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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

#181

Post by petecox »

djsumdog wrote: post #118
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…

Ubuntu Touch was expected to have that. Their crowdfunding video for the Ubuntu Edge showed an Android e-mail app that read/wrote to the same datastore as Thunderbird when it was in desktop mode. I'm not sure how it worked as Ubuntu Mobile really kinda died off and I never tried it myself. There are many other projects that have attempted this (none of which I can remember, but I've seen this concept a bunch). It mak…

various GNU/Linux-in-a-chroot projects exist on Google Play and f-droid. In the other direction, Anbox attempts to run Android inside a container.

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

#182

Post by petecox »

thatcat wrote: post #52
ruleabidinguser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this makes sense until phones are basically as fast as current laptops.

The flagship phone for this OS is the nexus 5 which uses a 2.26 Ghz quad core qualcomm chip and has 2 gb ram. The hw limitation seems to be the low ram limiting the number of memory heavy desktop apps you can run. Definitely not a video editing rig and vbox doesn't work on arm hosts, but this is good for spread sheets / typing up papers / scanning things with your camera and quickly editing them on a desktop with out…

Exactly, the complaint of power users is that "it'll never be as powerful as my Core i7 desktop". Were a phone solution seamless enough to dock into my kvm switch, I'd power up my 'workstation' far less often.

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

#183

Post by drusepth »

This looks cool, but I'm wondering who the target market is for this.

To properly use it, you need:

1) An Android phone (easy to satisfy) that you're comfortable enough installing another OS on (so... a more technical user)

2) An HDMI monitor (which could actually be a TV)

3) A SlimPort USB-to-HDMI cable

4) A bluetooth mouse and bluetooth keyboard

5) No desktop (since using it and this seem to be mutually exclusive for most casual setups)

Most people don't have a bluetooth keyboard/mouse lying around, so the time/cost investment to set this up is not only just installing a new OS on your phone, but also buying hardware (keyboard, mouse, and potentially monitor if you don't already have a computer) [and potentially also waiting for it to arrive if you buy online]. And, after this investment, the target market seems to be people that'd be comfortable doing the above while _not_ also buying a desktop to go with it. So... either technical hobbyists/tinkerers and/or people that want a $50-100 machine (and are savvy enough to set it up).

I would _love_ to use something like this, but I move enough that it doesn't make sense to have a desktop (and, therefore, the same mostly applies to monitor+keyboard), and if I were to live in one place long enough to have a desktop, I'd just buy a desktop (because I likely wouldn't use it _and_ this). Am I just not the target market for something like this (even though it legitimately excites me)?

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

#184

Post by jareds »

swiley wrote: post #165
drewg123 wrote: post #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.

You should leave the default user's password blank on embedded Linux images! Why does everyone set them up with default passwords!? I'm surprised the raspbian maintainers have not realized this yet. sshd won't let you login with an empty password by default.

What percent of pi users don't connect a keyboard and monitor? I don't mind having a default password since when ever I've used a pi I ran it headless and configured it on first boot with SSH. It would make sense to force the pi user to change there password on first login, can't remember if this is the case.

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

#185

Post by kovek »

drusepth wrote: post #183

This looks cool, but I'm wondering who the target market is for this. To properly use it, you need: 1) An Android phone (easy to satisfy) that you're comfortable enough installing another OS on (so... a more technical user) 2) An HDMI monitor (which could actually be a TV) 3) A SlimPort USB-to-HDMI cable 4) A bluetooth mouse and bluetooth keyboard 5) No desktop (since using it and this seem to be mutually exclusive f…

I was thinking that you do not necessarily need a mouse if you know your keyboard-fu well, but then realized that you could use the phone screen as a trackpad in place of a mouse.

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

#186

Post by X-Cubed »

panic wrote: post #173
narrowrail wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the Github [0], it looks like a fairly alpha product targeted at technical people and has one contributor. I think giving the project some slack at this point seems reasonable. I guess if there is major concern about this, one could submit a PR? [0] https://github.com/maruos/maruos

The website is super polished and doesn't mention anything about being alpha quality. It would be easy to install this on your phone without any idea you were making yourself vulnerable.

It's version 0.4, so it's a pre-release build.

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

#188

Post by Schwolop »

I have a nexdock; an HDMI screen, bluetooth keyboard + trackpad, webcam, USB hub, and battery - with no CPU. It's intended to work with continuum/handover compatible phones, compute sticks, or raspberry pi like devices. Something like MaruOS would be an even better option in my mind.

And yet, then I think why would I bother carrying a laptop-minus-cpu plus a phone with desktop ability when I could just do what I currently do and carry a phone and a full laptop? I can see this brings a bit of flexibility, and my files/config would always be on my person, etc. But we have global and close-enough-to ubiquitous internet now - isn't that sufficient or even better?

I guess I just don't get the use case. Or maybe I get the use case(s) but not the business case.

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

#189

Post by pdsouza »

drewg123 wrote: post #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.

Preetam here, founder and lead developer of Maru.

Thank you for all the critical feedback on security in this thread. Maru used to ship with sshd disabled [0] but it was enabled because of all the requests I was getting from users who wanted to run the system headless without needing an HDMI display and BT keyboard/mouse around to set sshd up. I assumed that users would change the default password after the initial login, but as many of you have pointed out, hope is not a strategy when it comes to security. I've opened up an issue [1] to fix this.

Please feel free to open up issues (or, even better, PRs!) at any time if you have further suggestions for improvement. It's thanks to feedback like this that Maru continues to move onwards and upwards.

[0]: https://github.com/maruos/maruos/issues/22#issuecomment-2296... [1]: https://github.com/maruos/maruos/issues/76

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

#190

Post by pdsouza »

floatboth wrote: post #124
unixhero wrote: post #119

So is it still only for Nexus 5x? This can now be achieved on the Samsung Galaxy S8 with the accompanying dock. It's global, rolled out to anywhere you can buy a Samsung S8.

Nexus 5, sadly not 5X

Very early alpha available for the 5X on the forum: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/maru-os-dev/U9EpPQ0SFb0/4MIe...
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