PureOS is convergent • Hacker News Board

Re: PureOS is convergent

#101

Post by uryga » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #66

jancsika wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making "everything work everywhere", we're going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms. Which are the Linux GUIs that currently "work beautifully" on the desktop? > I m…

You may have missed that part where I said "Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM". My point was not someone simply running vim on their phone. My point was that if someone rewrote vim to be idiomatic within the smartphone UX (e.g. replacing keyboard motions with swipes and gestures), it would largely defeat the purpose of vim as a modal editor and render it simply as another generic t…

> idiomatic within the smartphone UX (e.g. replacing keyboard motions with swipes and gestures) it would largely defeat the purpose of vim as a modal editor

i'm not convinced that's true... you're right that presently most touch interactions are very "direct" (i.e. an object will move exactly like you drag it, much like using a mouse). but that doesn't rule out more "abstract" (i.e. vim-like) methods of touch input, we just haven't seen them yet. "10 fingers on a keyboard" will always be more expressive than two thumbs on a screen for input like this because it offers more bandwidth and isn't limited by screen real estate, but i feel there's still a lot to explore w.r.t. touch gestures, even if they end up as keyboard shortcuts on steroids.

one example of a good "abstract" gesture is what Paper 53 (an iPad drawing app) did (does?) for undo: put one finger down, drag another finger around it in a compasses-like motion; counter-clockwise to undo, clockwise to redo, and the further you turn, the more "steps" it moves. felt really intuitive and way better than tapping an undo button!

Re: PureOS is convergent

#102

Post by FakeComments » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:14 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…

A 10” screen has a twentieth the screen estate of my workstation screens, and is the difference of a narrow point of attention and spanning my view.

It’s bordering on absurdism to try and utilize the same UI between them, and simply doesn’t match the reality of human perception or tool use.

There are certainly uses where it makes sense — people who use just a phone and laptop for the internet and documents, for instance — and arguments to be made for consistency in styling or icons, but there’s also a lot of use cases where they’re different kinds of tools, even if both use computer chips, and it makes sense to have different UIs.

I appreciate Microsoft offering the other option in Windows 10: that I can use a tablet UI in tablet mode and a desktop UI in laptop mode.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#103

Post by robto » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #59

This reminds me of the idea of "wouldn't it be great if we could use the same programming language for frontend, backend, and database queries". Well, maybe, but in practice not really. They are doing different kinds of things, you will have to use them differently, it doesn't really help all that much to have the same language. It SOUNDS like this would be really helpful, until you get it, and then discover that it…

You can live that dream in clojure land! Clojurescript on the front end, Clojure on the backend, and datalog/honeysql for the database if you'd like. And it is awesome! After using a stack like this I'm spoiled for the slog that is developing in separate languages for each of those things.

I think that dream is possible with OS usecases as well, it's just that nobody has made it work yet. And I can't think of a better way to eventually get there than to build it slowly out of free and open source software. It might take a while, but since people have the ability to adapt the software to their needs when it is free, I'm confident with time that it will serve those needs.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#104

Post by dharma1 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

I worked on this stuff for Ubuntu. I think this can work pretty well for some classes of apps - browsers, chat/messaging apps, voice/video calling, terminal, contacts, gallery, music player etc - relatively light weight (at least in terms of interactions) apps.

Android/ChromeOS and iOS/MacOS are already moving to this direction for these classes of apps.

It doesn't work so well (or is more difficult to execute well, or at all) on apps with very dense UI - video editing, 3D design, IDEs, interface design apps, CAD etc

An aside - I'm not sure I'd use GTK+ for this. Why not Qt, or something like Flutter?

Re: PureOS is convergent

#105

Post by MrMember » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

rcthompson wrote: post #62

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…

I guess we have to ask whether having a single OS running on phones and PCs means that every application written for that OS absolutely needs to be designed to run on both, or whether it's acceptable for an app launched on a phone to just say "sorry, you need a bigger screen" and quit. In other words, is it acceptable to write non-convergent apps for a convergent OS?

There is the approach Samsung is taking with LinuxOnDex. My Note9 runs Android but I can plug it into a monitor, mouse, and keyboard and boot up a Linux environment. It's still a bit rough since it runs in a container on top of Android but it works surprisingly well.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#106

Post by jclulow » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

0815test wrote: post #94

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…

> 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…

_Most_ people did not use computers like that at all, and it's not like they weren't tedious for those of us who did. There was simply no alternative at the time -- there is now.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#107

Post by saturn_vk » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

dharma1 wrote: post #104

I worked on this stuff for Ubuntu. I think this can work pretty well for some classes of apps - browsers, chat/messaging apps, voice/video calling, terminal, contacts, gallery, music player etc - relatively light weight (at least in terms of interactions) apps. Android/ChromeOS and iOS/MacOS are already moving to this direction for these classes of apps. It doesn't work so well (or is more difficult to execute well,…

Why not gtk+ though?

Re: PureOS is convergent

#108

Post by toast0 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

ascii_only wrote: post #63

toast0 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's great for developers, but how does that help users? As a user, I would rather use something built specifically for the device (and os) I'm using, I've used enough things that were supposed to work everywhere that it's a major turn off at this point. If developers want t…

>but how does that help users? It helps users by providing apps. Purism phone is very niche product. It is unreasonable to think that a lot of developers will start writing their application for PureOS. But hopefully some of them can port app if it will be easy enough. So instead of OS without almost any apps you will have OS with some apps.

As a user, is there a significant difference between an OS with no apps and an os with mostly half-hearted ports of apps?

Having been a user of Windows Phone, I would say, don't bother giving me an app if it's going to be garbage.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#109

Post by kamarg » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:26 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…

Have you considered getting a bluetooth keyboard/mouse? It makes text editing on tablets/phones much more tolerable for me.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#110

Post by HeWhoLurksLate » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:27 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…

Outside of Intel Phi, is there anything like an eCPU? That would be really cool, and could be exactly what we need.

Back before Thunderbolt, I used a mini-PCI-express to PCIE adapter for more GPU power. This was great for games, but I immediately became CPU-bound, which wasn't so great.

To fix this, you could have something like Big.Little but where the Big cores are external and only used when connected. Heck, then you could do something like a Big.Medium.Little architecture, where the phone's integrated Big.Little bows to the higher IPC cores in the eCPU device.

In this way, you would be able to have something that was a "soul" device that had all your settings and stuff on it, with expandable CPU & GPU computing resources. Expanded storage would also be pretty neat, but then you'd have to figure out what did and didn't need access when you were away from your "exosuit".