Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PureOS is convergent

puri.sm

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 299 posts

Re: PureOS is convergent

#251

Post by catherd »

computerex wrote: post #186
encypruon wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nokia N900 used to fill this spot between phone and PC for me. It has a slider keyboard and came with a Debian based Linux distro (Maemo) installed on it. Typing was much more comfortable than with a touchscreen and with a few changes to the Xorg keyboard config it was even suitable for programming. The padding madness wasn't there yet and even though the screen was very small by today's standards, it was used ve…

I hear you. Coming from a desktop app development background, I never got into mobile development because from far away it looks so constrained. I dream of a phone where I can use its hardware in whatever way I want.

That's exactly the motivation behind this phone, which has a simple OS and a connector on the back of it for hardware expansion:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103809433/338898127?re...

It's less powerful than a smartphone, but designed from the ground up for hardware hacking.

disclaimer: I am part of the WiPhone project

Re: PureOS is convergent

#252

Post by larkeith »

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…

> "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"

With a Bluetooth keyboard, Vim over SSH is actually a pretty fantastic editor on mobile devices - lots of real estate, fully customizable, and none of those awful "features" that get added to mobile apps. It's really convenient to be able to just connect to my server over LTE and keep working from most anywhere.

I do agree with your point, however - apps designed to make use of a full computer's space will rarely work well on a phone screen, and the great majority of design for mobile is already atrocious even on its native platform.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#253

Post by voltagex_ »

gcbw2 wrote: post #239
ryanmarsh wrote: post #147

Slightly off-topic, is anyone using Librem laptops? What has your experience been? They look nice. I've always wanted a nice secure Linux laptop to work on but I'm not eager to waste hours upon hours getting the drivers to behave (my experience with Linux on the desktop is a bit dated).

your experience is more than 20yrs out of date. And i am not even exaggerating. Drivers in linux normally gives you less problems than OSX or Windows (latest graphic cards model excluded)

Dunno about that. I have a Dell XPS 9350 - to get a stable wifi connection under Linux I had to pull the Broadcom wifi card out and replace it with a much nicer Intel one (good luck doing that on the 2018/9 model - it's soldered in).

For a couple of years, the internal NVMe drive wasn't supported unless you changed from "RAID" to AHCI mode - unknown performance and power effects. It looks like that's changed recently.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#254

Post by pjmlp »

jclulow wrote: post #106
0815test wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Apparently they were quite good, given the amount of posts how great it is to live in a text terminal. /s

Re: PureOS is convergent

#255

Post by pjmlp »

MrMember wrote: post #105
rcthompson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are the updates?

Re: PureOS is convergent

#256

Post by mastrsushi »

JohnFen wrote: post #166
mastrsushi wrote: post #154

Canonical has been trying to make a mobile OS since 2012, KDE since 2011. Do you guys honestly think a company of 27 employees is going to make this work?

I'm not sure that what Canonical can or can't do has much bearing on what others can or can't do. I also don't think that the number of employees means all that much. Very often, smaller teams can be more focused and able to accomplish more than larger teams.

Yeah, let me know when less than 25 developers crank out a working mobile Linux distro that will continue to be supported in 5 years. Looking at all the failed projects in the past and all the managements complexities like software support, modern touch integration this is virtually impossible. They'll likely have a brief stint releasing some Debian ARM based mobile OS with a limited selection of software. You'll get some GTK Calendar, Calculator, etc. The basic crap that imitates Android phones from 2011. And it will be supported by up to 5 or so devices, hopefully without some impractical rooting method.

Linux barely exists as a desktop operating system as is. The only difference nowadays is smartphones don't have that freedom of customization desktops provide. Smartphones are consumer centric devices, you can't even swap batteries anymore. Leading OEMs have no interest in supporting an obscure operating system, they know the majority of users want Android.

When Purism releases this as an OOTB product, it will without a doubt run on some no named Chinese Phone that holds the mediocre power of any low end Android Device. Only it will be $600, rather than $180

Re: PureOS is convergent

#257

Post by pjmlp »

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.

I saw the presentation, lack of experience with mobile development naturally doesn't produce high-quality results.

I remember there were some statements how things work, related to issues they faced, which were plain wrong.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#258

Post by pjmlp »

moron4hire wrote: post #68

Windows has had this with .NET apps for... Oh, pretty much since there has been a .NET. I had written several apps for Windows CE that ran both on desktop and mobile (same EXE file, even). Today, you can do it with UWP. It's a shame Windows Phones didn't take off. They had a great UI paradigm and I think Microsoft has done a lot of very hard work that goes mostly unappreciated in the development world, just because G…

I loved my Lumias, still use one of them as my secondary phone.

And also like UWP a lot, although its implementation was rather clusmy with the whole DevDiv vs WinDev issues.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#259

Post by pjmlp »

gcbw2 wrote: post #239
ryanmarsh wrote: post #147

Slightly off-topic, is anyone using Librem laptops? What has your experience been? They look nice. I've always wanted a nice secure Linux laptop to work on but I'm not eager to waste hours upon hours getting the drivers to behave (my experience with Linux on the desktop is a bit dated).

your experience is more than 20yrs out of date. And i am not even exaggerating. Drivers in linux normally gives you less problems than OSX or Windows (latest graphic cards model excluded)

My less than 5 years experience is still waiting for the beautiful AMD open source drivers to give me back the video acceleration and OpenGL Features from fxglr.

One of these days, the laptop will just get back W10 with its DirectX 11 drivers.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#260

Post by emilsedgh »

mastrsushi wrote: post #256
JohnFen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that what Canonical can or can't do has much bearing on what others can or can't do. I also don't think that the number of employees means all that much. Very often, smaller teams can be more focused and able to accomplish more than larger teams.

Yeah, let me know when less than 25 developers crank out a working mobile Linux distro that will continue to be supported in 5 years. Looking at all the failed projects in the past and all the managements complexities like software support, modern touch integration this is virtually impossible. They'll likely have a brief stint releasing some Debian ARM based mobile OS with a limited selection of software. You'll get…

The mobile phone market is already slowing down. Just like PC market did years ago.

When it gets stagnant, companies will stop innovating that hard and slowly but steadily open solutions will gain quality and feature parity.

If in 10 years I get an open phone with the features close to what I have today, I'd be pretty happy. Because I just don't think phones today are going to be that different in 10 years.

You are right that Linux Desktop barely has any market share. But it's a very viable solution and I'd personally argue that it's ahead of it's competition.

Post reply on HN