PureOS is convergent

> It solves a _development_ problem, in that it reduces the amount of work needed to allow an application to reach a larger number of devices.

Sounds like a repeat of the Java strategy: you can run garbage nobody wants anywhere nobody wants to run it.

> So because someone else failed at solving a particular problem in a particular way previously

Microsoft also attempted it, and also failed quite miserably.

> we should simply give up on it?

Not necessarily, but at the very least you could avoid lying by omission (mentioning Google and Apple which don't exactly attempt convergence and pointedly ignoring every pre-existing attempt at the concept) and maybe consider humility and avoid overblown claims given you're not the first to attempt it, nobody's succeeded, there's no evidence available that you are succeeding, and you've really not shown anything which would made anyone think "this is going to succeed where everybody else failed".

> There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly

And beyond that, platforms have affordances which you should want to leverage. A smartphone has a very direct and tactile interaction model, but my computer pairs an extremely precise pointing mechanism with a good way to input oodles of text and chord shortcuts.

As a developer I'm fairly disappointed in how Ballmer messed this one up for us. C# is a nice place to spend your day. And the promise of write once run anywhere is really starting to materialize.

That's cool, and it's good to see work going on in more fundamental building blocks of Linux like Gnome to support mobile and reactive UIs. I always felt like this was the biggest blocker to using a Linux system on handheld devices - having a good ecosystem of open source projects that work for that, and having the ability to pick your own desktop environment and components rather than having to have an "all in one" solution equivalent to Android. Admittedly I know that isn't a killer feature for average users - they do want the all in one solution. But having these things available makes it easier for a company like Purism to build a product using existing software.

It feels like this announcement is missing a step though. What can we do with this? Does this allow plugging your phone into a monitor and then running your phone apps in larger windows (eg, the opposite of what's shown in the videos). The idea of having the same programs running on your phone and laptop is nice in theory, but I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there.

Of course, much more work will need to be done in other programs to support this. The Gnome Web example looks really slick, and it's great to see this sort of 'responsive design' applied to native application interfaces - Android took a step backwards in this regard. But on desktop I'd rather use Firefox, and they have entirely separate builds for desktop and mobile. I wonder if Mozilla have any plans to support this?

I've become unenthused about this software "dream". Having spent years designing and building UIs on the web, what I've learned is that:

1) Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; anything where the amount of stuff you need to see on screen at once doesn't need to be especially large. But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive and cross-platform.

2) Advanced, dense professional tools will never adapt automatically to mobile screens in any meaningful way. And frankly, these are all I find myself installing natively on my desktop anymore.

The vast majority of software these days falls squarely into one of these two camps, and neither seems to benefit much from the prospect of convergence.