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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

#141

Post by RajT88 »

asveikau wrote: post #127
RajT88 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In fairness, most people I knew with Windows phones worked for MSFT.

But a few (the ones I talked to the most) were just people interested in the Windows ecosystem. One was running Windows Home Server. Those folks all swore that everything was great (except the app ecosystem). I can only go by what I was told.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#142

Post by jaimex2 »

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…

Nokia nailed this 2005 with Maemo actually but didn't have the grit to see it through.

Understandable as the risk of going all in on would have been a hard sell to the board vs a slow cosy death they couldn't see coming.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#143

Post by bane »

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…

DeX is perfect for certain business settings (mostly sales, but many management functions also) where you home-base out of a desk, then hit the road during the day.

When you home-base, you're producing more in terms of text, longer form emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. So having a keyboard+monitor+mouse is important.

When you are on the road, you really just need to make calls, text, get driving directions, send short emails, etc. Occasionally make a presentation, which is doable off of the phone without any external devices.

I've done this workflow in short spurts and it's frankly really fantastic, modern productivity tools usually have an Android app version that's fine, or a web-app version that's also fine. I was often also making calls from the same phone that was driving my KVM.

Pretty much the only thing preventing me doing it permanently is multi-monitor support at "homebase", and sometimes being able to print sanely on a corporate printer setup.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#144

Post by fuzzfactor »

eldaisfish wrote: post #64
szszrk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I'm just saying that "there are no HDMI devices near me" is weird and hard to achieve. To use my phone as a desktop all I need is the phone itself. USB cable I most often already have to charge it. Phone works as a keyboard and mouse and I have large screen to browse web, play, watch videos. ZERO new devices, only things I already carry and a screen that is already there.

i disagree entirely. Think about a poor person. Are they better served by a laptop or your proposed solution of four different devices? Even in my own daily life, i struggle to find places where your solution is practical.

People probably don't think about a poor person enough or they would come up with more solutions that benefit everybody.

Some only conceptualize scenarios that include those that are quite wealthy, whether intentional or not.

Even if you are not poor, one of the most respectable things you can do is to re-use and recycle rather than consume new.

For minimal cash outlay, surplus PC's can easily be found at zero cost which is naturally an unmatched bargain, compared to used monitors even as low as $10 each, unless you can get the monitors free also, but that's much more uncommon. Surplus keyboards are stacked up everywhere and being thrown away all the time too.

So it's really the monitors (and physical desk space) that's the limiting factor for aspiring low-cost operators. By a long shot.

It's been that way for years so by now with every multi-monitor workspace I have a PC for each monitor, even if I only run one of the PC's at a time usually. Each monitor also has at least two separate inputs which can be chosen from at any time and all the wiring is in place whether it is being actively used or not.

So between my office or home or an employment site a laptop used to be carried with me but now mainly collects dust except for "outreach" or distant travel these days. Laptop chargers still in each location so I didn't have to carry that as often.

Now it's usually only a miniPC (or sometimes two) that I carry for "full-strength" mobile deployment between locations. Chose miniPC's that run on the laptop chargers that were already at each desk. Even more convenient to carry than laptops.

Soon for the PC's that I have appropriately configured at each familiar location, I will only need to be carrying a bootable USB stick instead of either a miniPC or laptop :)

Might as well use the PC's that are already there too, along with the full-size monitors and keyboards ;)

Environment on a stick.

Not much different than the way you could put Windows XP on a bootable FAT32 Memorystick, then put the Memorystick into the Sony phone to utilize its remaining storage space the regular way. The cellphone folders don't interfere with the Windows folders. Then plug in the USB cord from the phone to a PC, boot the PC to USB and the phone acts like a bootable USB stick and your C: drive is the Windows volume on the phone's internal Memorystick.

This still works with Android and SD cards too.

It's good to have but it just ties up the phone and a separate USB stick is the real functional model.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#145

Post by msgodel »

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…

I ran Ubuntu Touch briefly on a Nexus 5 as well. IIRC the two issues I had were:

1) calls and MMS not working well.

2) Instead of a normal GNU/Linux OS Ubuntu Touch tried really hard to have an Android style immutable OS. Kind of the worst of both worlds since you have a difficult to work with OS but without the app ecosystem of Android that some people believe makes it worth using.

After that I kind of just gave up on the idea that I owned my phone at all and a few years later I gave up carrying smartphones entirely.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#146

Post by hx8 »

fensgrim wrote: post #101
tombert wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Marketing played a role yes, but plenty of other phone operating systems failed that had much stronger marketing then Ubuntu ever would have.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#147

Post by pjmlp »

vimredo wrote: post #115
bboygravity wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For Linux to gain 5% marketshare, I really doubt it "barely works" on a "limited set of hardware that it was designed for". It can run headless on basically anything better than a Pentium, and it mostly just works on average hardware (except fingerprint sensors and Nvidia). I've had no problem with Linux on all my hardware, and I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.

Besides working with it on servers on regular basis, and having had enough with it on desktops and laptops since 1995, last year I managed to get a NUC, where Ubuntu, Red-Hat and SuSE weren't able to boot from the internal SSD or get along with UEFI, only booting from the external drive worked.

So yeah no problem, and yes I know should have gone to the usual forums asking everyone and their dog if someone before me had ever succeeded installing Linux on this brick.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#148

Post by pjmlp »

const_cast wrote: post #129
bboygravity wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pity that AMD doesn't upstream everything they do with ROCm for everyone.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#149

Post by Joeri »

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 tried out that windows phone continuum feature back in the day to try and get actual work done. Here's what I remember of it.

You could connect it wirelessly to your windows laptop and it would take over screen, keyboard and mouse from the laptop. The actual connecting part worked smoothly, but it could only stream one relatively low res screen and even then over a wireless connection it felt sluggish. I couldn't use the laptop while the phone was connected, and this was its biggest handicap because I would have preferred the phone's desktop in a window similar to running a virtualized OS, with easy drag-and-drop and copy-paste.

The experience was that you had the same phone apps with the same feature set as on the phone, but they transformed into desktop layouts. For the first party apps this worked fine, but many of the third party apps didn't work at all or didn't work well, so I ended up largely being stuck with the first party apps, mostly the mobile versions of Outlook and Edge, and the file explorer. At the time these were seriously limited compared to the desktop counterparts. In that version of Edge I couldn't use many of the web apps that I tried. The outlook version was very basic, but I still managed to get some of my email done.

The apps only appeared fullscreen. I get why they did it on the weak phone hardware of the time, but this was very limiting. You could alt-tab however, and there was the windows taskbar. The start menu was the phone's home screen, so you would see the exact same tile layout as you saw on the phone, and clicking a tile would open the app. I really liked this solution because it gave a lot of flexibility while being instantly familiar.

Bottom line it wasn't really suited at being a one stop computing experience, but it was a good way to do the things you would otherwise do on the phone on a larger canvas. It was good for what it was, but it was not in any way a laptop replacement. What really killed it as a useful feature for me was what ultimately killed windows phone: the lack of a decent app catalog. I still think in its time windows phone was the best mobile OS, but the app gap meant that it never stood a chance.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#150

Post by Apocryphon »

dbeley wrote: post #125

> 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).

There's something charming about the slickness and naviete of this abandonware site.
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