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Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mlinksva 7y ago> Until now, Nexedi has been maintaining a derivative of ChromiumOS with some extra features: NayuOS. However, the gap between ChromiumOS and its proprietary counterpart ChromeOS has increased so much that we see no possibility to maintain a usable NayuOS in the long terme. In what ways has the gap between ChromiumOS and ChromeOS increased? Is that true of Chromium and Chrome as well? > Nexedi has thus decided to support the /e/ foundation and its sister corporation, with the hope that /e/ would some day become a usable OS for desktop or laptop. Good for them, I think/hope!
- zamadatix 7y agoI haven't worked with ChromeOS/ChromiumOS all that much but Chrome/Chromium aren't very different at all.
- zifnab06 7y agoI have one qualm with /e/: they use LineageOS as their base, add a few apps, and avoid mentioning this to anyone. Most of their repos aren’t special, they’re a 1:1 copy of upstream. I realize the license allows this but attribution would still be appreciated.
- smetsjp 7y agoWhat you do not get in ChromiumOS (last time I checked): - support for flash movies - support of certain video codecs - support of sound hardware of many recent Chromebook models - support of CJK input (at least in Guest Mode) - support of Android apps - support of Linux virtual machine subsystem - support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me) Lack of stable support of CJK input in guest mode (and the difficulty to find anyone capable of solving this problem or supporting us) was the biggest issue for me. Some years ago, the difference was: - support for flash movies - support of certain video codecs - support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me) which was fine to me. Note: I wrote the article on /e/ for Desktop
- smetsjp 7y agoWhat you do not get in ChromiumOS (last time I checked): - support for flash movies - support of certain video codecs - support of sound hardware of many recent Chromebook models - support of CJK input (at least in Guest Mode) - support of Android apps - support of Linux virtual machine subsystem - support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me) Lack of stable support of CJK input in guest mode (and the difficulty to find anyone capable of solving this problem or supporting us) was the biggest issue for me. Some years ago, the difference was: - support for flash movies - support of certain video codecs - support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me) which was fine to me. Note: I wrote the article on /e/ for Desktop
- jdnenej 7y agoFlash is long dead and gone. Chrome OS probably also doesnt support floppy disk's.
- mirimir 7y agoI wonder if VirtualBox would run on this. I see that some phones have 6GB RAM, and that should be enough for at least two or three VMs. And many have lots of CPu cores. But maybe I'm missing something.
- curryst 7y agoI wonder if they are thermally capable of sustaining a high CPU load. Phones strike me as fairly bursty in terms of compute usage; I'm curious if running them hot for a long period of time would damage the phone.
- th0ma5 7y agoAny way to put E on an S7 and then relock / de-root it?
- ttsda 7y agoI'm pretty sure you'll blow the Knox eFuse which can't be reset.
- mirimir 7y agoWhich is a good reason not to buy junk like that.
- zozbot234 7y agoMany phones are somewhat harder to unlock than Samsung models. The Knox efuse is an annoyance, but most of that is security theater anyway. It doesn't gate many useful features that a Lineage user would care about.
- mirimir 7y agoOK, then. It still seems offensive that there's no way to reset it.
- zozbot234 7y agoIt's a fuse. It's write-once. That's just how the device works. They probably did it like that so that attempts to tamper with the device without the owner's knowledge would always be detectable after the fact.
- mirimir 7y agoFrom what I've read, it's actually not physically a fuse. But in any case, it ought to be fixable by an authorized service technician. Indeed, it's arguably a right to repair issue.
- zozbot234 7y agoContext: /e/ is simply a fork of LineageOS, so these features should work on Lineage as well. Support for USB-connected screens, docking stations etc. is going to be highly hardware dependent, but everything else should work out of the box. AOSP derivatives are a suboptimal approach to convergence though (i.e. running the same OS on desktop/laptop and a mobile device). Ultimately, a native convergent OS such as PostmarketOS (running GNOME Phosh or KDE-Plasma Mobile) or UBPorts should work a lot more smoothly. AOSP apps should be supported via a container-based approach, as with Anbox.
- IIAOPSW 7y agoThis is exactly what I've wanted phones to become for years. It honestly amazes / pisses me off that I can't buy something like this off the shelf. Maybe I'll bite the bullet and piss away a few hours on rom flashing to get /e/ on my phone.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoThat's just wishful thinking. No manufacturers would release any devices with this OS for the following reasons: Phones are commodity devices where volumes have to be high and costs low. The big manufacturers that have the resources to make and sell something like this at scale(i.e. Samsung) want you tied in their ecosystem instead. Maybe some niche manufacturer could make a device with this via crowdfunding but the price would be too high for such a low volume as the niche of techies this would be aimed at are savvy enough to flash it themselves on an older phone for free.
- zozbot234 7y ago> No manufacturers would release any devices with this OS PinePhone has one-upped /e/ and is releasing a competitively-priced device with mainline Linux support (not just AOSP)! It absolutely is a possibility.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoHow many people do you know who have heard of or will buy a device called PinePhone? And that's the problem right there. Hell, even the people who work in cybersecurity don't give two shits about this. I'm in this gig and phones are IOS across the board.
- cyril_figgis 7y agoDo any of your cyber friends have dumbphones?
- 7y ago
- mekkkkkk 7y agoWhy has cheap KVM-consoles for phones never taken off? It seems like a great way to get a portable/inexpensive laptop experience. Judging by the relative success of Chromebooks, it would appear to be a ripe segment. And the performance of any mid to high tier phone is more than enough for the casual laptop user. As mentioned in the article: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook-turn-your-smartphone-into-a-laptop-f https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...
- zozbot234 7y agoWhat I wonder about is cheap KVM consoles for RaspPi and comparable SBC's. There used to be a few (e.g. a docking station from Motorola which just happened to be compatible with the RaspPi use case) but it's not really an established market.
- jbverschoor 7y agoI don’t want a kvm switch. I don’t want to rely on some remote server to do actual work
- mekkkkkk 7y agoWell, in this case the remote server would be your phone. The switching part would be plugging it in.
- jbverschoor 7y agooh like that. Yeah, for my phone I think the only things I'd want is actually just vscode and a linuxy environment. I was playing around with https://ish.app/ https://ish.app/ on ios.. It supports airplay. But I couldnt' get it to compile some things I'd want, and it was still very slow.
- Spooky23 7y agoIt does in some industries. VDI is a thing, and ChromeOS is a really cool way to deliver it. Chrome offers some really interesting use cases in enterprise now, and the pricing is competitive with traditional thin clients. You can still get Wyse devices for less money at scale.
- riquito 7y agoMicrosoft tried with Continuum https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/continuum https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/continuum but Windows Phones didn't take off
- kamarg 7y agoWhich is a shame. I really enjoyed my Nokia 920. It was a significantly better user experience than any Android phone I've owned. Just a shame that nobody wanted to develop apps for it.
- pjmlp 7y agoThey were slowly taking off in Europe, and were already around 10% when they decided to kill them.
- realusername 7y agoYeah that's what I don't get as well, they killed the product as soon as it started to take off.
- solarengineer 7y agoOf related interest: http://nexdock.com/ http://nexdock.com/ Connect your USB-C phones which support Desktop Mode, and the apps in them can be used in the laptop shell. They depend upon phones that short this via Android Q. They are tracking other projects such as OXI, MaruOS, and Librem to ensure compatibility.
- Tilian 7y agoCanonical tried something similar with Ubuntu Touch, which was, sadly, killed off due to low market interest. With ever more capable phone hardware I'm quite surprised we aren't seeing more progress in OS convergence.
- kovek 7y agoI’d love to see a tablet that can be connected to a monitor to go pc mode. On the tablet, I could use a tablet pen to control the cursor/textinput on the monitor.
- roywiggins 7y agoWhatever newest Samsung tablet is probably supports this through their Dex feature.
- k_sze 7y agoI think it would be interesting to get this running on DLT One (https://hackaday.io/project/164845-dlt-one-a-damn-linux-tablet https://hackaday.io/project/164845-dlt-one-a-damn-linux-tabl...) Does /e/ require a phone? Or would it work with a tablet as well?
- rbanffy 7y agoIsn't Nexedi the guys who make a really nice ERP on top of the Zope platform?
- smetsjp 7y agoYes. https://www.nexedi.com/NXD-Presentation.Status.Roadmap?portal_skin=Slide#/ https://www.nexedi.com/NXD-Presentation.Status.Roadmap?porta... Our story with /e/ is that we decided that it would make more sense to invest some cash in /e/ (we did it) than try to maintain NayuOS now that most ChromeOS users expect to run Android apps (and this part is not in ChromiumOS AFAIK). Also, we observed a growing need for some kind of "desktop OS" for industrial applications (robotics, industrial automation) that does not depend on Google APIs (factories are often in China or do not have Internet access). /e/ thus made a lot of sense. Note: I the author of the post.
- rbanffy 7y agoIt's funny. At the company I work for we have a system of record that, while built on completely different tech, reminds me of Zope a lot. I guess the problems both platforms try to solve are so similar we see convergent evolution.
- pepijndevos 7y agoI find it difficult to evaluate an Android for my phone. Currently running AOSP (actually phh-treble) rather than any fork that adds any significant features. In particular it's hard to tell if any particular fork is just a one man hobby project, a fork of a fork, or has any significant work behind it. Of course the big one is LineageOS, but they seem to make specific phone images, mostly for high-end phones, rather than generic system images for my low-end phone. The list of generic system images is extremely long and not all that helpful: https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki/Generic-System-Image-%28GSI%29-list https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki/Gen... I ended up chosing phh-treble because it doesn't add any BS, promises quick updates, and serves as a base for many other roms, lending it some reliability. It's pretty much AOSP with hardware fixes. That said, it doesn't do some pretty basic things like automatic brightness and night mode, or a PIN timeout. So maybe that's eventually drive me to try another ROM...
- csagan5 7y ago> /e/ has modified the source code of various parts of AOSP and Chromium web browser to stop informing Google (and the NSA as a consequence of CLOUD Act) of user activity. The article is incorrect also about the browser: it is simply packing a re-branded Bromite browser.
- csagan5 7y agoEdit: the article has been kindly edited, thanks to the author