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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

#121

Post by thewebguyd »

red369 wrote: post #109
thewebguyd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.

With iOS 26 you can now export Apple notes to markdown as well, which I've done recently on the beta and put them in my Obsidian folder.

The switching cost for me is more so the stupid little conveniences I'm not quite willing to give up yet. I do regularly take advantage of clipboard sharing, universal control, AirPods device switching, auto-fill from messages & mail for TOTP (which works in Chrome now on macOS 26), and my Apple Watch has been hard to replace last time I tried (was with a pixel watch 2, maybe the 4 will be good enough this time).

I can recreate some of that with KDE Connect & Linux, but last time I tried it wasn't nearly as seamless.

Photos are the most important to me, and I already have those regularly backed up locally.

I suspect I'll switch eventually, I just have to mourn the loss of the little things.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#122

Post by cubefox »

gleenn wrote: post #106
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

He could instead use a normal phone, but while plugging in display ("AR") glasses from Xreal, which act like an external monitor. He might also want a foldable mouse in addition to his foldable keyboard.

And the phone should be a Samsung, which has DeX (an Android desktop mode). The official Android desktop mode isn't released yet.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#123

Post by p1necone »

LtWorf wrote: post #112
p1necone wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 applicati…

Try the KDE applications designed for this, like kasts, alligator, qrca and see for yourself. I don't think it can necessarily work for any kind of application, but for some simpler ones I think it's completely fine.

> designed for this

This is kind of my point - I'm not saying you can't have applications that are usable across multiple UX paradigms, and I'm also not saying you can't write a UX library that automatically translates at least simple applications with little manual effort.

I'm just saying this requires active buy in from application developers into the ecosystem - you can't just run everything on all devices and have it magically work (with usability comparable to current state of the art in single device applications).

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#124

Post by altairprime »

fsflover wrote: post #53
altairprime wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere I might hook up my phone to a monitor there is already either a preexisting computer hooked up, my laptop with its ultra flat keyboard trackpad combo to hook up, and/or lacking the appropriate back support and table height for me for me to ergonomically use a keyboard and mouse there. This might make sense for someone who travels a lot and wants to work in odd places but the assumption that people can Find…

> This product would have been wildly successful if they just released it as a laptop case for a phone You mean, this? https://nexdock.com/

Yep. Lot more market for that. Dunno how much, though! Does it have a battery?

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#125

Post by dbeley »

> Maru is built on the latest Android Oreo.

Yeah this is abandonware, idk why it's being posted and upvoted now.

Something similar to real mobile/desktop convergence is still technically possible today with Phosh on PostMarketOS (or Mobian, Mobile NixOS or Arch ARM) and a compatible device with USB-C video out (like the PinePhone).

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#126

Post by cadamsdotcom »

We’re so close to laptop-free travel!

Imagine running linux in UTM (the fast jit version, not the nerfed appstore version) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and VR sunglasses (eg. xreal make good ones that plug in to usb-c), on your iPhone.

Or carry a phone that can run linux on bare metal - or can run Wayland in Android Terminal, a new feature in Android 16.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#127

Post by asveikau »

RajT88 wrote: post #120
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…

The people I knew with a Windows phone said it worked awesome for them, the desktop mode. Samsung DeX is not bad! It is not as good as a real desktop, but it will do in a pinch.

I kind of doubt it did work well for them. Microsoft was having an identity crisis at that time where they didn't yet realize nobody wanted their tablet UI on desktop.

If they allowed straight Win32 ports on ARM it could have been interesting. Or if they did it now, where I think x86 emulation on arm is working well these days.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#128

Post by ryukafalz »

dcminter wrote: post #44
doebler wrote: post #3

> Simply plug your phone into an HDMI screen, connect up a keyboard and mouse, and you’ve got a lightweight desktop experience you can take anywhere. No, I can't take it anywhere, because few places I go to have a HDMI screen and keyboard ready for me. And to the ones they do, I carry my laptop.

The use case for me is mostly hotel stays. When travelling for fun I don't particularly want the weight (and risk) of packing my laptop, but I would like to be able to play movies and music on the hotel TV. With a cheap light keyboard I could also do email and similar light admin things with the benefit of the bigger screen. Until recently I was also travelling frequently for work with a heavy MacBook running a varie…

Yeah, agreed that that's a nice use case.

And given a sufficiently flexible phone, it'd be nice to have a mode selector pop up when you plug into a new display. Pick between screen mirroring, desktop mode, and a media center, and optionally remember the choice for next time.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#129

Post by const_cast »

bboygravity wrote: post #88
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…

Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for. Indeed I don't think it's reasonable to then also make it work on some completely different phone hardware that has a operational life of like 2 years + full of closed source hardware and drivers. If you want users, the thing has to be usable. For the thing to be usable it needs software with perfect hardware support. Google, Android vendors an…

Linux runs on everything that upstreamed it's drivers, and then almost everything that didn't. By just reverse engineering and guessing.

And, a lot of this firmware is extremely buggy too. Have you see ACPI tables in laptops? But, they work under Linux. They shouldn't, but they do.

What doesn't work is the intersection of closed-source firmware and extremely eccentric or evil firmware. I think a lot of Android parts manufactures don't want to upstream their stuff because it's extremely bad and probably filled to the brim to vulnerabilities.

But, Intel upstreams everything, and so does AMD - and it's only improved their firmware quality.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#130

Post by const_cast »

happyopossum wrote: post #68
fsflover wrote: post #45

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.

Popularity =/= quality.

That being said, obviously the Librem phone is missing functionality.

Most computer users are goo goo ga ga level users. Most people in the US use iMessage, for example.

It's not the best messenger, not even close. It's not the most ubiquitous either - doesn't even break top 5 globally. Doesn't have the most features. Not the fastest. Not the most secure. Not the easiest to use.

They just use it because it's already installed and right there. That is how deep their understanding and comprehension can go.

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