removing_ the desktop-part of Linux and replacing it with a homebrewed one. Although you can still use a regular desktop "mode." And yet, even with such companies, Windows machines stand for a massive section of the Linux desktop computing userbase.
Ironically, this is exactly the kind of argument I'd expect from an obsessed and out of touch Linux user. Because it makes no sense, disregards the points other potential users make and doesn't even properly address them.
> You selectively pick only tiny parts of comments to reply to
Yes, I nitpick on some smaller things when I know the poster is wrong on that matter (and I feel it's sufficiently important).
> while ignoring the points that are made and the plethora of very, very common issues highlighted
It doesn't mean I think there are no issues at all. Often I just don't have anything to add to them. Do I always have to say "it's true" to everything else? I never said "and therefore you're wrong about everything".
> Linux only _properly_ supports a small subset of devices for _desktop computing
This is true. However what you conclude from this may differ. It doesn't mean that Linux is a lost case and everybody should use Windows. It doesn't mean that companies can't switch to Linux. Very often they choose the hardware for the next upgrade and nothing prevents them from choosing a known supported hardware, however rare it could be.
Also, in every Linux thread there is always a large number of people with vague, unhelpful Linux bashing like "I'm trying Linux every other week and there are countless issues every single time". This is not actionable, it doesn't help anybody to choose the hardware. It's just a shallow dismissal, which is against the HN guidelines. I don't understand who upvotes that.
> Is the proper response to say, to effect, you're the one at fault by not using the right hardware?
This is not exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that you should manage your expectations when using random hardware with a free OS. Not only the Linux developers weren't paid to support every hardware in world -- in many cases, the hardware vendors actively fight against this. Statistically, it must be a really large number of devices reliably working. How else could Linux reach >5% without anything sold in stores?
> either Linux doesn't actually properly support a lot of different hardware
Yes, this is the case.
> Even worse is this, honestly, moronic take
I stand by what I said. You can't demand any OS to work on every piece of hardware in the world; not even mega-corps can achieve that. You have to keep in mind the reality, otherwise this is a Nirvana fallacy. I would understand if someone said "I'm unlucky, Linux doesn't work on my hardware". Instead, they say "Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for" or "Linux on the desktop failed and will never succeed" (actual quotes from this discussion).
> The primary subject of _desktop_ users _are_ Windows users with Windows machines.
This is very true, and it's a sad state of affairs that for Linux to grow it has an impossible task of supporting all those different Windows machines. I recommend every Windows user to try installing Linux. At the same time, I do not guarantee that it will work, but there is a good chance. You will likely loose some features like suspend, but your machine will be faster, more secure, private and supported for the lifetime if you're lucky. Also you should be able to pay somebody to fix your problems, which will fix them for every other user. This is not true for proprietary software btw.
> It's honestly just so weird to argue that installing Linux on a Windows machine is in any way shape or form as bad as installing it on a Mac.
This is not what I said. I said that you're misplacing the responsibility here. The user should accept their responsibility for buying a "Windows-certified" hardware and not blame their problems on volunteers. They should thank the volunteer when it works and understand the reasons when it doesn't (and consider helping to fix the issues, too).
> And even then, the Steam Deck blows them out of the water
What are you talking about? Most users buy it as a separate device to play games, just like a console. It does help Linux to grow, but the comparison to Linux-first general-purpose devices doesn't seem relevant here.
> I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.
I literally looked at it last week. Spent multiple days on it. Tried Mint and Zorin (full install, not just live).
This is on a brand new Lenovo p16s Gen 4 with AMD (no nvidia). That laptop didn't even exist before this year.
List of problems I encountered:
-- Multi touch not working (fixed by switching from Mint to Zorin, upgrading mainline kernel in Mint did not help).
-- External monitor not working (had to install display link drivers by going into terminal and running scripts and all of that other classic Linux usability) .
-- Hardware video acceleration not working (scrolling super slow, maps super slow, entire system super slow). Had to install AMD display drivers for that separately. Upgrading mainline kernel worked for Mint, but not for Zorin. Installing AMD drivers in Zorin involved downloading the drivers, !editting an install script that is part of the drivers! and then having an LLM guide me through the rest of the extremely elaborate process of installing the driver.
-- And to top it off, my classic pet peeve: there's no way to configure something as basic as scroll-lines (mouse scrollwheel speed) through a GUI in ANY of the distros. It involves installing imwheel, !writing a script!, setting the script to run on boot and then rebooting (and/or restarting the script).
So no. There's definitely no "it just works". Not even on a laptop that is supposed to have official HW vendor support for Ubuntu.
Also, I only ran it for like a day. I'm sure that I'll run into tons of other issues if I use it a bit longer.
Good for you and lucky you that you got it to work. But for most of us Linux is "nice try, but it's not finished yet" .
It works for me, said every Linux zelot ever. NVidia acceleration is horrid. The only thing that worked was directx on zorin. AMD? Only a few machines, even fewer models. What all the zelots we're running is built in Intel. "It works for me." Followed by bins by the truck full of unsupported hardware.
ThinkPads? Perfect every time? Dell? Have you configured you bios lately? Unsupported AMD? Grab your crayons on a race the old hardware will loose.
Linux has had 10 years to run on 10 year old hardware. Linux is not an OS. It's an attitude, and it's not a reflection on the technology, it's a reflection on the lowest common denominator.
Windows 10? I still have another 14 months left, and mass*.dev to thank.
Hardware that was built to run Linux? Drivers? If you have an AMD card and any interest in Linux, pull the card and prepare to trash the entire system, like the HP sitting on the sidewalk last night. Bye.
Which brings us back to my initial point: it only runs properly without fiddling on a tiny minority of very specific hardware by a tiny handful of vendors (who often ship to only a tiny portion of the globe).
To be clear: I got it to run eventually after hours/days of fiddling.
Do I like it after all this effort?
No.
But sure, I'll wait. I've waited for Linux to become truly user friendy for 3 decades and I really really want to love it, so I'll wait some more. No problem.
Running as a user where things need to work is not the same as being headless wherrle all you need is CLI access, disk and network ...
My lenovo p14s is a great linux laptop unless you want it to sleep (which it does!) It even wakes up! But 50% of the time the trackpad does not wake up properly ... Making hard to be used as a laptop that I can get things done on
Besides working with it on servers on regular basis, and having had enough with it on desktops and laptops since 1995, last year I managed to get a NUC, where Ubuntu, Red-Hat and SuSE weren't able to boot from the internal SSD or get along with UEFI, only booting from the external drive worked.
So yeah no problem, and yes I know should have gone to the usual forums asking everyone and their dog if someone before me had ever succeeded installing Linux on this brick.
I have different opinions. Try my NUC. Reinstall Windows 10 on it; you won't get audio support
unless you get especial audio drivers from a shady download URL (usually used from pirating services) linked from the OEM vendors. Windows Update won't help. Neither SDI Tool Origin.
Nope. Win 10 is now a free year of support. All the way to Oct 2026. Thanks for pointing out mistakenly your mistaken. And is it surprising than hardware shills are pointing not pointing this out? You want Linux get a Thinkpad, and a mouse, and plan on replugging every time you wake. "It just works." Well guess what?
Because with NUCs if you dare to gasp reinstall the OEM OS, if the vendor it's gone, with Windows you might get a nice door stopper. You can get audio thru the headphones/speakers output, but that's a shitty experience for your living room.
And I don't, Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux and VMs are good enough.
If others have fun making it work, good for them, I have better ways to spend the rest of my life on this litte sphere.
As what Linux needs, I thought it needs every little user, to make a difference against Apple and Microsoft, after all we are always told that now is the year everyone is going to flee into Linux.
Agreed - my view is that Linux on the desktop failed and will never succeed and its mostly alright since people have shifted their computing needs from desktops to phones.
So the market for personal computers has grown massively with phones entering it, and Linux has won here.
As to the general state of Linux usability - I’ve been using Linux since 1995, and professionally for more than 20 years - it’s great for professionally administered servers or workstations, less great for regular desktops / laptops where things pretty never work out of the box which is unfortunately not going to bring in extra users …
Linux runs on everything that upstreamed it's drivers, and then almost everything that didn't. By just reverse engineering and guessing.
And, a lot of this firmware is extremely buggy too. Have you see ACPI tables in laptops? But, they work under Linux. They shouldn't, but they do.
What doesn't work is the intersection of closed-source firmware and extremely eccentric or evil firmware. I think a lot of Android parts manufactures don't want to upstream their stuff because it's extremely bad and probably filled to the brim to vulnerabilities.
But, Intel upstreams everything, and so does AMD - and it's only improved their firmware quality.
> Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for.
This is demonstrably false, and I don't understand where all these comments from Linux haters came from. My Librem laptops work flawlessly, including suspend.
Linux is used on a far greater variety of hardware than Windows or Mac, from phones to supercomputers, and everything in between. The number of servers, of all architectures, running Linux completely dwarfs either Windows or Mac.
Because I think ultimately it is only good on paper. In practice you want your computer to be able to act on itself as well. So it is hard to get the balance right.
I do think for enterprise and business it should work though. Especially we are all on mobile already and most of the time we need to work on something that is on our phone. I wonder if there could be another blackberry moment on this? Or Something Microsoft Windows could work on, as a way to get back into Mobile. I have long argued they should have spend small R&D on possible Mobile OS just in case opportunities pops up.
Bring back Pocket PC. Tie it up with Azure and CoPilot.
You can get like 65% of the way there by just using i3wm with an onscreen keyboard and really big window borders (so you have somewhere to poke to change windows). But you have to contend with the fact that it is a basically fine touch window manager showing you… applications that were designed without touch in mind at all.
Imo trying to make a single UX that just changes a little bit to suit different device types is a misguided approach. Using a large screen with a mouse and keyboard is a fundamentally different thing to using a phone with a touch screen.
Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!)
There are some fuzzy boundaries - e.g. imo Gnome 3 has proven that a single experience can feel good on both a tablet and a single screen laptop with a good track pad. But I think paradoxically you need to take different approaches on different use modes if you want to provide true unity.
> Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!)
Phosh (Phone Shell) already exists and works quite well. I'm writing this comment from desktop Firefox running in Phosh on Librem 5 smartphone.
This is kind of my point - I'm not saying you can't have applications that are usable across multiple UX paradigms, and I'm also not saying you can't write a UX library that automatically translates at least simple applications with little manual effort.
I'm just saying this requires active buy in from application developers into the ecosystem - you can't just run everything on all devices and have it magically work (with usability comparable to current state of the art in single device applications).
I tried out that windows phone continuum feature back in the day to try and get actual work done. Here's what I remember of it.
You could connect it wirelessly to your windows laptop and it would take over screen, keyboard and mouse from the laptop. The actual connecting part worked smoothly, but it could only stream one relatively low res screen and even then over a wireless connection it felt sluggish. I couldn't use the laptop while the phone was connected, and this was its biggest handicap because I would have preferred the phone's desktop in a window similar to running a virtualized OS, with easy drag-and-drop and copy-paste.
The experience was that you had the same phone apps with the same feature set as on the phone, but they transformed into desktop layouts. For the first party apps this worked fine, but many of the third party apps didn't work at all or didn't work well, so I ended up largely being stuck with the first party apps, mostly the mobile versions of Outlook and Edge, and the file explorer. At the time these were seriously limited compared to the desktop counterparts. In that version of Edge I couldn't use many of the web apps that I tried. The outlook version was very basic, but I still managed to get some of my email done.
The apps only appeared fullscreen. I get why they did it on the weak phone hardware of the time, but this was very limiting. You could alt-tab however, and there was the windows taskbar. The start menu was the phone's home screen, so you would see the exact same tile layout as you saw on the phone, and clicking a tile would open the app. I really liked this solution because it gave a lot of flexibility while being instantly familiar.
Bottom line it wasn't really suited at being a one stop computing experience, but it was a good way to do the things you would otherwise do on the phone on a larger canvas. It was good for what it was, but it was not in any way a laptop replacement. What really killed it as a useful feature for me was what ultimately killed windows phone: the lack of a decent app catalog. I still think in its time windows phone was the best mobile OS, but the app gap meant that it never stood a chance.
I kind of doubt it did work well for them. Microsoft was having an identity crisis at that time where they didn't yet realize nobody wanted their tablet UI on desktop.
If they allowed straight Win32 ports on ARM it could have been interesting. Or if they did it now, where I think x86 emulation on arm is working well these days.
In fairness, most people I knew with Windows phones worked for MSFT.
But a few (the ones I talked to the most) were just people interested in the Windows ecosystem. One was running Windows Home Server. Those folks all swore that everything was great (except the app ecosystem). I can only go by what I was told.
> Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most.
Yeah, apple could solve that instantly.
Sadly, they decided to play a cash cow strategy of milking existing users instead for trying to grow market share.
Apple is so frustrating. Amazing hardware but then they complete shit the bead with the software side of things and act actively hostile against their own users.
Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS.
Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system.
Adaptive design has fared best on the web, but it's still not settled. See, for instance, the back-and-forth around density defaults for web apps like Gmail. Some people really like their pointer-friendly dense UIs with hover buttons, and that makes them really hard to use on a touchscreen.
Perhaps ironically, Apple is also in the best position to bridge the gap. Since they own the UI stack that renders most apps on Apple devices, they could do something clever like say "a button is 32px tall if there's a trackpad and 56px tall otherwise." Rules like that could produce an app that truly adapts to the user's primary modality.
The other systems have too many UI frameworks for that to work. Apple could only pull it off because ~everyone uses their component set (I think it's called UIKit). They also have a reputation of declaring the future and making the ecosystem catch up (going all the way back to adopting USB exclusively on the first iMac).
That post is 6 years old, and yet Linux still sucks by default on a touchscreen.
I installed NixOS on a handheld nearly 2 years ago and tried a whole bunch of touch-oriented options (including tiny ones like Maui). The closest I got to good enough was running the mobile fork of GNOME, using someone on GitHub's custom flake to pull it in at HEAD. I'm very happy that Valve has released SteamOS for other devices so I can offload that tinkering.
Steam is very usable on a touchscreen, but the KDE desktop mode hasn't impressed me.
I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS with Phosh DE. It's convenient and pretty in my opinion. Also it runs desktop Firefox with all plugins you want.
I don't really know, but I don't think the use outside of steam is an important use case to them, possibly they don't want to make things too easy, or maybe it wasn't packaged for arch either when they created the base image.
I know for a fact that many university students are using iPad OS instead of macOS now, especially for less typing-intensive stuff like chemistry. You might be surprised how much of college runs in the browser now.
Bill Gates spoke of this context-aware OS at a lecture in the mid-00s. He specifically called out future phones (this was pre-iPhone era) that would have location context (work/home/mobile) and load secure, sandboxed datastores and profiles depending on that context. He also spoke at length about how desktop computers would transform into accelerators, like your gaming GPU at home or your additional processors and memory at your workstation. It was a grand vision of ultimate portability, with clear lines between work and personal lives enabled through technology.
Then he showed off the Fossil MSN watch, and suggested future iterations may do away with phones entirely and act as methods of identification for digital systems.
And then, like all things Microsoft, they abandoned the concepts entirely. Apple and Google cribbed most of the ideas for themselves in some form or another and saw wild success with them, though to date nobody major has really attempted to create that mobile vision Gates spoke of - other than Maru, and for a time, Google on Android.
It’s a shame, really. I like the idea of validating my public key via NFC from my Apple Watch to login to work machines or my home boxes (a la SSH). Seems like it’d be easier to wrangle in the long run, especially with job hopping being the norm.
Man, that would be great. Imagine going out for a walk with just your smartwatch. Then you go back home and you insert the watch into a phone case and it gives it more RAM and CPU power and it becomes your phone and you go out again. Then when you come back you put it inside your big box and now you have a computer. All with the same accounts, OS, apps.
I mean, we already basically have that but even more convenient -- you don't need to have a watch-shaped hole in your phone, or a phone-shaped slot in your computer.
I already use all the same accounts and apps and data across my watch, phone, and computer. I don't particularly want to take my watch off to use my phone, or put my phone away to use my computer though.
One step ahead is innovation, two steps ahead is a martyr. Microsoft is a lot of the time two steps ahead, but the technology and/or the people are not ready for it.
Hasnt harmed their product Microsoft Profit (TM) too much however.
> One step ahead is innovation, two steps ahead is a martyr.
IMO people constantly mischaracterize progress as Great New Inventions By an Innovative Figure, when it's almost always something people already tried (and failed at) years before, and the difference is luck or some surrounding context improves.
Yeah this is abandonware, idk why it's being posted and upvoted now.
Something similar to real mobile/desktop convergence is still technically possible today with Phosh on PostMarketOS (or Mobian, Mobile NixOS or Arch ARM) and a compatible device with USB-C video out (like the PinePhone).
Last release on GitHub was also 2019. Repository's seen activity since then, last thing I see is some documentation and GitHub actions committed in 2023, and there's dependabot activity all the way up to 2 weeks ago.
For me these efforts feel like a solution to a problem very few people have. People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops. The people who want a portable computer, which needs access to a screen, keyboard, mouse and desk, just seems like a very small niche. Even when you get that computer set up, you end up with something quite slow with limited RAM and storage, unless you've bought a real flagship phone which is more expensive than a good laptop anyway.
I tried this with DeX, it's cool, but it's just really hard to see where I'd use it. Some sort of trip where for some reason I can't bring my laptop, but I do have access to the various peripherals required to make a desktop setup.
> People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops
Especially now with laptops like the Apple Silicon macbook air, with more than enough power and battery life.
I used to want a beefy phone that could run a full Linux desktop when plugged into a monitor, but that was a long time ago (ironically, Google is getting there with some of the Android 16 stuff...too bad the switching cost from Apple for me is too high at this point).
But then the M1 air came out, and that was pretty much game over for me. I've since upgraded to my M4 pro but it's still small and light enough to go everywhere, I have no need for an all-in-one phone.
Just a rather long thought regarding the switching cost from Apple to Android - I rebooted my iPhone yesterday (not unusual for me) and my Safari was empty - no open tabs, no tab groups, no reading list, no history, nothing! I don't use iCloud for Safari so there wasn't much I could do. After trying a few suggestions I found online involving toggling iCloud on and off, I rebooted again, and got back the reading list and the tabs in tab groups, but no history or any open tabs which weren't in a group.
If my phone had died completely I'd have restored from a backup, but this isn't worth that. Realising how easily everything can vanish, and that there are almost no options to go digging around to find the underlying files made me rethink how much I trust the OS. And that made me look at exporting.
The export options from Safari are fairly complete (in the settings App, in the App section under Safari), and Apple have something similar to Google Takeout. The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.
I wouldn't normally bother, but now I feel I can't trust the OS to manage this stuff I'm motivated.
Anyway, my thought is that once you have this stuff setup robustly without completely trusting the phone or iCloud to just handle everything, that's one aspect of switching completely taken care of.
I would never normally bother, but now I feel I can't rely on the OS to handle things I'm more motivated.
I realise that it must seem like I could have solved this (and still can) by just using iCloud backup/sync. I intentionally chose not to use that for reasons that I'm not convinced really stack up, so I won't go into (vendor lock-in, flakiness, stories of vanishing data, etc.).
Anyway, just thought I'd point out that exporting might be able to take care of the data side a lot better than you might be expecting, and you might be able to just slowly transition, e.g. export all notes, import into another location, tick one off the list.
Edit:
Ah, just thinking more about it now, I realise now that while there is a Mail export option, there is nothing for messages in either Download Your Data, or direct from the phone. That's rough.
> The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.
With iOS 26 you can now export Apple notes to markdown as well, which I've done recently on the beta and put them in my Obsidian folder.
The switching cost for me is more so the stupid little conveniences I'm not quite willing to give up yet. I do regularly take advantage of clipboard sharing, universal control, AirPods device switching, auto-fill from messages & mail for TOTP (which works in Chrome now on macOS 26), and my Apple Watch has been hard to replace last time I tried (was with a pixel watch 2, maybe the 4 will be good enough this time).
I can recreate some of that with KDE Connect & Linux, but last time I tried it wasn't nearly as seamless.
Photos are the most important to me, and I already have those regularly backed up locally.
I suspect I'll switch eventually, I just have to mourn the loss of the little things.
My workplace forces me to use a virtual windows VM atm, which I'm usually connecting from an MacBook Pro.
I recently wanted to try using such an XR glasses (viture) and just use a Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad and connect from my phone. It would make teethering unnecessary as an additional plus.
While it worked, it was super janky because mobile devices are still not optimized for desktop use... The VM screen was effectively limited by the phone resolution which was mirrored by the glasses. Couldn't get it to work without the mirroring...
If it was less janky I would definitely use that for some business trips. Currently? Nope.
On the contrary, I think that this problem has such a simple and obvious solution that you even have to wonder why it hasn't been solved yet.
In essence, the hardware completely allows you to have a device that can connect to a monitor via USB, connect to a keyboard via Bluetooth and function as a full-fledged computer.
DeX is perfect for certain business settings (mostly sales, but many management functions also) where you home-base out of a desk, then hit the road during the day.
When you home-base, you're producing more in terms of text, longer form emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. So having a keyboard+monitor+mouse is important.
When you are on the road, you really just need to make calls, text, get driving directions, send short emails, etc. Occasionally make a presentation, which is doable off of the phone without any external devices.
I've done this workflow in short spurts and it's frankly really fantastic, modern productivity tools usually have an Android app version that's fine, or a web-app version that's also fine. I was often also making calls from the same phone that was driving my KVM.
Pretty much the only thing preventing me doing it permanently is multi-monitor support at "homebase", and sometimes being able to print sanely on a corporate printer setup.
There's ideas like this every couple of years, and I love the idea, but they never seem to go anywhere. I think Nokia's Maemo/Meego was the first, and it keeps popping up, but it never seems to go anywhere. I understand this one has been dead for a couple of years now too.
Everywhere I might hook up my phone to a monitor there is already either a preexisting computer hooked up, my laptop with its ultra flat keyboard trackpad combo to hook up, and/or lacking the appropriate back support and table height for me for me to ergonomically use a keyboard and mouse there. This might make sense for someone who travels a lot and wants to work in odd places but the assumption that people can Find A Monitor That Has A Keyboard Flatspace In The Wild is what’s broken.
This product would have been wildly successful if they just released it as a laptop case for a phone, Framework-style. Dock your phone into the PCMCIA slot to activate the laptop, etc.
The use case for me is mostly hotel stays. When travelling for fun I don't particularly want the weight (and risk) of packing my laptop, but I would like to be able to play movies and music on the hotel TV. With a cheap light keyboard I could also do email and similar light admin things with the benefit of the bigger screen.
Until recently I was also travelling frequently for work with a heavy MacBook running a variety of Enterprise malware that would prevent me from doing any personal stuff with it - being able to use my own phone for light leisure activities that I normally do on the personal laptop would have been very useful for the boring hotel evenings. Adding another kg+ of laptop to the already heavy backpack was too annoying to put up with - my cheapo bluetooth keyboard and mouse weigh in at a much more acceptable 280 grams.
In short, there's a use case - but most phones are too locked down to take full advantage of the possibility.
This is why my iPad Mini is my main travel device. Small enough that it fits in my pockets. But the screen is big enough that it's comfortable to use. More comfortable than the Pro Max. Have a cheap bluetooth keyboard with integrated stand so the mini can be used as a laptop. Take the mini with me when I go places and leave the keyboard in the hotel. Would make me sad if someone stole the keyboard but it's a far smaller loss than if a laptop was stolen. Gives me a more peace of mind.
If only the Mini had true 4k output, it would be absolutely perfect. But it only does screen mirroring which limits it when plugged into a monitor or hotel television.
Yeah, I'm considering a pi500 as a similar alternative. I need to check the weight, but if it's low enough and they release a version with m2 I'll surely try it.
And given a sufficiently flexible phone, it'd be nice to have a mode selector pop up when you plug into a new display. Pick between screen mirroring, desktop mode, and a media center, and optionally remember the choice for next time.
I'm not sure why you neatpick that. I feel the complete opposite. HDMI screens are everywhere. Usb-c ones less but still present.
I have a screen at work, with keyboard and USB hub. Same at home. And at most of my friend's homes. I have a screen (tv) in a hotel and flats to rent. I even had one in a cabin recently (use them with tv stick for my kid's shows).
I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter than a laptop, that I sometimes carry for multiple reasons.
Keyboard is a bit harder, I won't have it provided in a hotel, but there are plenty of small and light models, foldable etc..
I choose current phone specifically for usb-c/HDMI option and a full desktop experience and use it often. It's easy, it's fast, it's stable. Perfect for mobile gaming with a small BT gamepad as well.
I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me.
> I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me.
It seems like this comes down to personal experience. I have literally never seen a place I could plug my phone into an HDMI display (even if I had cables for that, which I don't). As such it strikes me as very impractical, but it sounds like your experience has been drastically different so we come to different conclusions.
It's not personal experience. It's a segment of the market and also a lack of familiarity. The Macbook Air ships with only USB-C Thunderbolt and a large group of people are fine buying a dock to connect it or HDMI to thunderbolt.
While reading this article I thought it'd be interesting to read this on Android desktop mode and went looking for a cable while forgetting I could just unplug my USB-C laptop.
> I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter than a laptop
How much lighter is it than say a Surface Go that can run Windows or Linux? If they are about the same then it doesn't make sense to fiddle with Linux on a phone. Comes with a keyboard too.
I see that this thread became a "throw random edge cases and diverge the discussion".
How does Surface Go states against other commenters comment that suddenly brought poverty into the mix? :) how does Surface Go address poor people, because it's not cheap where I live.
Your suggestion is that people should carry around four devices with them, poorly integrated, clunky, all for the experience of plugging to their phone? At that point, what advantage is there over a laptop?
No. I'm just saying that "there are no HDMI devices near me" is weird and hard to achieve.
To use my phone as a desktop all I need is the phone itself. USB cable I most often already have to charge it. Phone works as a keyboard and mouse and I have large screen to browse web, play, watch videos. ZERO new devices, only things I already carry and a screen that is already there.
People probably don't think about a poor person enough or they would come up with more solutions that benefit everybody.
Some only conceptualize scenarios that include those that are quite wealthy, whether intentional or not.
Even if you are not poor, one of the most respectable things you can do is to re-use and recycle rather than consume new.
For minimal cash outlay, surplus PC's can easily be found at zero cost which is naturally an unmatched bargain, compared to used monitors even as low as $10 each, unless you can get the monitors free also, but that's much more uncommon. Surplus keyboards are stacked up everywhere and being thrown away all the time too.
So it's really the monitors (and physical desk space) that's the limiting factor for aspiring low-cost operators. By a long shot.
It's been that way for years so by now with every multi-monitor workspace I have a PC for each monitor, even if I only run one of the PC's at a time usually. Each monitor also has at least two separate inputs which can be chosen from at any time and all the wiring is in place whether it is being actively used or not.
So between my office or home or an employment site a laptop used to be carried with me but now mainly collects dust except for "outreach" or distant travel these days. Laptop chargers still in each location so I didn't have to carry that as often.
Now it's usually only a miniPC (or sometimes two) that I carry for "full-strength" mobile deployment between locations. Chose miniPC's that run on the laptop chargers that were already at each desk. Even more convenient to carry than laptops.
Soon for the PC's that I have appropriately configured at each familiar location, I will only need to be carrying a bootable USB stick instead of either a miniPC or laptop :)
Might as well use the PC's that are already there too, along with the full-size monitors and keyboards ;)
Environment on a stick.
Not much different than the way you could put Windows XP on a bootable FAT32 Memorystick, then put the Memorystick into the Sony phone to utilize its remaining storage space the regular way. The cellphone folders don't interfere with the Windows folders. Then plug in the USB cord from the phone to a PC, boot the PC to USB and the phone acts like a bootable USB stick and your C: drive is the Windows volume on the phone's internal Memorystick.
This still works with Android and SD cards too.
It's good to have but it just ties up the phone and a separate USB stick is the real functional model.
I feel the opposite of you and not sure why you defend it. I can not think of the last time I plugged my phone or tablet into an HDMI screen I didn't own.
I could commute to the office every day with nothing but the shirt on my back and the phone in my pocket if my work-provided device were my phone. I would not need a backpack or briefcase, which means that for any errands or dinner plans after work, I don't fumble with a backpack. I already leave my preferred keyboard+mouse at my office desk.
If I needed to fly to another office for a business trip, same story: I could sit down at any desk, grab a spare bluetooth keyboard from IT (if there isn't already one on the bookable desk).
If I'm over at a friend's house for dinner and get paged, I could just ask to sit down at their desk and plug my phone in.
I would love to not have to carry a laptop around to all the places that I do today.
I remember being somewhat sold on this story by the PinePhone, but it seems like it might not be possible to buy one new nowadays.
Having just looked up the PinePhone again for the first time in a while, it does look like the Ubuntu Touch project is still alive and kicking, and compatible with some modern commercially available phones!
The main thing preventing me from having a non-standard Android phone/distribution as a daily driver is access to mobile banking apps - I'm yet to check for myself but as I understand, having an unlocked bootloader means that banking apps will consider the device "compromised" and will not work.
If phones consistently gave you a useful desktop environment when you plugged them into a monitor, I imagine that might change.
I think offices are the most likely places to have something like this, though. My company has monitors with USB-C dock inputs set up at each desk; you grab a desk and plug your laptop into it when you get there. But they're just using DisplayPort Alt-Mode, and a phone with a desktop mode would work with them as well.
I wish I could do that for work; would save me from lugging around a rather heavy laptop. :)
I've yet to find a portable screen and keyboard that can even remotely compare in display quality or battery life to a MacBook Air, and the 'portable' combination is usually heavier and always clunkier to set up.
I don't personally think there's any ease of management advantage to be gained, but that depends on whether one wants their phone to have the data that's on their computer. I don't, personally. But I think there's definitely no advantage from a "single device" when you have to take something just as big as taking a laptop anyway.
I'm not trying to shit on this as a neat tool, but my phone is not the single place for all my data, and I find it considerably harder to manage. If I'm bringing my phone, an external keyboard, and a portable screen (and, presumably, a mouse) with me, it's not really a "single device", it's more like 4 devices that poorly imitate a laptop and don't offer as much functionality
Ooh now this is interesting! I have to start following them I guess, been itching to switch since the most recent Android update absolutely destroyed the battery life on my brand new Pixel 9 Pro XL.
This seems like an abandoned project with no updates since 2019 (!!)
Those looking for a more active and stable project: ubports is carrying the torch forward on the convergence front. I have personally used it on my old OnePlus device and it was quite usable.
As a consumer I'm excited by the vision these convergent solutions sell, in a futuristic "I just carry one device" way, but I think the reason they haven't kicked off is that in reality you don't just have monitors and keyboards and mice lying around wherever you go.
A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you might as well also carry the incredibly thin screen it's attached to on a laptop.
My friend has a foldable screen phone and carries a cute foldable keyboard with touchpad. He can plug in when available or just do light stuff at cafes with the keyboard in his bag
He could instead use a normal phone, but while plugging in display ("AR") glasses from Xreal, which act like an external monitor. He might also want a foldable mouse in addition to his foldable keyboard.
And the phone should be a Samsung, which has DeX (an Android desktop mode). The official Android desktop mode isn't released yet.
I've been diving towards this outcome for awhile now.
I have a gpd pocket 4 for my machine, but carry a chiri CE 5x3 and the MS arc mouse (and am looking for a second screen).
It's an extremely small footprint in my bag, and i'm not sure it can get much smaller. You could remove the keyboard and the mouse from the Pocket 4, but given they're on top of the hardware it wouldn't save that much space.
I can, in theory, do the same setup with my phone instead of the pocket though. I'm yet to really hook it all up and test (I expect several points of failure given past experiments), but the idea really is intriguing.
It does however require people to get more comfortable with smaller keyboards/mice (please for the love of god, if nothing else, swap left control with caps lock), or at least more portable ones.
And as for the ideal of "carry a drive, hook up to hardware as needed", that'll always run into the common issue of who is maintaining the hardware. We need cheap and easy to fix/replace hardware for that to ever really be a thing.
I think Apple would actually be in a position capable of doing this. Slap an M1-4 into an iPhone Case with MacOS. Normally you have an interface like iOS, which shouldn't be hard because iOS is based on MacOS, and when you connect it to a monitor you have normal MacOS. Normal iOS applications need to run on MacOS which I think they already could.
You would just have to allow apps to transform the interface between desktop and mobile or allow both interfaces to access the same data. And for apps that aren't working just show a small windows on the desktop and either disallow opening only-desktop apps on iOS or make everything small and allow zooming.
You could also make something MacBook-like where you connect your phone or slide it into the side.
I think one of the problems here is that Apple then could only sell 1 device to everyone and not potentially three (iPhone, iPad, Mac).
I don't think this would accidentally eat at Apple's laptop market because the laptop-in-a-stick option would still need an external screen. If you're travelling for work or something, might as well just have your phone AND your laptop, instead of phone + external screen full of messy cables. but YMMV
They could sell MacOS as a mobile app subscription like logic Pro for iPads or for one time fee somewhere between $99 - $199, and many would switch from MacMinis I guess.
Pair this with some nice "Vision Air" glasses as a screen replacement..
Funny, Google just announced the Linux Terminal now supports graphical Linux apps. It's closer to WSL2 than a regular app, implementing a fully vrtualized environment.
Unfortunately, even the text-mode-only Android Terminal is incredibly buggy and crashes on GrapheneOS if you have the audacity of typing Ctrl-D to close your session, requiring a full reset (and losing your data in the process). I am not brave enough to try a non-degoogled Android.
I think at this point the niche would be well-served if one could have a competent clamp-on landscape keyboard (so close, clicks keyboard) for their phone they could use to RDP into a better machine that could run while the phone is off. Additionally nice would be if the phone had a fully functional usb-c port that could do DP and usb for docking. At that point I'd have serious thoughts about retiring my backpack or nanote next. It frustrates me how close we are, if such a keyboard existed for $80 or so
I've been occasionally using Microsoft's RDP Client [0] on my iPhone with external keyboard + mouse with a usb-c cable into my external monitor (with a Logitech RF dongle connected to the back of it).
It worked okay, the mouse support is somewhat of a hack, but keyboard works awesome.
The biggest annoyance was actually getting RDP to work satisfactory on a linux box with no external monitor plugged in to it (hetzner box).
I thought someone would have created an app to run browser on the external screen in full resolution, so I could skip RDP and use vscode server via the browser. But the only option seems to be infinitex2p which is not available in the EU :(.
[0]: Which in typical Microsoft idiotic fashion semi recently got renamed to "Windows app"...
[1]: https://x.com/infinitex2p
I've run vscode over ssh via tailscale before and it was pretty good, I'm mostly connecting to a remote using rustdesk however, that also requires a "dummy" hdmi to operate. The only thing it needs to make it perfect would be if there were officially supported forwarded web browsing windows in vscode. I wish apple would actually let us use "our" usb-c as.. usb-c
I carry my laptop with me all the time when I go on holiday, when I travel with my family etc. I have too many obligations to leave it behind. Many times I carry it for nothing, but sometimes it's needed. If I could have a dev environment on my phone with access to all my projects, and I could transform that phone to a full "computer", I'll be travelling about 1.1kg lighter.
Imagine running linux in UTM (the fast jit version, not the nerfed appstore version) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and VR sunglasses (eg. xreal make good ones that plug in to usb-c), on your iPhone.
Or carry a phone that can run linux on bare metal - or can run Wayland in Android Terminal, a new feature in Android 16.
I want something like this. But realistically I’ve had Samsung Dex for years and never use it. I liked the idea of Continuum. Leave my phone in a dock and magically it shows on the monitor and I use my mouse and keyboard. Again, no real life use case.
Dex,Chrome OS, whatever distro pinephone and librem use, they all feel like I’d be having a lesser experience than using my iPhone or iPad. I don’t see this changing until Apple or Google decides to make the phones capable of handling apps in a desktop-like experience and environment.
iPadOS 26 is very close to that vision. I can’t run that on my phone, but it is almost that perfect portable ubiquitous computer!
This project could achieve this via the following. Project up an alternate screen. Put an “app” on the screen called maruOS projected at external screen resolution. Then get access to your phone storage and maybe to your phone hardware like mic.
Then pretend there is a huge possibility of apps that can run on Maru OS.
But it is Too little too late. Samsung DEX did this. Google is supposed to invent this (again). Everyone has failed. All apps need separate desktop versions to do this work. Essentially they need a second desktop app. This means more ram and more storage and more power.
One advantage of having 'everything on the phone' is that you wouldn't need a cloud provider to sync between your laptop and your phone - it's a 'stand alone' experience.
This is pretty neat. Similarly, I feel like we are really close to smartwatches being able to replace smartphones for all essential tasks. I try to rely on my apple watch with cellular as much as I can and leave my phone at home. I can't wait until agents get a bit better at navigating the web and someone makes a killer UI for the watch. I'll be able to do everything I need to do with a much more ambient device that doesn't suck attention the way a smartphone does.
I remember doing this with my Windows 10 phone back in 2015 (with a dock). Kinda slow and clunky, but mostly worked for a lot of the basic stuff I was doing with it. I think Motorolla had a similar thing?
Reminds me of Windows Continuum [0] (2015) which either via an adapter (Microsoft Display Dock) or wirelessly cast your phone to a display, giving you a more desktop-like experience.
Have they invented anything at all? You've already been able to do this with basically any mobile linux distro, as far as I can tell. At least, on the best-supported devices. You don't need a custom OS for it.
If you're going for a native touch-first experience. If you're trying to emulate actual PC use (either something like this or an RDP-like experience) I've found letting the screen act as a traditional touchpad which controls a cursor is a far more usable approach. Honestly, better than a lot of actual touchpads out there...
In either case the software keyboard popping in and out of existence remains the much more frustrating part of the experience. Docking or bluetooth keyboard/mouse are often required to be practical because of this.
Yes, and that’s what windows does on touch screens going back a long while.
iOS makes pretty heavy use of right click menus (e.g. on the Home Screen, in Mail). It used to be Force Touch/3D Touch, which is superior, but has more learning curve and doesn’t scale to iPad.
It's interesting that in the early 2010s, both halves of the ecosystem were talking about "convergence:" Ubuntu wanted to make its Linux render a single column on a handset and with floating windows on a larger screen. Motorola had a similar project based on Android.
A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. Ubuntu gave up. Mobile-targeted Linux distributions aren't good (missing functionality, mobile UX, or both). The linked distribution is running Debian in a container for desktop on top of Android. The rumors about the future of ChromeOS are imagining something similar.
Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most.
Adapting desktop Linux to mobile seems to be impossibly hard with the amount of resources those distributions have.
I really wanted the Ubuntu phone to succeed. I backed the Indiegogo for their fancy phone, and when that failed I installed Ubuntu OS on a Nexus 5 to play with.
I never activated any phone service on it but I think I would have enjoyed it if I had. It was kind of neat to have a smartphone that didn't hide the fact that it was a computer. Even without plugging it in to a monitor or anything, I was able to play with the Chrome dev tools on the fly and it was pretty fun.
I ran Ubuntu Touch briefly on a Nexus 5 as well. IIRC the two issues I had were:
1) calls and MMS not working well.
2) Instead of a normal GNU/Linux OS Ubuntu Touch tried really hard to have an Android style immutable OS. Kind of the worst of both worlds since you have a difficult to work with OS but without the app ecosystem of Android that some people believe makes it worth using.
After that I kind of just gave up on the idea that I owned my phone at all and a few years later I gave up carrying smartphones entirely.
I used to use Ubuntu Touch on my OnePlus One for quite a while and it was very nice! I had to switch away because it didn't really support group MMS (still doesn't from what I can tell), and then later US carriers started requiring VoLTE which it didn't support for a while either. But I still hope to switch back someday, that was the most enjoyable phone I'd used since the N900.
I haven't tried to use it full time for the same reason that I haven't tried to take the plunge to the dumb-phone world.
A part of me occasionally considers buying one of those cheap KaiOS dumbphones, because I figure that the stuff that's missing could be supplemented with my laptop. The problem I'm always afraid of is that I'm afraid that I'll be missing something. I'll start a job and they'll require some specific proprietary 2FA app, for example. Also, I don't think Signal has a dumb phone app yet and that's basically all I use to communicate.
Similarly, I haven't done anything but play with Ubuntu Touch, because I know there would be an app missing that I would need, so I'd be forced to have an Android or iPhone for those edge cases anyway.
Startup costs are enormous to break into the smartphone world now, at least if you want to penetrate into the "non-tech-enthusiast" market.
IMO it comes down to marketing: can't have the kayfabe of selling something that is "not a computer"/"new kind of computer" and have it act like a "computer" too
Marketing played a role yes, but plenty of other phone operating systems failed that had much stronger marketing then Ubuntu ever would have.
Not a phone, but I really liked the Blackberry Playbook's QNX system. It was extremely smooth and easy to use, and was fairly easy to develop for.
They shit the bed by betting on Flash, which was a dying tech, but I was pretty sad when Blackberry just went to "another Android phone", since I thought what they had was pretty neat.
Blackberry definitely had much better marketing than Ubuntu has ever had, and for reasons probably too complicated for me to fully understand, they're sort of a joke now.
GNOME is still plugging away at this, making sure their entire OS is usable on mobile. Even without a market or audience.
Both impressively and disappointingly, that seems to be literally one guy in Germany.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/verdre/gnome-shell-mobile
relevant https://xkcd.com/2347/
Purism company contributed a lot to mobile Gnome UI.
I think it's more than phone hardware is still really locked down/non standardized, so there aren't a lot of viable options to get alternatives on there without also being a hardware designer and having the bank to go with that. Need a big country to force a standardization on the hardware interface/bios and an opening up similar to what we have in pc components and this will get a lot more interesting. Sadly the chance of that happening is near zero and the interests of google and apple lie in more lockdown, not less.
I think the true reason is that onñy a small fraction of people are interested in convergence and most people are fine, or even truly desire, to have different devices and experiences.
Millions (billions?) of people are happy to leave their phone in another room when working on their computer and vice-versa. Sure you could use a do not disturb button but it would be a major PITA to have enough granularity to allow or disallow certain app/services to notify you and you would be certain to forget to activate/deactivate it when you really want.
Billions of users don't have a computer they work on and don't realize that this might be an option.
> A dozen years later, nobody has done that well.
I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS based on Debian. No Android dependencies and possibility of full desktop mode. How is this not a success?
You and several thousand other people see it that way, meanwhile the billions of other computer users out here don’t.
Popularity =/= quality.
That being said, obviously the Librem phone is missing functionality.
Most computer users are goo goo ga ga level users. Most people in the US use iMessage, for example.
It's not the best messenger, not even close. It's not the most ubiquitous either - doesn't even break top 5 globally. Doesn't have the most features. Not the fastest. Not the most secure. Not the easiest to use.
They just use it because it's already installed and right there. That is how deep their understanding and comprehension can go.
There are a lot of people who are not "goo goo ga ga" level users and really need a device.
I've switched to UMPCs because the constant lies and intentional breakage from smartphone vendors drove me up the wall.
glad to see I'm not the only one, if you don't mind me asking, what OS did you settle on? I'm using mint w/ auto-cpufreq on a donki nanote next right now but it's not perfect.
I use Artix on everything these days. It used to Alpine (and before that I was just making my own distros because I didn't like the decisions eg Debian was making.)
thanks! wasn't even on my radar. mind if I ask the device?
For Operating Systems and Ecosystems, Popularity == Quality. The more popular a software is, the more edge cases it encounters and solves issues. More people will write software, plugins, tools for it.
Are you saying that Windows is the most high-quality operating system in the world? This is not even funny. Did you hear about the concepts of walled garden and network effect?
You picked the exact worst example to illustrate your point. People do not pick their messaging service, it is driven by adoption of everybody else.
That's why you're downvoted.
Right, but as ive stated: thats popularity, not quality. There's a difference. Picking something for popularity is perfectly valid.
Do they have a choice? I mean, an actual one that doesn't take significant technical ability.
Those billions need to accept the facts. They're not getting a Windows phone again, and Apple won't likely cannibalize Mac demand with the iPhone.
If they want to have their cake and eat it too, they can either run Linux in an Android container, or Android in a Linux container.
People don't want to quickly turn their phone into a desktop, they want to quickly turn their phone into a laptop. Apple's laptops are over 75% of its sales. And if you have the screen and keyboard of a laptop, why not put a CPU, battery et al. in there?
I think you are missing the point. People don't want to turn anything into anything. They want a minimal number of devices covering all their needs.
then I guess we'll have to wait for companies like huawei with their mate xt, or more likely given friendshoring, the samsung trifold to give people phones that turn into tablets and have a companion keyboard for them to feel this is enough of a threat to address
Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for. Indeed I don't think it's reasonable to then also make it work on some completely different phone hardware that has a operational life of like 2 years + full of closed source hardware and drivers.
If you want users, the thing has to be usable. For the thing to be usable it needs software with perfect hardware support. Google, Android vendors and Apple (and to some extend System 76) understand this.
For Linux to gain 5% marketshare, I really doubt it "barely works" on a "limited set of hardware that it was designed for". It can run headless on basically anything better than a Pentium, and it mostly just works on average hardware (except fingerprint sensors and Nvidia). I've had no problem with Linux on all my hardware, and I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.
Linux didn’t work reliably on my laptops in the past 10 years. And I mean basic things, like booting up, or showing a desktop without serious glitches. And all the time problems were non deterministic, and printing just generic unhelpful “something is wrong” errors, if there were any. I try it every year, whether the situation is better, and in the past 25 years, the answer is that barely. Yes, you can have terminal with very basic settings almost every time, but if you want anything more, even just like proper resolution, then it’s still a lottery. The interesting thing is that before that I was luckier, I could hack Linux to many things (I would definitely not say “install”).
And of course like in the past decades any time, you can always use Linux in VMs. Very reliably. So I stick to that.
> Linux didn’t work reliably on my laptops in the past 10 years. And I mean basic things, like booting up, or showing a desktop
Which laptops? Do they all have Nvidia graphics? This is really vague. Your comment is not helpful, and it just looks like usual Linux bashing from people who don't know what they're talking about.
And how it would be helpful for me to specify? Do you think that I just gave up immediately, and didn’t try to solve it for days and weeks? Do you think you can help me more than that without the exact errors which I got? Do you think I care about a solution to laptops which I don’t even have? Do you think any kind of blanket term like “NVIDIA whatever doesn’t work” would be even true?
I specified a few times, and I got zero relevant information. My time is more valuable than reading comments which are like “it worked for me with <something-which-is-not-even-in-my-spec>”.
FWIW I have Mint on two grandparents laptops and I agree with the parent comment. I gave up doing any updates on them, I just wipe off everything once a year and reinstall from scratch. Even though it's only browser and music player and nobody touches the settings (unless there was a misclick) yet still last time the desktop came to show through the application windows so I had to wipe it again and lo it worked.
1. You didn't name the laptops just like the OP.
2. It seems you're using hardware designed for Windows. It's like trying to install Windows on a Macbook: You're on your own here. Don't blame Microsoft or Apple for your issues.
You know, reading through your replies in this thread is kind of just sad. You selectively pick only tiny parts of comments to reply to, while ignoring the points that are made and the plethora of very, very common issues highlighted.
Sadly, it's also a very expected answer from someone who probably likes Linux a lot. No matter what argument is made, no matter what examples or proof are included, irregardless of the number of such things, it's all just user error in the end.
When the argument is that Linux only _properly_ supports a small subset of devices for _desktop computing,_ and the counter-argument is that it does, yet a person mentions very, very incredibly common issues . . . Is the proper response to say, to effect, you're the one at fault by not using the right hardware? No, no it's not. Given that so, so, _so_ many experience these kinds of basic UX problems means that either Linux doesn't actually properly support a lot of different hardware (despite what many obsessed Linux users screech/preach) or it supports them perfectly fine and the tons upon tons upon tons of people who experience these issues are all the ones at fault and in no way, shape or form does Linux lack from a well known general UX problem.
Even worse is this, honestly, moronic take:
> 2. It seems you're using hardware designed for Windows. It's like trying to install Windows on a Macbook: You're on your own here. Don't blame Microsoft or Apple for your issues.
If I wasn't before convinced that you aren't completely out of touch, I am now. The primary subject of _desktop_ users _are_ Windows users with Windows machines. Goodness gracious, I honestly do not understand this take. Most of Linux's not-always-optimal desktop hardware support comes from a plethora of formerly Windows machines.
It's honestly just so weird to argue that installing Linux on a Windows machine is in any way shape or form as bad as installing it on a Mac.
Even more, Linux-only devices, as in Linux-first devices, are more of a newer thing. There have been initiatives before, that have fallen through or not gained a lot of traction. It's not until relatively recently that companies making Linux-first devices for _desktop_ computing became a real thing. And even then, the Steam Deck blows them out of the water by mostly _removing_ the desktop-part of Linux and replacing it with a homebrewed one. Although you can still use a regular desktop "mode." And yet, even with such companies, Windows machines stand for a massive section of the Linux desktop computing userbase.
Ironically, this is exactly the kind of argument I'd expect from an obsessed and out of touch Linux user. Because it makes no sense, disregards the points other potential users make and doesn't even properly address them.
Thank you for an interesting, thoughtful reply.
> You selectively pick only tiny parts of comments to reply to
Yes, I nitpick on some smaller things when I know the poster is wrong on that matter (and I feel it's sufficiently important).
> while ignoring the points that are made and the plethora of very, very common issues highlighted
It doesn't mean I think there are no issues at all. Often I just don't have anything to add to them. Do I always have to say "it's true" to everything else? I never said "and therefore you're wrong about everything".
> Linux only _properly_ supports a small subset of devices for _desktop computing
This is true. However what you conclude from this may differ. It doesn't mean that Linux is a lost case and everybody should use Windows. It doesn't mean that companies can't switch to Linux. Very often they choose the hardware for the next upgrade and nothing prevents them from choosing a known supported hardware, however rare it could be.
Also, in every Linux thread there is always a large number of people with vague, unhelpful Linux bashing like "I'm trying Linux every other week and there are countless issues every single time". This is not actionable, it doesn't help anybody to choose the hardware. It's just a shallow dismissal, which is against the HN guidelines. I don't understand who upvotes that.
> Is the proper response to say, to effect, you're the one at fault by not using the right hardware?
This is not exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that you should manage your expectations when using random hardware with a free OS. Not only the Linux developers weren't paid to support every hardware in world -- in many cases, the hardware vendors actively fight against this. Statistically, it must be a really large number of devices reliably working. How else could Linux reach >5% without anything sold in stores?
> either Linux doesn't actually properly support a lot of different hardware
Yes, this is the case.
> Even worse is this, honestly, moronic take
I stand by what I said. You can't demand any OS to work on every piece of hardware in the world; not even mega-corps can achieve that. You have to keep in mind the reality, otherwise this is a Nirvana fallacy. I would understand if someone said "I'm unlucky, Linux doesn't work on my hardware". Instead, they say "Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for" or "Linux on the desktop failed and will never succeed" (actual quotes from this discussion).
> The primary subject of _desktop_ users _are_ Windows users with Windows machines.
This is very true, and it's a sad state of affairs that for Linux to grow it has an impossible task of supporting all those different Windows machines. I recommend every Windows user to try installing Linux. At the same time, I do not guarantee that it will work, but there is a good chance. You will likely loose some features like suspend, but your machine will be faster, more secure, private and supported for the lifetime if you're lucky. Also you should be able to pay somebody to fix your problems, which will fix them for every other user. This is not true for proprietary software btw.
> It's honestly just so weird to argue that installing Linux on a Windows machine is in any way shape or form as bad as installing it on a Mac.
This is not what I said. I said that you're misplacing the responsibility here. The user should accept their responsibility for buying a "Windows-certified" hardware and not blame their problems on volunteers. They should thank the volunteer when it works and understand the reasons when it doesn't (and consider helping to fix the issues, too).
> And even then, the Steam Deck blows them out of the water
What are you talking about? Most users buy it as a separate device to play games, just like a console. It does help Linux to grow, but the comparison to Linux-first general-purpose devices doesn't seem relevant here.
Works reliably on mine. Windows 11 on the other hand, feels beta.
> I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.
I literally looked at it last week. Spent multiple days on it. Tried Mint and Zorin (full install, not just live).
This is on a brand new Lenovo p16s Gen 4 with AMD (no nvidia). That laptop didn't even exist before this year.
List of problems I encountered:
-- Multi touch not working (fixed by switching from Mint to Zorin, upgrading mainline kernel in Mint did not help).
-- External monitor not working (had to install display link drivers by going into terminal and running scripts and all of that other classic Linux usability) .
-- Hardware video acceleration not working (scrolling super slow, maps super slow, entire system super slow). Had to install AMD display drivers for that separately. Upgrading mainline kernel worked for Mint, but not for Zorin. Installing AMD drivers in Zorin involved downloading the drivers, !editting an install script that is part of the drivers! and then having an LLM guide me through the rest of the extremely elaborate process of installing the driver.
-- And to top it off, my classic pet peeve: there's no way to configure something as basic as scroll-lines (mouse scrollwheel speed) through a GUI in ANY of the distros. It involves installing imwheel, !writing a script!, setting the script to run on boot and then rebooting (and/or restarting the script).
So no. There's definitely no "it just works". Not even on a laptop that is supposed to have official HW vendor support for Ubuntu.
Also, I only ran it for like a day. I'm sure that I'll run into tons of other issues if I use it a bit longer.
Good for you and lucky you that you got it to work. But for most of us Linux is "nice try, but it's not finished yet" .
> That laptop didn't even exist before this year.
Here's your problem. The hardware wasn't designed to run Linux and you gave Linux no time to fix the related problems. Try older hardware or wait.
It works for me, said every Linux zelot ever. NVidia acceleration is horrid. The only thing that worked was directx on zorin. AMD? Only a few machines, even fewer models. What all the zelots we're running is built in Intel. "It works for me." Followed by bins by the truck full of unsupported hardware.
ThinkPads? Perfect every time? Dell? Have you configured you bios lately? Unsupported AMD? Grab your crayons on a race the old hardware will loose.
Linux has had 10 years to run on 10 year old hardware. Linux is not an OS. It's an attitude, and it's not a reflection on the technology, it's a reflection on the lowest common denominator.
Windows 10? I still have another 14 months left, and mass*.dev to thank.
Hardware that was built to run Linux? Drivers? If you have an AMD card and any interest in Linux, pull the card and prepare to trash the entire system, like the HP sitting on the sidewalk last night. Bye.
> ThinkPads? Perfect every time? Dell?
System76, Purism, Taxedo, Pine64.
Which brings us back to my initial point: it only runs properly without fiddling on a tiny minority of very specific hardware by a tiny handful of vendors (who often ship to only a tiny portion of the globe).
To be clear: I got it to run eventually after hours/days of fiddling.
Do I like it after all this effort?
No.
But sure, I'll wait. I've waited for Linux to become truly user friendy for 3 decades and I really really want to love it, so I'll wait some more. No problem.
Running as a user where things need to work is not the same as being headless wherrle all you need is CLI access, disk and network ...
My lenovo p14s is a great linux laptop unless you want it to sleep (which it does!) It even wakes up! But 50% of the time the trackpad does not wake up properly ... Making hard to be used as a laptop that I can get things done on
Besides working with it on servers on regular basis, and having had enough with it on desktops and laptops since 1995, last year I managed to get a NUC, where Ubuntu, Red-Hat and SuSE weren't able to boot from the internal SSD or get along with UEFI, only booting from the external drive worked.
So yeah no problem, and yes I know should have gone to the usual forums asking everyone and their dog if someone before me had ever succeeded installing Linux on this brick.
I have different opinions. Try my NUC. Reinstall Windows 10 on it; you won't get audio support unless you get especial audio drivers from a shady download URL (usually used from pirating services) linked from the OEM vendors. Windows Update won't help. Neither SDI Tool Origin.
GNU/Linux works, HDMI output et all.
Unless I’m mistaken windows 10 is end of life in 3 months so this shouldn’t be surprising ?
Barely no one uses Windows 11.
I think about half of all desktop machines , since MS is pushing upgrades aggressively. Many corporate environments ( have already moved as well.
https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
Nope. Win 10 is now a free year of support. All the way to Oct 2026. Thanks for pointing out mistakenly your mistaken. And is it surprising than hardware shills are pointing not pointing this out? You want Linux get a Thinkpad, and a mouse, and plan on replugging every time you wake. "It just works." Well guess what?
Microsoft says it ends in October 2025.
What am I missing here ?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-suppo...
I love how HN nowadays mirrors the Linux forums experience from phpBB and Slashdot days.
Because with NUCs if you dare to gasp reinstall the OEM OS, if the vendor it's gone, with Windows you might get a nice door stopper. You can get audio thru the headphones/speakers output, but that's a shitty experience for your living room.
With Windows 11 it will happen the same.
then don't use it. Linux needs less people like you
And I don't, Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux and VMs are good enough.
If others have fun making it work, good for them, I have better ways to spend the rest of my life on this litte sphere.
As what Linux needs, I thought it needs every little user, to make a difference against Apple and Microsoft, after all we are always told that now is the year everyone is going to flee into Linux.
Agreed - my view is that Linux on the desktop failed and will never succeed and its mostly alright since people have shifted their computing needs from desktops to phones.
So the market for personal computers has grown massively with phones entering it, and Linux has won here.
As to the general state of Linux usability - I’ve been using Linux since 1995, and professionally for more than 20 years - it’s great for professionally administered servers or workstations, less great for regular desktops / laptops where things pretty never work out of the box which is unfortunately not going to bring in extra users …
Linux may have won on phones, but free software did not, which is the thing that actually matters.
That’s a different issue but you have a point esp since the Linux vs windows fight back then was essentially framed as proprietary vs free.
Linux runs on everything that upstreamed it's drivers, and then almost everything that didn't. By just reverse engineering and guessing.
And, a lot of this firmware is extremely buggy too. Have you see ACPI tables in laptops? But, they work under Linux. They shouldn't, but they do.
What doesn't work is the intersection of closed-source firmware and extremely eccentric or evil firmware. I think a lot of Android parts manufactures don't want to upstream their stuff because it's extremely bad and probably filled to the brim to vulnerabilities.
But, Intel upstreams everything, and so does AMD - and it's only improved their firmware quality.
Pity that AMD doesn't upstream everything they do with ROCm for everyone.
> Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for.
This is demonstrably false, and I don't understand where all these comments from Linux haters came from. My Librem laptops work flawlessly, including suspend.
Linux is used on a far greater variety of hardware than Windows or Mac, from phones to supercomputers, and everything in between. The number of servers, of all architectures, running Linux completely dwarfs either Windows or Mac.
Because I think ultimately it is only good on paper. In practice you want your computer to be able to act on itself as well. So it is hard to get the balance right.
I do think for enterprise and business it should work though. Especially we are all on mobile already and most of the time we need to work on something that is on our phone. I wonder if there could be another blackberry moment on this? Or Something Microsoft Windows could work on, as a way to get back into Mobile. I have long argued they should have spend small R&D on possible Mobile OS just in case opportunities pops up.
Bring back Pocket PC. Tie it up with Azure and CoPilot.
It sounds like a nice idea in theory but I dont think demand is that high.
Except all those people who don't own a computer and are stuck on old Android phones. Debian can allow lifetime updates btw.
Apple has this out of the box with MacBooks + iPhones. But in their case, it's easy to implement.
You can get like 65% of the way there by just using i3wm with an onscreen keyboard and really big window borders (so you have somewhere to poke to change windows). But you have to contend with the fact that it is a basically fine touch window manager showing you… applications that were designed without touch in mind at all.
You don't have to suffer: Phosh and convergent apps exist.
Imo trying to make a single UX that just changes a little bit to suit different device types is a misguided approach. Using a large screen with a mouse and keyboard is a fundamentally different thing to using a phone with a touch screen.
Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!)
There are some fuzzy boundaries - e.g. imo Gnome 3 has proven that a single experience can feel good on both a tablet and a single screen laptop with a good track pad. But I think paradoxically you need to take different approaches on different use modes if you want to provide true unity.
> Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!)
Phosh (Phone Shell) already exists and works quite well. I'm writing this comment from desktop Firefox running in Phosh on Librem 5 smartphone.
See also: https://videos.puri.sm/pureos/l5-convergence-purism.mp4
Try the KDE applications designed for this, like kasts, alligator, qrca and see for yourself.
I don't think it can necessarily work for any kind of application, but for some simpler ones I think it's completely fine.
> designed for this
This is kind of my point - I'm not saying you can't have applications that are usable across multiple UX paradigms, and I'm also not saying you can't write a UX library that automatically translates at least simple applications with little manual effort.
I'm just saying this requires active buy in from application developers into the ecosystem - you can't just run everything on all devices and have it magically work (with usability comparable to current state of the art in single device applications).
And to have buy in it needs to exist first :)
Like websites nowadays being usually designed for mobile and desktop devices
kirigami
> I'm just saying this requires active buy in from application developers into the ecosystem
It's true, but on the other hand, it's much easier to adapt your desktop app to a smaller screen than to rewrite it completely for another OS.
In the long term markets usually specialize https://ashishb.net/tech/the-android-chrome-merger-saga/
> but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most
This seems to be a product decision not a limitation. Apple cannot implement this without self-cannabalizing sales of the other.
Nokia nailed this 2005 with Maemo actually but didn't have the grit to see it through.
Understandable as the risk of going all in on would have been a hard sell to the board vs a slow cosy death they couldn't see coming.
Grit is one possible interpretation. A bad c-suite culture is another. Same as with Kodak.
The people I knew with a Windows phone said it worked awesome for them, the desktop mode.
Samsung DeX is not bad! It is not as good as a real desktop, but it will do in a pinch.
I tried out that windows phone continuum feature back in the day to try and get actual work done. Here's what I remember of it.
You could connect it wirelessly to your windows laptop and it would take over screen, keyboard and mouse from the laptop. The actual connecting part worked smoothly, but it could only stream one relatively low res screen and even then over a wireless connection it felt sluggish. I couldn't use the laptop while the phone was connected, and this was its biggest handicap because I would have preferred the phone's desktop in a window similar to running a virtualized OS, with easy drag-and-drop and copy-paste.
The experience was that you had the same phone apps with the same feature set as on the phone, but they transformed into desktop layouts. For the first party apps this worked fine, but many of the third party apps didn't work at all or didn't work well, so I ended up largely being stuck with the first party apps, mostly the mobile versions of Outlook and Edge, and the file explorer. At the time these were seriously limited compared to the desktop counterparts. In that version of Edge I couldn't use many of the web apps that I tried. The outlook version was very basic, but I still managed to get some of my email done.
The apps only appeared fullscreen. I get why they did it on the weak phone hardware of the time, but this was very limiting. You could alt-tab however, and there was the windows taskbar. The start menu was the phone's home screen, so you would see the exact same tile layout as you saw on the phone, and clicking a tile would open the app. I really liked this solution because it gave a lot of flexibility while being instantly familiar.
Bottom line it wasn't really suited at being a one stop computing experience, but it was a good way to do the things you would otherwise do on the phone on a larger canvas. It was good for what it was, but it was not in any way a laptop replacement. What really killed it as a useful feature for me was what ultimately killed windows phone: the lack of a decent app catalog. I still think in its time windows phone was the best mobile OS, but the app gap meant that it never stood a chance.
I kind of doubt it did work well for them. Microsoft was having an identity crisis at that time where they didn't yet realize nobody wanted their tablet UI on desktop.
If they allowed straight Win32 ports on ARM it could have been interesting. Or if they did it now, where I think x86 emulation on arm is working well these days.
In fairness, most people I knew with Windows phones worked for MSFT.
But a few (the ones I talked to the most) were just people interested in the Windows ecosystem. One was running Windows Home Server. Those folks all swore that everything was great (except the app ecosystem). I can only go by what I was told.
Plasma mobile is not flawless but it's very good. I use a tablet daily to do tablet stuff: read news or play sokoban while pooping, watching cartoons…
What is the point of convergence when you can sell two devices to one customer?
> Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most.
Yeah, apple could solve that instantly.
Sadly, they decided to play a cash cow strategy of milking existing users instead for trying to grow market share.
Apple is so frustrating. Amazing hardware but then they complete shit the bead with the software side of things and act actively hostile against their own users.
It's a product decision.
Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS.
Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system.
Adaptive design has fared best on the web, but it's still not settled. See, for instance, the back-and-forth around density defaults for web apps like Gmail. Some people really like their pointer-friendly dense UIs with hover buttons, and that makes them really hard to use on a touchscreen.
Perhaps ironically, Apple is also in the best position to bridge the gap. Since they own the UI stack that renders most apps on Apple devices, they could do something clever like say "a button is 32px tall if there's a trackpad and 56px tall otherwise." Rules like that could produce an app that truly adapts to the user's primary modality.
The other systems have too many UI frameworks for that to work. Apple could only pull it off because ~everyone uses their component set (I think it's called UIKit). They also have a reputation of declaring the future and making the ecosystem catch up (going all the way back to adopting USB exclusively on the first iMac).
There are no new native apps, only Electron or similar.
This is only sort of sarcasm.
> Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well.
Concerning Windows, you're right. Concerning GNU/Linux you aren't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085
That post is 6 years old, and yet Linux still sucks by default on a touchscreen.
I installed NixOS on a handheld nearly 2 years ago and tried a whole bunch of touch-oriented options (including tiny ones like Maui). The closest I got to good enough was running the mobile fork of GNOME, using someone on GitHub's custom flake to pull it in at HEAD. I'm very happy that Valve has released SteamOS for other devices so I can offload that tinkering.
Steam is very usable on a touchscreen, but the KDE desktop mode hasn't impressed me.
I think the Steam Deck’s touch screen is also one of its worst features.
I will type a message or an email on a phone (Android or iOS) but I loathe even typing my username into the Steam Deck via touch.
I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS with Phosh DE. It's convenient and pretty in my opinion. Also it runs desktop Firefox with all plugins you want.
You must use the plasma-mobile stuff, not the plasma desktop.
Mobile wasn't packaged for NixOS.
I am curious why/if Valve hasn't used it for SteamOS's desktop mode though.
Package it yourself then!
I don't really know, but I don't think the use outside of steam is an important use case to them, possibly they don't want to make things too easy, or maybe it wasn't packaged for arch either when they created the base image.
I know for a fact that many university students are using iPad OS instead of macOS now, especially for less typing-intensive stuff like chemistry. You might be surprised how much of college runs in the browser now.
Bill Gates spoke of this context-aware OS at a lecture in the mid-00s. He specifically called out future phones (this was pre-iPhone era) that would have location context (work/home/mobile) and load secure, sandboxed datastores and profiles depending on that context. He also spoke at length about how desktop computers would transform into accelerators, like your gaming GPU at home or your additional processors and memory at your workstation. It was a grand vision of ultimate portability, with clear lines between work and personal lives enabled through technology.
Then he showed off the Fossil MSN watch, and suggested future iterations may do away with phones entirely and act as methods of identification for digital systems.
And then, like all things Microsoft, they abandoned the concepts entirely. Apple and Google cribbed most of the ideas for themselves in some form or another and saw wild success with them, though to date nobody major has really attempted to create that mobile vision Gates spoke of - other than Maru, and for a time, Google on Android.
It’s a shame, really. I like the idea of validating my public key via NFC from my Apple Watch to login to work machines or my home boxes (a la SSH). Seems like it’d be easier to wrangle in the long run, especially with job hopping being the norm.
Man, that would be great. Imagine going out for a walk with just your smartwatch. Then you go back home and you insert the watch into a phone case and it gives it more RAM and CPU power and it becomes your phone and you go out again. Then when you come back you put it inside your big box and now you have a computer. All with the same accounts, OS, apps.
I mean, we already basically have that but even more convenient -- you don't need to have a watch-shaped hole in your phone, or a phone-shaped slot in your computer.
I already use all the same accounts and apps and data across my watch, phone, and computer. I don't particularly want to take my watch off to use my phone, or put my phone away to use my computer though.
One step ahead is innovation, two steps ahead is a martyr. Microsoft is a lot of the time two steps ahead, but the technology and/or the people are not ready for it.
Hasnt harmed their product Microsoft Profit (TM) too much however.
> One step ahead is innovation, two steps ahead is a martyr.
IMO people constantly mischaracterize progress as Great New Inventions By an Innovative Figure, when it's almost always something people already tried (and failed at) years before, and the difference is luck or some surrounding context improves.
I have an idea for a ring you can wear on one of your fingers and this ring actually runs Java [1]
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/300495374337
> Maru is built on the latest Android Oreo.
Yeah this is abandonware, idk why it's being posted and upvoted now.
Something similar to real mobile/desktop convergence is still technically possible today with Phosh on PostMarketOS (or Mobian, Mobile NixOS or Arch ARM) and a compatible device with USB-C video out (like the PinePhone).
There's something charming about the slickness and naviete of this abandonware site.
Does Maru OS run on the current generation of devices?
https://maruos.com/downloads/ shows releases dated 2019.
No release in years: https://github.com/maruos/builds/releases
It looks like it is on maintenance mode: https://github.com/maruos/maruos/commits/master/
It does look like either the OS or the website have fallen behind.
Last release on GitHub was also 2019. Repository's seen activity since then, last thing I see is some documentation and GitHub actions committed in 2023, and there's dependabot activity all the way up to 2 weeks ago.
For me these efforts feel like a solution to a problem very few people have. People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops. The people who want a portable computer, which needs access to a screen, keyboard, mouse and desk, just seems like a very small niche. Even when you get that computer set up, you end up with something quite slow with limited RAM and storage, unless you've bought a real flagship phone which is more expensive than a good laptop anyway.
I tried this with DeX, it's cool, but it's just really hard to see where I'd use it. Some sort of trip where for some reason I can't bring my laptop, but I do have access to the various peripherals required to make a desktop setup.
> People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops
Especially now with laptops like the Apple Silicon macbook air, with more than enough power and battery life.
I used to want a beefy phone that could run a full Linux desktop when plugged into a monitor, but that was a long time ago (ironically, Google is getting there with some of the Android 16 stuff...too bad the switching cost from Apple for me is too high at this point).
But then the M1 air came out, and that was pretty much game over for me. I've since upgraded to my M4 pro but it's still small and light enough to go everywhere, I have no need for an all-in-one phone.
Just a rather long thought regarding the switching cost from Apple to Android - I rebooted my iPhone yesterday (not unusual for me) and my Safari was empty - no open tabs, no tab groups, no reading list, no history, nothing! I don't use iCloud for Safari so there wasn't much I could do. After trying a few suggestions I found online involving toggling iCloud on and off, I rebooted again, and got back the reading list and the tabs in tab groups, but no history or any open tabs which weren't in a group.
If my phone had died completely I'd have restored from a backup, but this isn't worth that. Realising how easily everything can vanish, and that there are almost no options to go digging around to find the underlying files made me rethink how much I trust the OS. And that made me look at exporting.
The export options from Safari are fairly complete (in the settings App, in the App section under Safari), and Apple have something similar to Google Takeout. The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.
I wouldn't normally bother, but now I feel I can't trust the OS to manage this stuff I'm motivated.
Anyway, my thought is that once you have this stuff setup robustly without completely trusting the phone or iCloud to just handle everything, that's one aspect of switching completely taken care of.
I would never normally bother, but now I feel I can't rely on the OS to handle things I'm more motivated.
I realise that it must seem like I could have solved this (and still can) by just using iCloud backup/sync. I intentionally chose not to use that for reasons that I'm not convinced really stack up, so I won't go into (vendor lock-in, flakiness, stories of vanishing data, etc.).
Anyway, just thought I'd point out that exporting might be able to take care of the data side a lot better than you might be expecting, and you might be able to just slowly transition, e.g. export all notes, import into another location, tick one off the list.
iCloud export: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306
Edit: Ah, just thinking more about it now, I realise now that while there is a Mail export option, there is nothing for messages in either Download Your Data, or direct from the phone. That's rough.
> The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.
With iOS 26 you can now export Apple notes to markdown as well, which I've done recently on the beta and put them in my Obsidian folder.
The switching cost for me is more so the stupid little conveniences I'm not quite willing to give up yet. I do regularly take advantage of clipboard sharing, universal control, AirPods device switching, auto-fill from messages & mail for TOTP (which works in Chrome now on macOS 26), and my Apple Watch has been hard to replace last time I tried (was with a pixel watch 2, maybe the 4 will be good enough this time).
I can recreate some of that with KDE Connect & Linux, but last time I tried it wasn't nearly as seamless.
Photos are the most important to me, and I already have those regularly backed up locally.
I suspect I'll switch eventually, I just have to mourn the loss of the little things.
I sometimes use a VR headset instead of a monitor but I do end up using a laptop because of the keyboard and touchpad.
I can conceive of using maybe a phone, an ultra light headset and a compact keyboard and TouchPad combined?
I'm usually connecting to a real computer over remote desktop however!
My workplace forces me to use a virtual windows VM atm, which I'm usually connecting from an MacBook Pro.
I recently wanted to try using such an XR glasses (viture) and just use a Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad and connect from my phone. It would make teethering unnecessary as an additional plus.
While it worked, it was super janky because mobile devices are still not optimized for desktop use... The VM screen was effectively limited by the phone resolution which was mirrored by the glasses. Couldn't get it to work without the mirroring...
If it was less janky I would definitely use that for some business trips. Currently? Nope.
On the contrary, I think that this problem has such a simple and obvious solution that you even have to wonder why it hasn't been solved yet.
In essence, the hardware completely allows you to have a device that can connect to a monitor via USB, connect to a keyboard via Bluetooth and function as a full-fledged computer.
DeX is perfect for certain business settings (mostly sales, but many management functions also) where you home-base out of a desk, then hit the road during the day.
When you home-base, you're producing more in terms of text, longer form emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. So having a keyboard+monitor+mouse is important.
When you are on the road, you really just need to make calls, text, get driving directions, send short emails, etc. Occasionally make a presentation, which is doable off of the phone without any external devices.
I've done this workflow in short spurts and it's frankly really fantastic, modern productivity tools usually have an Android app version that's fine, or a web-app version that's also fine. I was often also making calls from the same phone that was driving my KVM.
Pretty much the only thing preventing me doing it permanently is multi-monitor support at "homebase", and sometimes being able to print sanely on a corporate printer setup.
> a problem very few people have
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727972
There's ideas like this every couple of years, and I love the idea, but they never seem to go anywhere. I think Nokia's Maemo/Meego was the first, and it keeps popping up, but it never seems to go anywhere. I understand this one has been dead for a couple of years now too.
Everywhere I might hook up my phone to a monitor there is already either a preexisting computer hooked up, my laptop with its ultra flat keyboard trackpad combo to hook up, and/or lacking the appropriate back support and table height for me for me to ergonomically use a keyboard and mouse there. This might make sense for someone who travels a lot and wants to work in odd places but the assumption that people can Find A Monitor That Has A Keyboard Flatspace In The Wild is what’s broken.
This product would have been wildly successful if they just released it as a laptop case for a phone, Framework-style. Dock your phone into the PCMCIA slot to activate the laptop, etc.
> This product would have been wildly successful if they just released it as a laptop case for a phone
You mean, this? https://nexdock.com/
Yep. Lot more market for that. Dunno how much, though! Does it have a battery?
Yes.
would be cooler if it were something like the razer linda where you dock the phone as a touchpad
Would be a good HN convention to add (dead) after a project like older posts get tagged with the year.
It's probably the same as adding (2019) to the title about an OS, isn't it?
> Simply plug your phone into an HDMI screen, connect up a keyboard and mouse, and you’ve got a lightweight desktop experience you can take anywhere.
No, I can't take it anywhere, because few places I go to have a HDMI screen and keyboard ready for me. And to the ones they do, I carry my laptop.
The use case for me is mostly hotel stays. When travelling for fun I don't particularly want the weight (and risk) of packing my laptop, but I would like to be able to play movies and music on the hotel TV. With a cheap light keyboard I could also do email and similar light admin things with the benefit of the bigger screen.
Until recently I was also travelling frequently for work with a heavy MacBook running a variety of Enterprise malware that would prevent me from doing any personal stuff with it - being able to use my own phone for light leisure activities that I normally do on the personal laptop would have been very useful for the boring hotel evenings. Adding another kg+ of laptop to the already heavy backpack was too annoying to put up with - my cheapo bluetooth keyboard and mouse weigh in at a much more acceptable 280 grams.
In short, there's a use case - but most phones are too locked down to take full advantage of the possibility.
This is why my iPad Mini is my main travel device. Small enough that it fits in my pockets. But the screen is big enough that it's comfortable to use. More comfortable than the Pro Max. Have a cheap bluetooth keyboard with integrated stand so the mini can be used as a laptop. Take the mini with me when I go places and leave the keyboard in the hotel. Would make me sad if someone stole the keyboard but it's a far smaller loss than if a laptop was stolen. Gives me a more peace of mind.
If only the Mini had true 4k output, it would be absolutely perfect. But it only does screen mirroring which limits it when plugged into a monitor or hotel television.
I tend to bring my AppleTV + HDMI cable with me whenever we travel.
Its small size makes it largely inconsequential from a luggage point of view and it’s already fully set up with all my streaming apps.
It also doesn’t tie up my phone if anyone else wants to watch TV.
Yeah, I'm considering a pi500 as a similar alternative. I need to check the weight, but if it's low enough and they release a version with m2 I'll surely try it.
Yeah, agreed that that's a nice use case.
And given a sufficiently flexible phone, it'd be nice to have a mode selector pop up when you plug into a new display. Pick between screen mirroring, desktop mode, and a media center, and optionally remember the choice for next time.
I'm not sure why you neatpick that. I feel the complete opposite. HDMI screens are everywhere. Usb-c ones less but still present.
I have a screen at work, with keyboard and USB hub. Same at home. And at most of my friend's homes. I have a screen (tv) in a hotel and flats to rent. I even had one in a cabin recently (use them with tv stick for my kid's shows).
I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter than a laptop, that I sometimes carry for multiple reasons.
Keyboard is a bit harder, I won't have it provided in a hotel, but there are plenty of small and light models, foldable etc..
I choose current phone specifically for usb-c/HDMI option and a full desktop experience and use it often. It's easy, it's fast, it's stable. Perfect for mobile gaming with a small BT gamepad as well.
I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me.
> I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me.
It seems like this comes down to personal experience. I have literally never seen a place I could plug my phone into an HDMI display (even if I had cables for that, which I don't). As such it strikes me as very impractical, but it sounds like your experience has been drastically different so we come to different conclusions.
It's not personal experience. It's a segment of the market and also a lack of familiarity. The Macbook Air ships with only USB-C Thunderbolt and a large group of people are fine buying a dock to connect it or HDMI to thunderbolt.
While reading this article I thought it'd be interesting to read this on Android desktop mode and went looking for a cable while forgetting I could just unplug my USB-C laptop.
> I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter than a laptop
How much lighter is it than say a Surface Go that can run Windows or Linux? If they are about the same then it doesn't make sense to fiddle with Linux on a phone. Comes with a keyboard too.
I see that this thread became a "throw random edge cases and diverge the discussion".
How does Surface Go states against other commenters comment that suddenly brought poverty into the mix? :) how does Surface Go address poor people, because it's not cheap where I live.
It's a discussion that doesn't make sense.
You never said anything about affordability.
> It's a discussion that doesn't make sense.
That's on you for lack of context.
i struggle to see your point.
Your suggestion is that people should carry around four devices with them, poorly integrated, clunky, all for the experience of plugging to their phone? At that point, what advantage is there over a laptop?
No. I'm just saying that "there are no HDMI devices near me" is weird and hard to achieve.
To use my phone as a desktop all I need is the phone itself. USB cable I most often already have to charge it. Phone works as a keyboard and mouse and I have large screen to browse web, play, watch videos. ZERO new devices, only things I already carry and a screen that is already there.
i disagree entirely.
Think about a poor person. Are they better served by a laptop or your proposed solution of four different devices?
Even in my own daily life, i struggle to find places where your solution is practical.
People probably don't think about a poor person enough or they would come up with more solutions that benefit everybody.
Some only conceptualize scenarios that include those that are quite wealthy, whether intentional or not.
Even if you are not poor, one of the most respectable things you can do is to re-use and recycle rather than consume new.
For minimal cash outlay, surplus PC's can easily be found at zero cost which is naturally an unmatched bargain, compared to used monitors even as low as $10 each, unless you can get the monitors free also, but that's much more uncommon. Surplus keyboards are stacked up everywhere and being thrown away all the time too.
So it's really the monitors (and physical desk space) that's the limiting factor for aspiring low-cost operators. By a long shot.
It's been that way for years so by now with every multi-monitor workspace I have a PC for each monitor, even if I only run one of the PC's at a time usually. Each monitor also has at least two separate inputs which can be chosen from at any time and all the wiring is in place whether it is being actively used or not.
So between my office or home or an employment site a laptop used to be carried with me but now mainly collects dust except for "outreach" or distant travel these days. Laptop chargers still in each location so I didn't have to carry that as often.
Now it's usually only a miniPC (or sometimes two) that I carry for "full-strength" mobile deployment between locations. Chose miniPC's that run on the laptop chargers that were already at each desk. Even more convenient to carry than laptops.
Soon for the PC's that I have appropriately configured at each familiar location, I will only need to be carrying a bootable USB stick instead of either a miniPC or laptop :)
Might as well use the PC's that are already there too, along with the full-size monitors and keyboards ;)
Environment on a stick.
Not much different than the way you could put Windows XP on a bootable FAT32 Memorystick, then put the Memorystick into the Sony phone to utilize its remaining storage space the regular way. The cellphone folders don't interfere with the Windows folders. Then plug in the USB cord from the phone to a PC, boot the PC to USB and the phone acts like a bootable USB stick and your C: drive is the Windows volume on the phone's internal Memorystick.
This still works with Android and SD cards too.
It's good to have but it just ties up the phone and a separate USB stick is the real functional model.
I feel the opposite of you and not sure why you defend it. I can not think of the last time I plugged my phone or tablet into an HDMI screen I didn't own.
Projectors are what springs to mind for me. Though I guess less relevant if you work remotely.
Kinda solved by sharing on teams in a conference room now?
I could commute to the office every day with nothing but the shirt on my back and the phone in my pocket if my work-provided device were my phone. I would not need a backpack or briefcase, which means that for any errands or dinner plans after work, I don't fumble with a backpack. I already leave my preferred keyboard+mouse at my office desk.
If I needed to fly to another office for a business trip, same story: I could sit down at any desk, grab a spare bluetooth keyboard from IT (if there isn't already one on the bookable desk).
If I'm over at a friend's house for dinner and get paged, I could just ask to sit down at their desk and plug my phone in.
I would love to not have to carry a laptop around to all the places that I do today.
I remember being somewhat sold on this story by the PinePhone, but it seems like it might not be possible to buy one new nowadays.
Having just looked up the PinePhone again for the first time in a while, it does look like the Ubuntu Touch project is still alive and kicking, and compatible with some modern commercially available phones!
The main thing preventing me from having a non-standard Android phone/distribution as a daily driver is access to mobile banking apps - I'm yet to check for myself but as I understand, having an unlocked bootloader means that banking apps will consider the device "compromised" and will not work.
If phones consistently gave you a useful desktop environment when you plugged them into a monitor, I imagine that might change.
I think offices are the most likely places to have something like this, though. My company has monitors with USB-C dock inputs set up at each desk; you grab a desk and plug your laptop into it when you get there. But they're just using DisplayPort Alt-Mode, and a phone with a desktop mode would work with them as well.
I wish I could do that for work; would save me from lugging around a rather heavy laptop. :)
There are now ar glasses that do HDMI, and there are lots of portable keyboard solutions, with a trackpad or trackpoint or just a mouse.
haven't tried it, but I see glasses as an almost practical future.
Why can't the phone itself act as the input device? Sure it's not a full-fledged keyboard, but it could work wonderfully in a pinch.
it should at least work as a trackpad.
You could also use it with Nexdoc, https://nexdock.com
Lapdocks are an amazing concept, but I haven't found a single one with my preferred keyboard layout yet. Same problem as laptops in general.
you can always bring a portable screen/keyboard with you
I've yet to find a portable screen and keyboard that can even remotely compare in display quality or battery life to a MacBook Air, and the 'portable' combination is usually heavier and always clunkier to set up.
If I'm doing that, why wouldn't I just bring my laptop
Single place for all your data, easier to manage and back up. Single device to take with you.
I don't personally think there's any ease of management advantage to be gained, but that depends on whether one wants their phone to have the data that's on their computer. I don't, personally. But I think there's definitely no advantage from a "single device" when you have to take something just as big as taking a laptop anyway.
I'm not trying to shit on this as a neat tool, but my phone is not the single place for all my data, and I find it considerably harder to manage. If I'm bringing my phone, an external keyboard, and a portable screen (and, presumably, a mouse) with me, it's not really a "single device", it's more like 4 devices that poorly imitate a laptop and don't offer as much functionality
Plus, when far from a homebase, some people are going to bring two laptops anyway so they can have twice the reliability of your average person.
Don't ask me how I know . . .
I've comfortably used a 7 inch tablet as a pocketable phone, such a thing with a keyboard would likely be a "complete" solution
I’d also check out GrapheneOS once the Android 16 QPR1 beta with Desktop Mode gets merged in. Likely to be a more up-to-date experience.
Yeah, Maru is based on Android 8. Not exactly modern anymore.
Ooh now this is interesting! I have to start following them I guess, been itching to switch since the most recent Android update absolutely destroyed the battery life on my brand new Pixel 9 Pro XL.
This seems like an abandoned project with no updates since 2019 (!!)
Those looking for a more active and stable project: ubports is carrying the torch forward on the convergence front. I have personally used it on my old OnePlus device and it was quite usable.
1: https://ubports.com/
2: https://lomiri.com/
"Maru is built on the latest Android Oreo." That's Android 8.0, from 2017.
Also Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS.
As a consumer I'm excited by the vision these convergent solutions sell, in a futuristic "I just carry one device" way, but I think the reason they haven't kicked off is that in reality you don't just have monitors and keyboards and mice lying around wherever you go.
A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you might as well also carry the incredibly thin screen it's attached to on a laptop.
My friend has a foldable screen phone and carries a cute foldable keyboard with touchpad. He can plug in when available or just do light stuff at cafes with the keyboard in his bag
He could instead use a normal phone, but while plugging in display ("AR") glasses from Xreal, which act like an external monitor. He might also want a foldable mouse in addition to his foldable keyboard.
And the phone should be a Samsung, which has DeX (an Android desktop mode). The official Android desktop mode isn't released yet.
I've been diving towards this outcome for awhile now.
I have a gpd pocket 4 for my machine, but carry a chiri CE 5x3 and the MS arc mouse (and am looking for a second screen).
It's an extremely small footprint in my bag, and i'm not sure it can get much smaller. You could remove the keyboard and the mouse from the Pocket 4, but given they're on top of the hardware it wouldn't save that much space.
I can, in theory, do the same setup with my phone instead of the pocket though. I'm yet to really hook it all up and test (I expect several points of failure given past experiments), but the idea really is intriguing.
It does however require people to get more comfortable with smaller keyboards/mice (please for the love of god, if nothing else, swap left control with caps lock), or at least more portable ones.
And as for the ideal of "carry a drive, hook up to hardware as needed", that'll always run into the common issue of who is maintaining the hardware. We need cheap and easy to fix/replace hardware for that to ever really be a thing.
I think Apple would actually be in a position capable of doing this. Slap an M1-4 into an iPhone Case with MacOS. Normally you have an interface like iOS, which shouldn't be hard because iOS is based on MacOS, and when you connect it to a monitor you have normal MacOS. Normal iOS applications need to run on MacOS which I think they already could.
You would just have to allow apps to transform the interface between desktop and mobile or allow both interfaces to access the same data. And for apps that aren't working just show a small windows on the desktop and either disallow opening only-desktop apps on iOS or make everything small and allow zooming.
You could also make something MacBook-like where you connect your phone or slide it into the side.
I think one of the problems here is that Apple then could only sell 1 device to everyone and not potentially three (iPhone, iPad, Mac).
I don't think this would accidentally eat at Apple's laptop market because the laptop-in-a-stick option would still need an external screen. If you're travelling for work or something, might as well just have your phone AND your laptop, instead of phone + external screen full of messy cables. but YMMV
They could sell MacOS as a mobile app subscription like logic Pro for iPads or for one time fee somewhere between $99 - $199, and many would switch from MacMinis I guess.
Pair this with some nice "Vision Air" glasses as a screen replacement..
Funny, Google just announced the Linux Terminal now supports graphical Linux apps. It's closer to WSL2 than a regular app, implementing a fully vrtualized environment.
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-futu...
Unfortunately, even the text-mode-only Android Terminal is incredibly buggy and crashes on GrapheneOS if you have the audacity of typing Ctrl-D to close your session, requiring a full reset (and losing your data in the process). I am not brave enough to try a non-degoogled Android.
I think at this point the niche would be well-served if one could have a competent clamp-on landscape keyboard (so close, clicks keyboard) for their phone they could use to RDP into a better machine that could run while the phone is off. Additionally nice would be if the phone had a fully functional usb-c port that could do DP and usb for docking. At that point I'd have serious thoughts about retiring my backpack or nanote next. It frustrates me how close we are, if such a keyboard existed for $80 or so
I've been occasionally using Microsoft's RDP Client [0] on my iPhone with external keyboard + mouse with a usb-c cable into my external monitor (with a Logitech RF dongle connected to the back of it).
It worked okay, the mouse support is somewhat of a hack, but keyboard works awesome.
The biggest annoyance was actually getting RDP to work satisfactory on a linux box with no external monitor plugged in to it (hetzner box).
I thought someone would have created an app to run browser on the external screen in full resolution, so I could skip RDP and use vscode server via the browser. But the only option seems to be infinitex2p which is not available in the EU :(.
[0]: Which in typical Microsoft idiotic fashion semi recently got renamed to "Windows app"... [1]: https://x.com/infinitex2p
I've run vscode over ssh via tailscale before and it was pretty good, I'm mostly connecting to a remote using rustdesk however, that also requires a "dummy" hdmi to operate. The only thing it needs to make it perfect would be if there were officially supported forwarded web browsing windows in vscode. I wish apple would actually let us use "our" usb-c as.. usb-c
I carry my laptop with me all the time when I go on holiday, when I travel with my family etc. I have too many obligations to leave it behind. Many times I carry it for nothing, but sometimes it's needed. If I could have a dev environment on my phone with access to all my projects, and I could transform that phone to a full "computer", I'll be travelling about 1.1kg lighter.
We’re so close to laptop-free travel!
Imagine running linux in UTM (the fast jit version, not the nerfed appstore version) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and VR sunglasses (eg. xreal make good ones that plug in to usb-c), on your iPhone.
Or carry a phone that can run linux on bare metal - or can run Wayland in Android Terminal, a new feature in Android 16.
I want something like this. But realistically I’ve had Samsung Dex for years and never use it. I liked the idea of Continuum. Leave my phone in a dock and magically it shows on the monitor and I use my mouse and keyboard. Again, no real life use case.
Dex,Chrome OS, whatever distro pinephone and librem use, they all feel like I’d be having a lesser experience than using my iPhone or iPad. I don’t see this changing until Apple or Google decides to make the phones capable of handling apps in a desktop-like experience and environment.
iPadOS 26 is very close to that vision. I can’t run that on my phone, but it is almost that perfect portable ubiquitous computer!
This project could achieve this via the following. Project up an alternate screen. Put an “app” on the screen called maruOS projected at external screen resolution. Then get access to your phone storage and maybe to your phone hardware like mic.
Then pretend there is a huge possibility of apps that can run on Maru OS.
But it is Too little too late. Samsung DEX did this. Google is supposed to invent this (again). Everyone has failed. All apps need separate desktop versions to do this work. Essentially they need a second desktop app. This means more ram and more storage and more power.
One advantage of having 'everything on the phone' is that you wouldn't need a cloud provider to sync between your laptop and your phone - it's a 'stand alone' experience.
You'd still want an offsite backup somewhere. Doesn't have to be cloud, but it is the most accessible to most people.
This is pretty neat. Similarly, I feel like we are really close to smartwatches being able to replace smartphones for all essential tasks. I try to rely on my apple watch with cellular as much as I can and leave my phone at home. I can't wait until agents get a bit better at navigating the web and someone makes a killer UI for the watch. I'll be able to do everything I need to do with a much more ambient device that doesn't suck attention the way a smartphone does.
I remember doing this with my Windows 10 phone back in 2015 (with a dock). Kinda slow and clunky, but mostly worked for a lot of the basic stuff I was doing with it. I think Motorolla had a similar thing?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock
Reminds me of Windows Continuum [0] (2015) which either via an adapter (Microsoft Display Dock) or wirelessly cast your phone to a display, giving you a more desktop-like experience.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum
One of the things I love about my Samsung device is precisely this feature, i.e. DeX
Have they invented anything at all? You've already been able to do this with basically any mobile linux distro, as far as I can tell. At least, on the best-supported devices. You don't need a custom OS for it.
The mouse right-click on a PC.
What's the equivalent of that for a phone? Is it press-and-hold?
If you're going for a native touch-first experience. If you're trying to emulate actual PC use (either something like this or an RDP-like experience) I've found letting the screen act as a traditional touchpad which controls a cursor is a far more usable approach. Honestly, better than a lot of actual touchpads out there...
In either case the software keyboard popping in and out of existence remains the much more frustrating part of the experience. Docking or bluetooth keyboard/mouse are often required to be practical because of this.
Yes, and that’s what windows does on touch screens going back a long while.
iOS makes pretty heavy use of right click menus (e.g. on the Home Screen, in Mail). It used to be Force Touch/3D Touch, which is superior, but has more learning curve and doesn’t scale to iPad.
Two fingers tap is pretty common on touchpads. Three for scroll wheel click. But you'd attach a mouse with a solution like in the article.
this is what I want iOS and macOS to become. 1 OS. Plug in your phone and get a computer. unplug and get a phone.
Discussion in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350293
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350293 - May 2017 (251 comments)
Maru OS becomes an open source project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373251 - Aug 2016 (26 comments)
Maru OS – Your phone is your PC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11873444 - June 2016 (2 comments)
Maru turns Android smartphones into portable PCs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037937 - Feb 2016 (73 comments)
Used Samsung Dex for one year.
Incredible experience, but closed source and too niche.
Does it run my banking app which is Android/iOS based?
(Running through an emulator is ok.)
Waydroid can probably make it run.
Is the device encrypted at rest?
Nice idea. Also an abandoned project. Samsung also does it.
How does this really old stuff make it to the top of hacker news some times? What is going on here?
There's likely agreement with the sentiment of the project despite it never going anywhere
What's wrong with that?
"Peek under the hood and you'll find rock-stable Debian Linux" I LOL'd