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Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

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Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#101

Post by fensgrim »

tombert wrote: post #28
bsimpson wrote: post #23

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…

IMO it comes down to marketing: can't have the kayfabe of selling something that is "not a computer"/"new kind of computer" and have it act like a "computer" too

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#102

Post by fmajid »

Funny, Google just announced the Linux Terminal now supports graphical Linux apps. It's closer to WSL2 than a regular app, implementing a fully vrtualized environment.

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-futu...

Unfortunately, even the text-mode-only Android Terminal is incredibly buggy and crashes on GrapheneOS if you have the audacity of typing Ctrl-D to close your session, requiring a full reset (and losing your data in the process). I am not brave enough to try a non-degoogled Android.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#103

Post by outofpaper »

prmoustache wrote: post #100
bsimpson wrote: post #23

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 think the true reason is that onñy a small fraction of people are interested in convergence and most people are fine, or even truly desire, to have different devices and experiences. Millions (billions?) of people are happy to leave their phone in another room when working on their computer and vice-versa. Sure you could use a do not disturb button but it would be a major PITA to have enough granularity to allow or…

Billions of users don't have a computer they work on and don't realize that this might be an option.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#104

Post by p1necone »

bsimpson wrote: post #23

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…

Imo trying to make a single UX that just changes a little bit to suit different device types is a misguided approach. Using a large screen with a mouse and keyboard is a fundamentally different thing to using a phone with a touch screen.

Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!)

There are some fuzzy boundaries - e.g. imo Gnome 3 has proven that a single experience can feel good on both a tablet and a single screen laptop with a good track pad. But I think paradoxically you need to take different approaches on different use modes if you want to provide true unity.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#105

Post by blattus »

As a consumer I'm excited by the vision these convergent solutions sell, in a futuristic "I just carry one device" way, but I think the reason they haven't kicked off is that in reality you don't just have monitors and keyboards and mice lying around wherever you go.

A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you might as well also carry the incredibly thin screen it's attached to on a laptop.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#106

Post by gleenn »

blattus wrote: post #105

As a consumer I'm excited by the vision these convergent solutions sell, in a futuristic "I just carry one device" way, but I think the reason they haven't kicked off is that in reality you don't just have monitors and keyboards and mice lying around wherever you go. A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you migh…

My friend has a foldable screen phone and carries a cute foldable keyboard with touchpad. He can plug in when available or just do light stuff at cafes with the keyboard in his bag

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#107

Post by filleokus »

WorldPeas wrote: post #37

I think at this point the niche would be well-served if one could have a competent clamp-on landscape keyboard (so close, clicks keyboard) for their phone they could use to RDP into a better machine that could run while the phone is off. Additionally nice would be if the phone had a fully functional usb-c port that could do DP and usb for docking. At that point I'd have serious thoughts about retiring my backpack or…

I've been occasionally using Microsoft's RDP Client [0] on my iPhone with external keyboard + mouse with a usb-c cable into my external monitor (with a Logitech RF dongle connected to the back of it).

It worked okay, the mouse support is somewhat of a hack, but keyboard works awesome.

The biggest annoyance was actually getting RDP to work satisfactory on a linux box with no external monitor plugged in to it (hetzner box).

I thought someone would have created an app to run browser on the external screen in full resolution, so I could skip RDP and use vscode server via the browser. But the only option seems to be infinitex2p which is not available in the EU :(.

[0]: Which in typical Microsoft idiotic fashion semi recently got renamed to "Windows app"... [1]: https://x.com/infinitex2p

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#108

Post by Eji1700 »

blattus wrote: post #105

As a consumer I'm excited by the vision these convergent solutions sell, in a futuristic "I just carry one device" way, but I think the reason they haven't kicked off is that in reality you don't just have monitors and keyboards and mice lying around wherever you go. A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you migh…

I've been diving towards this outcome for awhile now.

I have a gpd pocket 4 for my machine, but carry a chiri CE 5x3 and the MS arc mouse (and am looking for a second screen).

It's an extremely small footprint in my bag, and i'm not sure it can get much smaller. You could remove the keyboard and the mouse from the Pocket 4, but given they're on top of the hardware it wouldn't save that much space.

I can, in theory, do the same setup with my phone instead of the pocket though. I'm yet to really hook it all up and test (I expect several points of failure given past experiments), but the idea really is intriguing.

It does however require people to get more comfortable with smaller keyboards/mice (please for the love of god, if nothing else, swap left control with caps lock), or at least more portable ones.

And as for the ideal of "carry a drive, hook up to hardware as needed", that'll always run into the common issue of who is maintaining the hardware. We need cheap and easy to fix/replace hardware for that to ever really be a thing.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#109

Post by red369 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #86
gt0 wrote: post #81

For me these efforts feel like a solution to a problem very few people have. People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops. The people who want a portable computer, which needs access to a screen, keyboard, mouse and desk, just seems like a very small niche. Even when you get that computer set up, you end up with something quite slow with limited RAM and storage, unless you've bought a real flagship pho…

> People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops Especially now with laptops like the Apple Silicon macbook air, with more than enough power and battery life. I used to want a beefy phone that could run a full Linux desktop when plugged into a monitor, but that was a long time ago (ironically, Google is getting there with some of the Android 16 stuff...too bad the switching cost from Apple for me is too…

Just a rather long thought regarding the switching cost from Apple to Android - I rebooted my iPhone yesterday (not unusual for me) and my Safari was empty - no open tabs, no tab groups, no reading list, no history, nothing! I don't use iCloud for Safari so there wasn't much I could do. After trying a few suggestions I found online involving toggling iCloud on and off, I rebooted again, and got back the reading list and the tabs in tab groups, but no history or any open tabs which weren't in a group.

If my phone had died completely I'd have restored from a backup, but this isn't worth that. Realising how easily everything can vanish, and that there are almost no options to go digging around to find the underlying files made me rethink how much I trust the OS. And that made me look at exporting.

The export options from Safari are fairly complete (in the settings App, in the App section under Safari), and Apple have something similar to Google Takeout. The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.

I wouldn't normally bother, but now I feel I can't trust the OS to manage this stuff I'm motivated.

Anyway, my thought is that once you have this stuff setup robustly without completely trusting the phone or iCloud to just handle everything, that's one aspect of switching completely taken care of.

I would never normally bother, but now I feel I can't rely on the OS to handle things I'm more motivated.

I realise that it must seem like I could have solved this (and still can) by just using iCloud backup/sync. I intentionally chose not to use that for reasons that I'm not convinced really stack up, so I won't go into (vendor lock-in, flakiness, stories of vanishing data, etc.).

Anyway, just thought I'd point out that exporting might be able to take care of the data side a lot better than you might be expecting, and you might be able to just slowly transition, e.g. export all notes, import into another location, tick one off the list.

iCloud export: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306

Edit: Ah, just thinking more about it now, I realise now that while there is a Mail export option, there is nothing for messages in either Download Your Data, or direct from the phone. That's rough.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#110

Post by WorldPeas »

filleokus wrote: post #107
WorldPeas wrote: post #37

I think at this point the niche would be well-served if one could have a competent clamp-on landscape keyboard (so close, clicks keyboard) for their phone they could use to RDP into a better machine that could run while the phone is off. Additionally nice would be if the phone had a fully functional usb-c port that could do DP and usb for docking. At that point I'd have serious thoughts about retiring my backpack or…

I've been occasionally using Microsoft's RDP Client [0] on my iPhone with external keyboard + mouse with a usb-c cable into my external monitor (with a Logitech RF dongle connected to the back of it). It worked okay, the mouse support is somewhat of a hack, but keyboard works awesome. The biggest annoyance was actually getting RDP to work satisfactory on a linux box with no external monitor plugged in to it (hetzner…

I've run vscode over ssh via tailscale before and it was pretty good, I'm mostly connecting to a remote using rustdesk however, that also requires a "dummy" hdmi to operate. The only thing it needs to make it perfect would be if there were officially supported forwarded web browsing windows in vscode. I wish apple would actually let us use "our" usb-c as.. usb-c
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