PureOS is convergent • Hacker News Board

Re: PureOS is convergent

#121

Post by cbhl » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…

That ship has already sailed.

Google redesigned all their desktop UIs to work with touchscreens in 2012, at the expense of mouse-and-keyboard users. Microsoft's Ribbon UI for Office, and Fluent UI for Windows 10 were both designed for touch first. Hell, even Ubuntu's Unity made huge compromises on Desktop in the name of convergence, even though no significant fraction of users ended up running Ubuntu on phones.

The original designer vision was for UI to adjust depending on the form factor of the user's device. What we got instead is "upscaled phone UIs everywhere", because programmers like to be DRY and reuse code. This is literally the tree swing cartoon.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#122

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

Convergence is not something of great value to me, but I don't object -- as long as mobile and desktop versions don't have to have the same user interface.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#123

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

cbhl wrote: post #121

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…

That ship has already sailed. Google redesigned all their desktop UIs to work with touchscreens in 2012, at the expense of mouse-and-keyboard users. Microsoft's Ribbon UI for Office, and Fluent UI for Windows 10 were both designed for touch first. Hell, even Ubuntu's Unity made huge compromises on Desktop in the name of convergence, even though no significant fraction of users ended up running Ubuntu on phones. The o…

"Touch first" seems to invariably mean "terrible to use on a desktop".

Re: PureOS is convergent

#124

Post by therealx » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

squarefoot wrote: post #81

tombert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the GPD Win that I bought a couple years ago, which is more or a less a Nintendo-DS-Sized computer running "real" Windows, and I love it. I can do programming on the train, even while standing up, as well as use all the tooling that I like, including Vim actually. The only limitation for me has honestly been Windows, since I'm more of a Unixey guy. Something that has always bothered me is that smartphones are…

"but I feel incredibly limited in what I can actually do with my iPhone" That's because they're intended to work as media consumption devices rather than productivity ones. If someone feels productive on a phone, he or she has very likely adapted herself to the device than the other way around. I had to struggle yesterday with my GF new phone because her lawyer sent her a paper in .doc format using Whatsapp (no kiddi…

Check out the new Planet devices.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#125

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

fwip wrote: post #33

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #20

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…

>"Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?" To be fair, I've used vim on my phone over SSH and it was actually a pretty good experience. Editing is a bit more deliberate of an affair than with a hardware keyboard, but still easier than trying to visually select text on the touchscreen, and no complex chorded keybindings to try to enter.

I use it on my phone as well, but with a physical keyboard.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#126

Post by ghostwreck » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

amdelamar wrote: post #120

Its neat, but doesn't make sense for a majority of apps/programs. Why would I run GIMP/Photoshop or any Graphics-heavy program on my phone? Why run any GPS-enabled app on my Desktop?

Maybe not phone yet, but tablets (running the same OS) are getting extremely powerful and the apps are coming. [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-photoshop...

Re: PureOS is convergent

#127

Post by peller » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #123

cbhl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship has already sailed. Google redesigned all their desktop UIs to work with touchscreens in 2012, at the expense of mouse-and-keyboard users. Microsoft's Ribbon UI for Office, and Fluent UI for Windows 10 were both designed for touch first. Hell, even Ubuntu's Unity made huge compromises on Desktop in the name of convergence, even though no significant fraction of users ended up running Ubuntu on phones. The o…

"Touch first" seems to invariably mean "terrible to use on a desktop".

The design constraints of the "input devices" are invariably different. The keyboard and mouse are "precise", while fingers are not. This manifests itself exactly like you see it :(

Re: PureOS is convergent

#128

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

orblivion wrote: post #114

rossdavidh wrote: post #59

This reminds me of the idea of "wouldn't it be great if we could use the same programming language for frontend, backend, and database queries". Well, maybe, but in practice not really. They are doing different kinds of things, you will have to use them differently, it doesn't really help all that much to have the same language. It SOUNDS like this would be really helpful, until you get it, and then discover that it…

Just for myself, I will say that I know how to do some amount of management on Linux. That the same sort of thing is available on the phone, and that I could use that knowledge out of the box, is exciting to me. For example: SSH clients and servers. I've tried playing with various apps from F-Droid to make it happen, with varying success. If I have just Linux, I know what should work. Another one is backups. I have a…

I'm totally with you here.

Last year, I realized that the direction that smartphones have taken is not a direction that is good and useful for me, so I decided that I'd better design and build my own smartphone before I need to replace the one I have. I have it breadboarded up and fundamentally working. It should be completed this year.

One of my very first decisions was that the phone was going to run ordinary Linux, for all of the reasons you cite. I'm VERY excited about being able to ditch Android!

Re: PureOS is convergent

#129

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #69

_bxg1 wrote: post #29

I've become unenthused about this software "dream". Having spent years designing and building UIs on the web, what I've learned is that: 1) Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; anything where the amount of stuff you need to see on screen at once doesn't need to be especially large. But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive an…

> Convergence works great for "casual" apps - messaging, stores, content feeds, etc.; But the web already does a great job of making this type of application both responsive and cross-platform. I'd argue this is where Convergence actually works best. (Especially the way Windows does it, anyway). For most people, "casual" apps are 95% of what they need a computer for. And the web does a good job, but not a great job,…

> the web does a good job, but not a great job, at making these apps responsive and cross-platform

I would say the web does an adequate job, not a good job, at this.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#130

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

0815test wrote: post #41

wjoe wrote: post #27

That's cool, and it's good to see work going on in more fundamental building blocks of Linux like Gnome to support mobile and reactive UIs. I always felt like this was the biggest blocker to using a Linux system on handheld devices - having a good ecosystem of open source projects that work for that, and having the ability to pick your own desktop environment and components rather than having to have an "all in one"…

> ...I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there. PureOS is just Debian with a few tweaks. This work is being done as part of the GNOME mainline branch, so any GNOME user is going to benefit from it down the road. And as "alternative" Linux desktops (MATE, Xfce, LXDE) transition to GTK3+, users of these environments will likely be able to make use of it, as wel…

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