I carry my laptop with me all the time when I go on holiday, when I travel with my family etc. I have too many obligations to leave it behind. Many times I carry it for nothing, but sometimes it's needed. If I could have a dev environment on my phone with access to all my projects, and I could transform that phone to a full "computer", I'll be travelling about 1.1kg lighter.
Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
131–140 of 209 posts
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#132It'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 it's more than phone hardware is still really locked down/non standardized, so there aren't a lot of viable options to get alternatives on there without also being a hardware designer and having the bank to go with that. Need a big country to force a standardization on the hardware interface/bios and an opening up similar to what we have in pc components and this will get a lot more interesting. Sadly the chance of that happening is near zero and the interests of google and apple lie in more lockdown, not less.
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Concerning Windows, you're right. Concerning GNU/Linux you aren't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085
That post is 6 years old, and yet Linux still sucks by default on a touchscreen. I installed NixOS on a handheld nearly 2 years ago and tried a whole bunch of touch-oriented options (including tiny ones like Maui). The closest I got to good enough was running the mobile fork of GNOME, using someone on GitHub's custom flake to pull it in at HEAD. I'm very happy that Valve has released SteamOS for other devices so I ca…
I think the Steam Deck’s touch screen is also one of its worst features.
I will type a message or an email on a phone (Android or iOS) but I loathe even typing my username into the Steam Deck via touch.
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#134I want something like this. But realistically I’ve had Samsung Dex for years and never use it. I liked the idea of Continuum. Leave my phone in a dock and magically it shows on the monitor and I use my mouse and keyboard. Again, no real life use case.
Dex,Chrome OS, whatever distro pinephone and librem use, they all feel like I’d be having a lesser experience than using my iPhone or iPad. I don’t see this changing until Apple or Google decides to make the phones capable of handling apps in a desktop-like experience and environment.
iPadOS 26 is very close to that vision. I can’t run that on my phone, but it is almost that perfect portable ubiquitous computer!
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#135This is pretty neat. Similarly, I feel like we are really close to smartwatches being able to replace smartphones for all essential tasks. I try to rely on my apple watch with cellular as much as I can and leave my phone at home. I can't wait until agents get a bit better at navigating the web and someone makes a killer UI for the watch. I'll be able to do everything I need to do with a much more ambient device that doesn't suck attention the way a smartphone does.
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Single place for all your data, easier to manage and back up. Single device to take with you.
I'm not trying to shit on this as a neat tool, but my phone is not the single place for all my data, and I find it considerably harder to manage. If I'm bringing my phone, an external keyboard, and a portable screen (and, presumably, a mouse) with me, it's not really a "single device", it's more like 4 devices that poorly imitate a laptop and don't offer as much functionality
Plus, when far from a homebase, some people are going to bring two laptops anyway so they can have twice the reliability of your average person.
Don't ask me how I know . . .
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hav…
And to have buy in it needs to exist first :)
Like websites nowadays being usually designed for mobile and desktop devices
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You picked the exact worst example to illustrate your point. People do not pick their messaging service, it is driven by adoption of everybody else.
That's why you're downvoted.
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why you neatpick that. I feel the complete opposite. HDMI screens are everywhere. Usb-c ones less but still present. I have a screen at work, with keyboard and USB hub. Same at home. And at most of my friend's homes. I have a screen (tv) in a hotel and flats to rent. I even had one in a cabin recently (use them with tv stick for my kid's shows). I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter tha…
> I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me. It seems like this comes down to personal experience. I have literally never seen a place I could plug my phone into an HDMI display (even if I had cables for that, which I don't). As such it strikes me as very impractical, but it sounds like your experience has been drastically different so we come to different conclusions.
It's not personal experience. It's a segment of the market and also a lack of familiarity. The Macbook Air ships with only USB-C Thunderbolt and a large group of people are fine buying a dock to connect it or HDMI to thunderbolt.
While reading this article I thought it'd be interesting to read this on Android desktop mode and went looking for a cable while forgetting I could just unplug my USB-C laptop.
Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
You and several thousand other people see it that way, meanwhile the billions of other computer users out here don’t.
Those billions need to accept the facts. They're not getting a Windows phone again, and Apple won't likely cannibalize Mac demand with the iPhone. 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.
People don't want to quickly turn their phone into a desktop, they want to quickly turn their phone into a laptop. Apple's laptops are over 75% of its sales. And if you have the screen and keyboard of a laptop, why not put a CPU, battery et al. in there?