5 ms·

This reminds me (in a good way) of the GPD Win computers. Obviously smartphones are cool, I have one, I like it, but it annoys me that in some senses they're s

This reminds me (in a good way) of the GPD Win computers. Obviously smartphones are cool, I have one, I like it, but it annoys me that in some senses they're still not as good as a Windows 98 laptop from 24 years ago. Their version of MS Office isn't as intuitive, there's not the same level of programming language/compiler support, on iOS you're restricted to the App Store, etc. The GPD Win was the first time I saw a good attempt at a "real" computer that fits in your pocket, and I have one and love it dearly for on-the-train coding, but sadly the pricepoint is a bit high for most people. If I can get something that feels like a real computer for less than $50, I'll be the first in line to buy it.

emteycz 5y ago
A rooted Android smartphone with Nix is a full Linux computer. I have Node.js, VSCode, C/C++, etc - all while keeping access to all phone capabilities. I haven't tried yet but there shouldn't be any problem with running X server and a full DE (I access the VSCode through Android browser now).
- tombert 5y ago
  Interesting. I don't use Android anymore but I have like four old phones lying around that I could easily use to play with. I wonder if this has better battery life than the GPD Win, and it would be a free experiment for me.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Well my phone (Samsung S9+) can do like 12 hours of Node.js+VSCode coding while using BT keyboard and mouse. Not bad IMHO. And the USB-C port of this phone can be used with a usual dock to connect it to a screen and wired peripherals.
    - tombert 5y ago
      Do you have a keyboard case that lets you just type with your thumbs?
- Jenda_ 5y ago
  > A rooted Android smartphone with Nix is a full Linux computer. I'm not sure. You still have the "Android ecosystem" interfering with common computer access that I'm using on normal Linux: - There is no standard V4L2/camera access, only their camera library. I wanted to take photos into tmpfs (to be encrypted asymetrically with GPG and saved to the storage/sent over the network), but the thing still saved them "under the mountpoint" where tmpfs was mounted. There is no v4l2loopback - for example I needed to scan a QR code from a webpage (web.whatsapp.com) and instead of using v4l2loopback like on normal Linux, I had to literally get a physical camera to point at the screen (so something impossible to do remotely). - There is no Alsa/PulseAudio. I have run alsamixer and the hardware froze when manipulating certain controls (on both Samsum Galaxy Ch@at with stock ROM and Nexus 4 with LineageOS). You cannot trivially add audio output to your scripts with "foo | aplay". Call recording is a mess (normally you would just hook the "monitor" output in pulseaudio). It's much more difficult to implement simple stuff like "when I'm home and it's dark, enter silent mode" - normally I'd just do iwlist scan to check if I'm on the home wifi network, capture a v4l2 frame to check if it's black, and mute the ringing app in pulseaudio. - The lockscreen is not PAM. You cannot easily add a module (it's like 3 lines of shell using pam_exec on normal Linux) that will poweroff the device after N failed password attempts/entering a special password. If you want to unlock the screen remotely, you literally need to fake the input (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23529460/is-there-a-way-to-unlock-android-phone-via-adb-if-i-know-the-pattern https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23529460/is-there-a-way-...). All the we-are-reinventing-PAM is littered with WTFs https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28689/install-ca-without-having-to-activate-screen-lock https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28689/install-ca... - The storage encryption is something custom, not a standard LUKS/cryptsetup. It was not possible to set different password for a lockscreen vs. the storage encryption, except by a special command-line API. There were several versions of such APIs, if you have used the wrong one, it silently set the wrong key and it was impossible to unlock. Recovery was not possible even when I had the master AES key, as it's not standard LUKS, so you cannot recover with cryptsetup --master-key-file or header backup. - The way the storage is implemented, full system backup, or configuration backup and versioning is terrible. I simply user "rsync /" on my normal Linux systems. - You need to run an X-server as an app, so there is no xmodmap to easily change the keyboard layout etc. There was no video player that could do reasonable speed scaling without pitch shifting, and running it from a chrooted system on the X-server app is terrible performance-wise. (I have now learned that there is a native MPV port. Hopefully it's better than the VLC port, and hopefully things like socket control work...) - There is no VNC server (like x11vnc) except for some paid apps. You can use scrcpy, which always streams the entire screen (VNC transfers only changed rectangles). And the list goes on and on (note that some of these are a few years old, I'm not using Android since then as I have evaluated this to be unusable. Maybe the situation has changed.)
ansible 5y ago
I've tried to do work on various pocket-sized computers over the years (HP LX100 palmtop, Motorola Q, HTC G1, Samsung Sidekick 4G) and various netbooks and such. The most productive device I've had is an Acer Chromebook. For me it is the typing speed, and having a nearly full-sized keyboard makes a huge difference. Adding an SSH client (though you can instead install the Linux subsystem) allows me to access my remote servers where I do development. While thin and light, the Chromebook doesn't fit in a pocket. But it is not as if I'm randomly hanging out in coffee shops these days trying to do work.
- tombert 5y ago
  I am on the train a lot (probably too often considering COVID), and often am forced to stand up, basically eliminating any laptop that requires a lap. The GPD Win has been great because I can hold it and type with it with my thumbs, not wholly dissimilar to a smartphone, but I have full Windows 10 running on there. It's definitely not for everyone, but for me it's been a lot of fun to hack on Pico-8 during a two hour train delay two years ago.
  - ansible 5y ago
    Ah, yes. If you're standing, then something much more compact makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't mind seeing something with the same form factor as the GPD Win3, but using a relatively low-power processor for better battery life. I suppose that wouldn't drop down the price enough to make it desirable to most of the target market though.
    - argvargc 5y ago
      As I understand it, battery performance can be somewhat configurable on these, eg by adjusting BIOS settings for thermal controls to keep the CPU throttled. If you don't mind the lack of gaming controls, they have some Pentium N6000-based models. The P2 Max (2022) with this claims 8 hours continuous 1080p playback. Still expensive though - would be great to see a more terminal-focused version with a lower power CPU and screen for a few hundred, and presumably a battery life measured in days.
ActorNightly 5y ago
I wish netbooks were still around with modern hardware. In college, I replaced a powerful laptop with a desktop in my dorm+netbook, and just did remote desktop on the on-campus internet (luckily all the classrooms were still wired for ethernet).
- nfriedly 5y ago
  There are options out there. GPD is still making new devices - you can get something from them with an i7 and 16GB of RAM that will fit into a large pocket.
  - ActorNightly 5y ago
    Id rather have a little large size with a palm rest, and a little more power.
- kaetemi 5y ago
  Similar setup, but with one of those harder-to-find Vaio netbooks with an AMD APU. No need for remote desktop. Flawless performance in 3D and CAD software on the netbook directly.

emteycz 5y ago

A rooted Android smartphone with Nix is a full Linux computer. I have Node.js, VSCode, C/C++, etc - all while keeping access to all phone capabilities. I haven't tried yet but there shouldn't be any problem with running X server and a full DE (I access the VSCode through Android browser now).

tombert 5y ago
Interesting. I don't use Android anymore but I have like four old phones lying around that I could easily use to play with. I wonder if this has better battery life than the GPD Win, and it would be a free experiment for me.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Well my phone (Samsung S9+) can do like 12 hours of Node.js+VSCode coding while using BT keyboard and mouse. Not bad IMHO. And the USB-C port of this phone can be used with a usual dock to connect it to a screen and wired peripherals.
  - tombert 5y ago
    Do you have a keyboard case that lets you just type with your thumbs?
Jenda_ 5y ago
> A rooted Android smartphone with Nix is a full Linux computer. I'm not sure. You still have the "Android ecosystem" interfering with common computer access that I'm using on normal Linux: - There is no standard V4L2/camera access, only their camera library. I wanted to take photos into tmpfs (to be encrypted asymetrically with GPG and saved to the storage/sent over the network), but the thing still saved them "under the mountpoint" where tmpfs was mounted. There is no v4l2loopback - for example I needed to scan a QR code from a webpage (web.whatsapp.com) and instead of using v4l2loopback like on normal Linux, I had to literally get a physical camera to point at the screen (so something impossible to do remotely). - There is no Alsa/PulseAudio. I have run alsamixer and the hardware froze when manipulating certain controls (on both Samsum Galaxy Ch@at with stock ROM and Nexus 4 with LineageOS). You cannot trivially add audio output to your scripts with "foo | aplay". Call recording is a mess (normally you would just hook the "monitor" output in pulseaudio). It's much more difficult to implement simple stuff like "when I'm home and it's dark, enter silent mode" - normally I'd just do iwlist scan to check if I'm on the home wifi network, capture a v4l2 frame to check if it's black, and mute the ringing app in pulseaudio. - The lockscreen is not PAM. You cannot easily add a module (it's like 3 lines of shell using pam_exec on normal Linux) that will poweroff the device after N failed password attempts/entering a special password. If you want to unlock the screen remotely, you literally need to fake the input (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23529460/is-there-a-way-to-unlock-android-phone-via-adb-if-i-know-the-pattern https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23529460/is-there-a-way-...). All the we-are-reinventing-PAM is littered with WTFs https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28689/install-ca-without-having-to-activate-screen-lock https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28689/install-ca... - The storage encryption is something custom, not a standard LUKS/cryptsetup. It was not possible to set different password for a lockscreen vs. the storage encryption, except by a special command-line API. There were several versions of such APIs, if you have used the wrong one, it silently set the wrong key and it was impossible to unlock. Recovery was not possible even when I had the master AES key, as it's not standard LUKS, so you cannot recover with cryptsetup --master-key-file or header backup. - The way the storage is implemented, full system backup, or configuration backup and versioning is terrible. I simply user "rsync /" on my normal Linux systems. - You need to run an X-server as an app, so there is no xmodmap to easily change the keyboard layout etc. There was no video player that could do reasonable speed scaling without pitch shifting, and running it from a chrooted system on the X-server app is terrible performance-wise. (I have now learned that there is a native MPV port. Hopefully it's better than the VLC port, and hopefully things like socket control work...) - There is no VNC server (like x11vnc) except for some paid apps. You can use scrcpy, which always streams the entire screen (VNC transfers only changed rectangles). And the list goes on and on (note that some of these are a few years old, I'm not using Android since then as I have evaluated this to be unusable. Maybe the situation has changed.)

ansible 5y ago

I've tried to do work on various pocket-sized computers over the years (HP LX100 palmtop, Motorola Q, HTC G1, Samsung Sidekick 4G) and various netbooks and such. The most productive device I've had is an Acer Chromebook. For me it is the typing speed, and having a nearly full-sized keyboard makes a huge difference. Adding an SSH client (though you can instead install the Linux subsystem) allows me to access my remote servers where I do development. While thin and light, the Chromebook doesn't fit in a pocket. But it is not as if I'm randomly hanging out in coffee shops these days trying to do work.

tombert 5y ago
I am on the train a lot (probably too often considering COVID), and often am forced to stand up, basically eliminating any laptop that requires a lap. The GPD Win has been great because I can hold it and type with it with my thumbs, not wholly dissimilar to a smartphone, but I have full Windows 10 running on there. It's definitely not for everyone, but for me it's been a lot of fun to hack on Pico-8 during a two hour train delay two years ago.
- ansible 5y ago
  Ah, yes. If you're standing, then something much more compact makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't mind seeing something with the same form factor as the GPD Win3, but using a relatively low-power processor for better battery life. I suppose that wouldn't drop down the price enough to make it desirable to most of the target market though.
  - argvargc 5y ago
    As I understand it, battery performance can be somewhat configurable on these, eg by adjusting BIOS settings for thermal controls to keep the CPU throttled. If you don't mind the lack of gaming controls, they have some Pentium N6000-based models. The P2 Max (2022) with this claims 8 hours continuous 1080p playback. Still expensive though - would be great to see a more terminal-focused version with a lower power CPU and screen for a few hundred, and presumably a battery life measured in days.

ActorNightly 5y ago

I wish netbooks were still around with modern hardware. In college, I replaced a powerful laptop with a desktop in my dorm+netbook, and just did remote desktop on the on-campus internet (luckily all the classrooms were still wired for ethernet).

nfriedly 5y ago
There are options out there. GPD is still making new devices - you can get something from them with an i7 and 16GB of RAM that will fit into a large pocket.
- ActorNightly 5y ago
  Id rather have a little large size with a palm rest, and a little more power.
kaetemi 5y ago
Similar setup, but with one of those harder-to-find Vaio netbooks with an AMD APU. No need for remote desktop. Flawless performance in 3D and CAD software on the netbook directly.