71–80 of 209 posts
I’d also check out GrapheneOS once the Android 16 QPR1 beta with Desktop Mode gets merged in. Likely to be a more up-to-date experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS based on Debian. No Android dependencies and possibility of full desktop mode. How is this not a success?
You and several thousand other people see it that way, meanwhile the billions of other computer users out here don’t.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS based on Debian. No Android dependencies and possibility of full desktop mode. How is this not a success?
You and several thousand other people see it that way, meanwhile the billions of other computer users out here don’t.
If they want to have their cake and eat it too, they can either run Linux in an Android container, or Android in a Linux container.
Bill Gates spoke of this context-aware OS at a lecture in the mid-00s. He specifically called out future phones (this was pre-iPhone era) that would have location context (work/home/mobile) and load secure, sandboxed datastores and profiles depending on that context. He also spoke at length about how desktop computers would transform into accelerators, like your gaming GPU at home or your additional processors and me…
Hasnt harmed their product Microsoft Profit (TM) too much however.
One advantage of having 'everything on the phone' is that you wouldn't need a cloud provider to sync between your laptop and your phone - it's a 'stand alone' experience.
It's interesting that in the early 2010s, both halves of the ecosystem were talking about "convergence:" Ubuntu wanted to make its Linux render a single column on a handset and with floating windows on a larger screen. Motorola had a similar project based on Android. A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. Ubuntu gave up. Mobile-targeted Linux distributions aren't good (missing functionality, mobile UX, or bo…
I really wanted the Ubuntu phone to succeed. I backed the Indiegogo for their fancy phone, and when that failed I installed Ubuntu OS on a Nexus 5 to play with. I never activated any phone service on it but I think I would have enjoyed it if I had. It was kind of neat to have a smartphone that didn't hide the fact that it was a computer. Even without plugging it in to a monitor or anything, I was able to play with th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most. Yeah, apple could solve that instantly. Sadly, they decided to play a cash cow strategy of milking existing users instead for trying to grow market share. Apple is so frustrating. Amazing hardware but then they complete…
It's a product decision. Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS. Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system. Adaptive des…
Concerning Windows, you're right. Concerning GNU/Linux you aren't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085
Bill Gates spoke of this context-aware OS at a lecture in the mid-00s. He specifically called out future phones (this was pre-iPhone era) that would have location context (work/home/mobile) and load secure, sandboxed datastores and profiles depending on that context. He also spoke at length about how desktop computers would transform into accelerators, like your gaming GPU at home or your additional processors and me…
There's ideas like this every couple of years, and I love the idea, but they never seem to go anywhere. I think Nokia's Maemo/Meego was the first, and it keeps popping up, but it never seems to go anywhere. I understand this one has been dead for a couple of years now too.
Would be a good HN convention to add (dead) after a project like older posts get tagged with the year.