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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

#171

Post by fsflover »

meta_ai_x wrote: post #156
const_cast wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For Operating Systems and Ecosystems, Popularity == Quality. The more popular a software is, the more edge cases it encounters and solves issues. More people will write software, plugins, tools for it.

Are you saying that Windows is the most high-quality operating system in the world? This is not even funny. Did you hear about the concepts of walled garden and network effect?

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#172

Post by fsflover »

altairprime wrote: post #124
fsflover wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#173

Post by fsflover »

philistine wrote: post #140
bigyabai wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think you are missing the point. People don't want to turn anything into anything. They want a minimal number of devices covering all their needs.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#174

Post by ffsm8 »

andybak wrote: post #118
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…

I sometimes use a VR headset instead of a monitor but I do end up using a laptop because of the keyboard and touchpad. I can conceive of using maybe a phone, an ultra light headset and a compact keyboard and TouchPad combined? I'm usually connecting to a real computer over remote desktop however!

My workplace forces me to use a virtual windows VM atm, which I'm usually connecting from an MacBook Pro.

I recently wanted to try using such an XR glasses (viture) and just use a Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad and connect from my phone. It would make teethering unnecessary as an additional plus.

While it worked, it was super janky because mobile devices are still not optimized for desktop use... The VM screen was effectively limited by the phone resolution which was mirrored by the glasses. Couldn't get it to work without the mirroring...

If it was less janky I would definitely use that for some business trips. Currently? Nope.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#175

Post by soco »

fsflover wrote: post #167
ruszki wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux didn’t work reliably on my laptops in the past 10 years. And I mean basic things, like booting up, or showing a desktop without serious glitches. And all the time problems were non deterministic, and printing just generic unhelpful “something is wrong” errors, if there were any. I try it every year, whether the situation is better, and in the past 25 years, the answer is that barely. Yes, you can have terminal…

> Linux didn’t work reliably on my laptops in the past 10 years. And I mean basic things, like booting up, or showing a desktop Which laptops? Do they all have Nvidia graphics? This is really vague. Your comment is not helpful, and it just looks like usual Linux bashing from people who don't know what they're talking about.

FWIW I have Mint on two grandparents laptops and I agree with the parent comment. I gave up doing any updates on them, I just wipe off everything once a year and reinstall from scratch. Even though it's only browser and music player and nobody touches the settings (unless there was a misclick) yet still last time the desktop came to show through the application windows so I had to wipe it again and lo it worked.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#176

Post by fsflover »

soco wrote: post #175
fsflover wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux didn’t work reliably on my laptops in the past 10 years. And I mean basic things, like booting up, or showing a desktop Which laptops? Do they all have Nvidia graphics? This is really vague. Your comment is not helpful, and it just looks like usual Linux bashing from people who don't know what they're talking about.

FWIW I have Mint on two grandparents laptops and I agree with the parent comment. I gave up doing any updates on them, I just wipe off everything once a year and reinstall from scratch. Even though it's only browser and music player and nobody touches the settings (unless there was a misclick) yet still last time the desktop came to show through the application windows so I had to wipe it again and lo it worked.

1. You didn't name the laptops just like the OP.

2. It seems you're using hardware designed for Windows. It's like trying to install Windows on a Macbook: You're on your own here. Don't blame Microsoft or Apple for your issues.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#177

Post by LtWorf »

axelthegerman wrote: post #137
p1necone wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

kirigami

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#178

Post by fsflover »

bee_rider wrote: post #41
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…

You can get like 65% of the way there by just using i3wm with an onscreen keyboard and really big window borders (so you have somewhere to poke to change windows). But you have to contend with the fact that it is a basically fine touch window manager showing you… applications that were designed without touch in mind at all.

You don't have to suffer: Phosh and convergent apps exist.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#179

Post by msgodel »

const_cast wrote: post #130
happyopossum wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

There are a lot of people who are not "goo goo ga ga" level users and really need a device.

I've switched to UMPCs because the constant lies and intentional breakage from smartphone vendors drove me up the wall.

Re: Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

#180

Post by bboygravity »

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.

> I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.

I literally looked at it last week. Spent multiple days on it. Tried Mint and Zorin (full install, not just live).

This is on a brand new Lenovo p16s Gen 4 with AMD (no nvidia). That laptop didn't even exist before this year.

List of problems I encountered:

-- Multi touch not working (fixed by switching from Mint to Zorin, upgrading mainline kernel in Mint did not help).

-- External monitor not working (had to install display link drivers by going into terminal and running scripts and all of that other classic Linux usability) .

-- Hardware video acceleration not working (scrolling super slow, maps super slow, entire system super slow). Had to install AMD display drivers for that separately. Upgrading mainline kernel worked for Mint, but not for Zorin. Installing AMD drivers in Zorin involved downloading the drivers, !editting an install script that is part of the drivers! and then having an LLM guide me through the rest of the extremely elaborate process of installing the driver.

-- And to top it off, my classic pet peeve: there's no way to configure something as basic as scroll-lines (mouse scrollwheel speed) through a GUI in ANY of the distros. It involves installing imwheel, !writing a script!, setting the script to run on boot and then rebooting (and/or restarting the script).

So no. There's definitely no "it just works". Not even on a laptop that is supposed to have official HW vendor support for Ubuntu.

Also, I only ran it for like a day. I'm sure that I'll run into tons of other issues if I use it a bit longer.

Good for you and lucky you that you got it to work. But for most of us Linux is "nice try, but it's not finished yet" .

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