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Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

maruos.com

31–40 of 264 posts

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#31

Windows mobile has had a similar feature for a while, but you know, windows. I've thought for a while that this is ultimately the way computing is moving - single device that fits in your pocket. I love my laptop, but there is no substituting the portability of a smart phone that seamlessly syncs with panels at home and at work.

On the other hand, although I love my phone's portability, there's no substituting a few hundred watts of processing power and a few terabytes of storage in a decent desktop.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#32
post #17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an OS for your phone that becomes a proper desktop OS if you plug in a monitor, mouse, keyboard etc. I don’t think this has been done before, or maybe I’m just hopelessly unaware? Either way, I think it’s quite interesting.

Motorola Atrix, Ubuntu Phone, Windows Phone 10 has Continuum. It's been tried before.

Yes, and it took around 20 years to go from the patent for the first underpinnings of applications for phones other than communication in the 1970s to Simon Personal Communicator in the early 90s, and then another 10-15 years for the first smart phones to emerge. If people gave up because it "had been tried before", we wouldn't have any of the technology we had (in fact, we would still be planting crops with wooden sticks because Thog got trampled trying to chase some wildebeest off of his early attempts at farming).

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#33

The fact that this spins up a Debian desktop when you're in desktop mode seems to make this a much more viable option than some of the previous attempts at this, which expected you to want to use only android apps on your desktop.

I'd love to have both, though. Debian apps for productivity, android apps for communications/games, side by side on the same screen with shared storage and maybe synchronized state. As it is, I have to manually sync state between the two devices which results in missed messages and inconsistent state.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#35
I am really surprised that the "single computing / storage device" idea which can switch between different screens and input methods seamlessly (and maybe support plug-in CPUs) is just is not happening, though the concept here is a small step in that direction.

Having everything in the cloud seems to have made this somewhat redundant for most users, though I still hope one day I can carry all my data around, of course given proper encryption and backups and the ability to distinguish between safe and possibly monitored (public) displays/inputs.

Or maybe wireless displays are missing so that decision to quickly do a task with a mouse and keyboard leaves out the cable plugging aspect.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#38
post #28

If you have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, you may was well have a computer. Seriously, if you have a laptop-like enclosure for all those things to make them portable, adding a SoC to make it a PC is what, $20-$40 to be on par with this in terms of compute? And last I checked, it's still not The Year Of The Linux Desktop. This is gonna crash and burn.

But, besides that, don't you think it's pretty cool?

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#39
I'm wondering how secure it is.. According to https://github.com/maruos/maruos/wiki/Tips, they start sshd up by default, listening on the local network, with the default user maru and password maru. That seems like a bit of a red flag and makes me wonder if it is the tip of the iceberg.
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