PureOS is convergent • Hacker News Board

Re: PureOS is convergent

#91

Post by abruzzi » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #87

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. 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 s…

Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality. While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges. I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a m…

To me the biggest hinderance is no the small screen, but the touch UI. Think of something simple like text editing. Because the UI has to differentiate simple taps and everything else, there is an inbuilt delay between the simple tap, and the more functional tap-and-hold. But since there is only one tap and hold, then it becomes tap-and-hold-and-select-action-from-menu-then-complete-action. Thats how I think of the simple action of selecting some text. Something the keyboard or mouse both accomplish much faster.

I don't use my phone for much of anything but calling and bored web browsing anymore, but I'd genuinely love for my iPad to be more functionally useful, but the issue above is similar to a lot of other interaction limitations. I really can't imagine using any mobile app on my desktop, and I can't imagine using any of my desktop apps on mobile (admittedly the desktop apps I use are on the more complex side things.)

Re: PureOS is convergent

#92

Post by mstibbard » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

wanderfowl wrote: post #77

The exciting part of this to me is not the ability to run the same software on two devices, but the potential to run two 'kinds' of software on one single device. This unlocks what is for me the most appealing computing fantasy: I have exactly one device to compute with. At home or work, I plug it into my dock, where it pairs to an eGPU/monitor, external storage, keyboard, and mouse, and is my desktop computer. There…

I completely agree with your goal definition of convergence. The ability to have one device for all your computing needs. I don't expect to be able to do everything on a 5-6" phone screen, but I should be able to connect my phone to a monitor (or dock) and be able to do everything. The closest thing to this on the market is Samsung DeX but it's still incredibly limited.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#93

Post by _red » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #29

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 an…

I share many of your feelings.

However, I think you should think of this in a different light: Purism's real problem is: How do we bootstrap this device?

That is to say, there is simply not enough money / engineering talent to both develop all the hardware AND all the software needed to bootstrap this thing. It must appear "viable" to the public as a 1.0 product.

Therefore, using convergence to bootstrap the product and then building out native UI's in further versions is probably the best decision.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#94

Post by 0815test » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #87

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. 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 s…

Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality. While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges. I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a m…

> Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality.

Right. We used to do perfectly serviceable work on extremely small screens, sometimes displaying as few as 40 columns and a dozen rows of text, and with keyboards that were so painful to type on that most commands would be abbreviated to 2 or 3 characters. Current versions of Linux still include a "quirk" for supporting an uppercase-only text mode that was common on early terminals and microcomputers. So no, hardware capabilities are not an inherent obstacle here. Providing an information- and interaction-dense UI on such limited devices is definitely a challenge that will require some added work, but the kind of 'convergence' that Purism is talking about is a necessary building block.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#95

Post by masklinn » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

meruru wrote: post #32

masklinn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It solves bug #1 It doesn't do so anymore than ubuntu already does.

It does so more directly by being a PC without Microsoft Windows pre-installed or proprietary BIOS. Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. Ubuntu helped enable Purism to exist and they are great for that too.

> It does so more directly by being a PC without Microsoft Windows pre-installed or proprietary BIOS.

Ah, so it does so by redefining the inconvenient bits completely out of bug #1.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#96

Post by magissima » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

sciurus wrote: post #24

Here's a report of the effort involved with making the Subsurface dive log desktop application run on mobile as well. The tl;dr seems to be that 1) it was a lot of work 2) users don't like the result very much https://lwn.net/Articles/780031/ There's a huge mismatch between how users want to interact with desktop and mobile applications that makes convergence really hard to do effectively in a single codebase.

A lot of the issues mentioned there stem from platform differences though. The packaging hurdles and out-of-place UI style wouldn't be an issue on a convergent platform, though the difficulty and slight ugliness of QML/Kirigami wouldn't change.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#97

Post by chongli » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

ascii_only wrote: post #67

chongli wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I get that it's important for your product to attract developers in order to present a thriving software ecosystem to the users. It is, but the users don't care how you do it. So marketing developer-centric features to end users is a waste of time and money.

But their market audience are developers/power users.

I'm a developer/power user and I don't find the product very compelling. I'm not a mobile developer though. I see my phone as an appliance: I just want it to work (and it does that very well, with the exception of touchID).

My laptop is where I do all of my serious computing. I have no desire to run bash or vim or tmux on my phone.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#98

Post by tomc1985 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #87

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. 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 s…

Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality. While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges. I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a m…

I feel like the only computer user in the world who wants his computers to act like computers and mobile devices to act like mobile devices and to maintain a firm line in the sand between them.

"Convergence" is a pipe dream because of the differing and mutually exclusive expectations of those different user types, and "one size fits all" programming ends up underserving both segments. The only thing I would change is that mobile needs to do more to expose users to internals (things like access to the proper file manager), rather than hiding and abstracting away every detail that might confuse grandma.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#99

Post by peller » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:09 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. 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 s…

Exactly what you're describing already happened when the netbook fad took hold some years ago. It's crazy obvious on Gnome but KDE apps suffered too, and the defaults to this day are still shit (optimized for form factors 2% of people use).

I feel like the solution is not necessarily to make one app do it all, but to embrace something more akin to a client-server architecture - one "app" with multiple UIs talking over the same API to the same backend logic.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#100

Post by 0815test » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

abruzzi wrote: post #91

bhauer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality. While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges. I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a m…

To me the biggest hinderance is no the small screen, but the touch UI. Think of something simple like text editing. Because the UI has to differentiate simple taps and everything else, there is an inbuilt delay between the simple tap, and the more functional tap-and-hold. But since there is only one tap and hold, then it becomes tap-and-hold-and-select-action-from-menu-then-complete-action. Thats how I think of the s…

Indeed, tap-and-hold is an inefficient gesture on touch-powered devices. Swipes and taps are much more convenient. (In fact, I don't even think that the gesture is used for anything on touchpads, even though it could be. Even for drag and drop, you activate it by "double-tapping" and then swiping away, not letting the double-click register. In general, UI-interaction on touchpads is quite advanced, and proves just how much ground there is to cover on mobile.)

The biggest obstacle to a genuinely productive UI on mobile, I find, is the lack of pervasive and easy confirmation and error-recovery for potentially-unwanted inputs. System management interfaces (e.g. community-built "recovery/modding" environments) get this right (everything that's potentially unwanted gets a "perform a swipe to confirm input" prompt), but almost nothing else does.