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Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

maruos.com

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

#71

Post by nkkollaw »

I always embrace change and appreciate all kinds of experiments, but I don't think you want the same thing on your phone and desktop.

I want different files on my desktop that I don't want on my phone—like accounting and tax stuff. I might want Skype on my PC, but not on my phone (because I can just call people), etc. etc.

iCloud and similar are a good balance, allowing you to have a shared virtual folder that you can browse on both your phone and desktop and is kept synchronized automatically. Google apps are great to keep things syncronized, too: contacts, passwords (iCloud or Google Chrome), etc.

I use macOS as a desktop OS and Android as a mobile OS, and I'm perfectly happy with using the right tool for the job which works well for what you need to do, instead of a security-nightmare OS and complicated mobile OS.

Just my two cents.

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

#72

Post by my123 »

khedoros1 wrote: post #68
falcolas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of any task that has ever caused your laptop fans to spin up, and cross that task off of what is possible on a phone-as-desktop list. No high definition video calls. No 1080p gaming. No fully functional IDEs (intellisense and interactive linting/compiling is computationally expensive). No high definition movies. Video/batch photo conversions are probably out, though may be possible at 1/10th speed. The most suc…

I can do hi-def video calls and video playback on my phone already; the video encode+decode is handled by dedicated hardware. Ditto for certain types of video conversions. Gaming is at 1080p, equivalent to PC games from perhaps 10 years ago. This is with a mid-range phone from a couple years ago. I think you're being overly pessimistic.

A modern phone CPU is way closer to a modern desktop CPU than what most people think, due to the mobile-first (and power-efficiency-first) nature of most of the current CPUs in the market - in the detriment of pure performance. Power-efficiency matters more than pure single-threaded performance in both the mobile and server markets.

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

#73

Post by toast0 »

cwyers wrote: post #17
xrisk wrote: 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.

It may not be new to the world, but it's likely new to users. Many recycled ideas go on to change the world in a second (or third, or nth) attempt.

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

#76

Post by zfnb »

From the FAQ: Is Maru an app or does it replace my current Android OS? Maru is firmware for your device, so yes, it will replace your existing Android OS.

I wonder how this works: is Android a virtual machine within the Maru/Debian host? It would be very interesting to be able to use the underlying Linux networking, for example, to control the Android functionality.

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

#78

Post by Rudism »

zeotroph wrote: post #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 cours…

I think all the walled-garden ecosystems of apps and device interoperability are also contributing to the slow progress on this front. Nobody with the resources to do so wants to develop open protocols that would enable easy collaboration on this kind of thing. We may get there one day, but you'll need to pick Google, Apple, or Amazon and buy your device, monitor, peripherals, and cloud services from just that one company.

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

#79

Post by djaychela »

graycoder wrote: post #13

If you like this you might like: sentio.com

Was coming on here to post exactly the same; backed it on Kickstarter but still waiting for the device to arrive; they changed the name from Andromium to Sentio (negative change, IMO, sounds like an age-related medical product now), but it's a similar concept. However, I've not looked into the technicalities of Sentio in terms of the issues raised elsewhere on this page, so hopefully they don't have them...

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

#80

Post by thinkling »

nkkollaw wrote: post #71

I always embrace change and appreciate all kinds of experiments, but I don't think you want the same thing on your phone and desktop. I want different files on my desktop that I don't want on my phone—like accounting and tax stuff. I might want Skype on my PC, but not on my phone (because I can just call people), etc. etc. iCloud and similar are a good balance, allowing you to have a shared virtual folder that you ca…

It's not the same thing -- the phone runs Android for phone-mode use, and "Peek under the hood and you'll find rock-stable Debian Linux" for the desktop mode.
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