14 ms·

There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "de

by ases 3y ago

There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. I believe Mozilla tried to invest in this pretty heavily. But it went nowhere. I suppose the technical challenges of the time were too great, and the mobile devices that won the space were locked down like the iPhone, where it was better to have the ecosystem that let you sync your mobile device to something more powerful if you really wanted. But given the power inside mobile devices these days, Apple silicon especially, I think it is sad that this vision never really came to fruitition. It seems like the perfect sort of device for most modern users. Something that is open and unlocked, and you can plug it into bigger things to solve the problems many other commentors are talking about around difficulty programming on small screens, etc. But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.

oh_sigh 3y ago
Perhaps it will now that third party app stores will be force onto apple. Granted, you still won't be able to jailbreak your iphone by just typing in the root password, but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024.
- gumby 3y ago
  > ...but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024. If you live in the EU. I look forward to Emacs on the ipad.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    There's already a ymacs port in the App store.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Compilers and interpreters have been allowed for a while now (with some caveats). Pythonista is an iOS Python IDE that lets you write apps on your iPhone.
xbonez 3y ago
Samsung Dex [0] is bringing that vision back, maybe? [0] https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/ https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/
- RajT88 3y ago
  Can confirm. I recently demoted my old Samsung S7 to be Wifi-only and work stuff-only. MFA, mobile email when I'm not at my desk, etc. When I travel for personal stuff, I now just take my personal laptop and my phone. If I need to get into my work stuff, I'm pretty damn effective with all the cloud tooling I can get into from the browser under Dex. Screen real estate is the biggest issue which Dex handily solves, with a close second being things like MS Teams being a little clunky in Dex mode (not a dealbreaker). It's all more than sufficient when I get pinged on personal travel, since I'm not likely to need to be at 110% like I am if I'm working at 2pm on a Tuesday. Why would I want to do this? Because every time I take time off, something goes off and nobody knows what to do about it, so I get pinged.
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    Why do you need DeX, if you bring your laptop.
    - RajT88 3y ago
      Personal laptop is much thinner and lighter, and I'm less concerned with losing it on travel compared to my work laptop. Also - accessing work resources requires a crap-ton of security policies applied to the device (full control including remote wipe, a stack of security & endpoint management software, just to be able to authenticate with my work account) which I don't want to install/grant on my personal laptop.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        That's an interesting value system. Why is losing a work laptop more concerning than losing your personal laptop? losing either of them isn't great, but the company has far more resources than you to protect and replace the laptop than you do.
teddyh 3y ago
It’s not completely dead. Software side: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-convergent-welcome-to-the-future/ https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co... Hardware side: https://nexdock.com/explore-nexdock/ https://nexdock.com/explore-nexdock/
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  I want to like this setup, but the NexDock's input devices (especially the touchpad) are so bad. Like, near unusably bad. Which, for a device that's mostly I/O, is a shame. I own two NexDocks despite this, for the record. My favorite lapdock though is the one meant for the HP Elite X3 phone. Only downside of that one is that the hinge isn't quite strong enough to hold up a phone with a magnetic mount.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MikusR 3y ago
Samsung Dex came out in 2017. And does just that.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  Are there alternatives to Dex?
  - lazycouchpotato 3y ago
    Motorola has Ready For https://www.motorola.com/we/ready-for https://www.motorola.com/we/ready-for
TillE 3y ago
> given the power inside mobile devices Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery. While desktops are essentially dead outside the enthusiast space, I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop. It's more or less the ideal computing device, reasonably portable with its own screen and a real keyboard.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery. "Gaming" phones exist that try to address this issue. But they're expensive, you're paying flagship prices for a brick-like form factor and a very limited OS update lifcycle compared to actual flagships.
- p1necone 3y ago
  You could maybe fix this with a cooled dock. I'm thinking of all kinds of wacky designs involving exposed heat pipes/metal on the outside of the phone that makes contact with something on the dock.
  - wffurr 3y ago
    Asus makes a cooling attachment for their “gaming phones”: https://rog.asus.com/us/power-protection-gadgets/docks-dongles-and-cables/aeroactive-cooler-6-model/ https://rog.asus.com/us/power-protection-gadgets/docks-dongl...
- memefrog 3y ago
  Desktops definitely aren't "dead outside the enthusiast space". About 2/3 of Steam users use desktops, for example. That's not enthusiasts, that's a large % of young people. Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time. And of course every serious software developer uses a desktop - laptops can't sustain compiling anything for too long without getting hot. Hell, my laptop fans started going full blast yesterday because I opened the 'Stylus' addon in Firefox and it decided to use 100% of my CPU to render a text editing panel, and I have a good laptop. Laptops can barely handle a bit of Javascript. Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.
fuzzy2 3y ago
That sort-of existed though. Windows Phone could do it (Continuum), and so could select Motorola Android phones (via Lapdock). However, we'll just have to accept that most people don't want this. It's a niche use case.
- fragmede 3y ago
  But with the long tail of the Internet, the dozens of us in the niche are a valuable market to target.
kajecounterhack 3y ago
For those interested, Motorola's Atrix phone and Webtop platform were high on this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop
scosman 3y ago
iPadOS is mostly delivering on what you describe. Plug into monitor, mouse, keyboard, window manager, multitasking. Only gap is the “open/unlocked” bit, but Apple is making slow progress there. It shows the horse power is there in iPhone. I’d guess it’s a UX decision to limit to iPad - iPad apps can scale up to monitor size, but I never want to use an app designed for a 6 inch screen on a 27 inch screen.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  iPadOS has some real weird limitations when it comes to big screens. For example, the small iPads don't support stage manager despite being more than powerful enough to drive a measily 1080p display. Their weird window managed also makes for a suboptimal desktop experience, with the weird mouse blob making the entire thing look more like a non-touch tablet than a real desktop. They could also just as easily implement this in their iPhones (I'm sure Apple's take on Continuum and Dex will be called "revolutionary" when it comes out) if they wanted to, but I suppose they don't want their phones to compete with their expensive tablets in terms of features.
dotnet00 3y ago
As others have mentioned, Samsung DeX does this very well. Plus, there are several apps out there for setting up a near Linux desktop experience on the device. Previously DeX itself used to support running Linux applications, it's a shame they dropped that. As a result, along with the ability to access my proxmox VMs if needed, I've been able to retire my laptop in favor of just a Galaxy Tab Ultra. It's overall pushed me heavily into Samsung's devices. They are not that much worse than most Android phone makers, have nice integration with their other devices, but don't lock things down as much as Apple. The wacom pen support across both the Ultra tab and phone has also been a huge draw for me. Makes me wish my desktop pentab also supported the same kind of pen for seamless interoperation.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  Samsung has this reputation of being bloatware heavy with a lot of their default apps having ads. Is that still true?
  - MikusR 3y ago
    Never was.
  - BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    Yes, they load up Android with their own versions of apps in an attempt at end-user lock-in to their ecosystem, plus various other, what I consider, unnecessary padding that's not uninstallable. The new life breathed into an older Samsung device by the installation of LineageOS is what I consider the proof of this. Overall it's entirely subjective, however. I prefer minimal base Android so that I can choose which apps are allowed to annoy me with their various reminders to create an account, log in, look at these new features, rate me, etc. Other (less technologically savvy) family members love their Samsung apps and the ecosystem, and just find my setup to be confusing or overly complicated.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Right. Whereas we want to strip the software down to the bare minimum into some sort of platonic ideal state, it turns out all the Samsung stuff is actually quite useful and actually is what most people want. It's really quite useful stuff!
yaky 3y ago
Microsoft attempted Continuum [1] with some of their Windows Phones. And as of now, PinePhone and Librem5 support USB-C dock with HDMI output. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  The entire vision behind Windows 10 cross platform apps was inspirational. Code once run then across phone, tablet, desktop, and Xbox. And Hololens... I guess. The implementation was terrible and was saddled the failing Mobile division.
  - rodgerd 3y ago
    Indeed. I have a Nokia 950 and in many ways WinPho was a really nice phone OS; Microsoft's endless jerking about of developers as it went 6.5 -> 7.x -> 8 -> 10 did it no favours.
    - NovaDudely 3y ago
      Absolutely, as soon as developers and customers found a nice place - they would pull the rug from under them. I got into the WinPho around Win 8/8.1 and it was pretty cool and the update to Win10 showed to much promise that vanished the instant they stopped working on the hardware. To be fair if I was in Nadella's position, even though I loved the Lumia line - I would have done the same. I have said that in technology one step ahead is an innovator, two steps ahead is martyr. Windows phone was Martyr.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    I think Microsoft finally got it right around Windows 10, but the damage had already been done. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/8/10 had caused too much damage to the brand. Now, Samsung Dex is doing what Microsoft wanted to do, but very few people know about it. That probably has to do with how uncommon USB-C docks are, and how many of those docks use DisplayLink instead of a normal standard to do video. It's a real shame, because a modern phone is more than powerful enough for most people's computer work.
tinus_hn 3y ago
Apple has a better solution with Continuity, if you are near your Mac there is an icon for the activity you are doing on the iPhone that you can click to continue it on the Mac. So you can just finish an email using the keyboard if you want. That’s what Apple built and released and it’s easy to use and quite useful every once in a while. You can be sure they also built and tried what you are proposing, but they found it just isn’t a great experience. Sounds great, doesn’t work. Samsung actually released it, pretty much no one uses it. You can try it for yourself and you will also probably find it’s not as great as you’d imagine.
ianburrell 3y ago
Phones are powerful enough these days, but computers are more powerful. I carry work laptop between home and office, but I couldn't do work on phone. Computers are also cheap, I am using Raspberry Pi 4 as spare desktop. The main use case I see is traveling. But where are you going to connect the phone while traveling? I guess some hotels still have office center. I guess could use the TV in hotel room but then need keyboard. I think phones should have external display support for playing on hotel TVs. Instead of phone that plugs into monitor, what you should be looking into is tablet with keyboard that connects to monitor. It can be used as tablet or small laptop while traveling. Tablet OS and apps will work better on larger screen than phone. I don't know of any OS that does tablet, small laptop, and big displays well, iPadOS does first two and Windows does second two. Apple are missing an opportunity with iPads.
- fragmede 3y ago
  What doesn't Samsung Dex do well for your three form factors?
zmmmmm 3y ago
I thought about this quite a bit when my phone and table started supporting Samsung Dex. It's a great system and I could literally do every single thing I need to on my phone. In the end I couldn't justify it though. It's really not a big deal to take a laptop and its several orders of magnitude more powerful, doesn't drain the battery on my phone etc etc. I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. In the end it just really isn't that bad to carry a laptop.
- noisy_boy 3y ago
  > I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. > But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. Does it though? Combined with the VR/AR type devices + a VM/host in cloud, your phone can run VSCode snappily with all the heavy lifting being done on the remote host. I tried this approach for a specific use case and really liked it - hardly any lag, full power of Linux, doesn't matter from where I connect and unlike the physical host, I don't need to take care of the VM. Of course, this is a developer-specific use case and the phone would indeed struggle in other scenarios requiring a powerful machine locally.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose. I really is not. Current Apple in particular has a strong vision of computers as almost commodities/appliances. The iPod might have been the defining moment, and almost all products after that were all defined by negative functional space. The iPhone is a smartphone that was built around the idea of having neither a keyboard, nor stylus (then later nor side-loaded apps). These characteristics where heavily touted on stage. Nowadays you can plug a keyboard, but it won't help a lot. The iPad was defined as having no advanced window management and no compiling, on top of iOS' other limitations. The iMac was the original "only usb!" computer, and could still be defined today as the no touchscreen computer. Even as of now, the Vision Pro is the headset that's touted as having no primary controllers. But if you look outside of the Apple ecosystem, these limits only apply to where the hardware can't do it. As many have cited, Samsung's phones can actually act as full computers, and som other android phones can too. Same way Samsung's android tablets have advanced window management, can load linux subsytems and do whatever a computer is supposed to do. Windows laptops have touch screens.
- paulmd 3y ago
  iMacs and MacBooks are definitely not “computers as appliances", and you can absolutely run unsigned code or an independent OS (with a vendor-supported mechanism for alternative booting that has been opened up significant to help Asahi along). On Intel macs you could flatly bootcamp windows if you wanted. Is a windows PC an "appliance"? Not having the ports you want doesn’t make them appliances either, and a touch screen is not a requirement for something to be considered a laptop. Nor, some would say, a positive thing at all. Parasocial attachment (fanboyism) isn't just a positive thing, there is such a thing as negative parasocial attachment, and you are letting your fanboyism make you say silly things. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    For context, I've exclusively used macs as daily work tools for 2 decades. The reason I did so was because I got tired of trying to make BSD work, and also burned out from windows. I've heard many people having the same take, we wanted something that "just works". But to step back, this also means, we don't care as much about raw perfs, we care less about new paradigms, we don't need the bleeding edge, and expect our devices to be stable and useable for 10 years, basically be "classics". And I also know if my mavbook burns down today, I can go to a store, buy the latest 13" laptop and be back where I was in 1 hour at most. They're utterly replaceable. That's basically what we want from appliances. I you care in any way shape or form to push the envelope, macs won't be your choice. The best GPU won't be there, the best CPU isn't (Apple's ARM is good, but not as powerful as the top of the line desktop CPU at full wattage), the best form factors aren't there, the most innovative apps didn't go there. Some companies do crazy things with macs, but they're in a extreme minority. And Apple 100% doesn't care about markets that have no scale.
kristopolous 3y ago
You can do USBC to an external display on Android and then do mouse and keyboard over Bluetooth. I've done it. It's fine? Never stuck with it
- karussell 3y ago
  Or an USBC dock for a USB keyboard and mouse. ... and the UserLAnd app then gives a normal Linux terminal with all tools or Linux Desktop apps.
dredmorbius 3y ago
OQO were one firm looking at this market. They folded in 2009: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO> (VA Linux's Larry Augustine was associated with this, probably through Azure Ventures, if I recall.) With the advent of very-small-form-factor computers, mobile displays, bluetooth, battery packs, and solid-state storage, you'd think that such a thing might be reasonably viable, though it would all but certainly be fussy. Neither a smartphone/PDA, nor a laptop, nor a desktop, nor a tablet. That tends to be a pretty ugly duckling. That said, the thought of a cluster of devices which could pair / peer with larger and smaller interfaces and provide utility across a wide range of circumstances does seem to have some level of attraction. For now, laptops or ultra-notebooks are sufficiently portable to cover much of the need, and smartphones / tablets too constrained mostly by OS, power, and input limitations to provide a true desktop experience. (This written by someone who has a large e-ink tablet with Termux installed which comes close to providing a very useful on-the-move computing platform.) I've heard that there may be such devices forthcoming. I can only keep an eye out.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
I think there is a GNU/Linux distro which can do that. Not sure whether it was KDE Neon or some feature of Framework laptops or another one, but they had a video where they plugged the phone onto a screen and were aber to use both.
- oynqr 3y ago
  Isn't KDE Neon desktop only? For phones, postmarketOS and Mobian would be the ones I think of.
- sumuyuda 3y ago
  https://maruos.com/ https://maruos.com/
niels_bom 3y ago
I think Valve’s Steam Deck does this too, quite successfully.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Does the Deck count? It's just a laptop with a weird keyboard, you don't exactly put it in your pocket. Attaching an external display to s device running Arch isn't all that unique.
planb 3y ago
I just don't see the appeal of this. I still need a screen and a keyboard to use it in desktop mode. Then I can just bring a laptop. My data is in the cloud and my settings sync - so the only way this could be "better" is that I don't have to buy a phone and a laptop I guess?
- adrianmsmith 3y ago
  > Then I can just bring a laptop. I guess what I was looking forward to was just that phones are smaller. Rather than taking a laptop, you have your phone with you all the time. Imagine getting to the office (where, as you say, there's a screen, keyboard, mouse etc.) and plugging the USB-C cable from the monitor (to which the keyboard/mouse/etc is connected) into your phone, and the iPhone changes to macOS and you can use it like a Mac. That would indeed be no different to carrying your laptop around, but it would be a lot smaller and more convenient than a laptop.
  - planb 3y ago
    But in the office, there could be a beefy workstation waiting for me. As long as we're not talking about floating workplace setups (which I'm no big fan of) or cutting costs, I still don't see the upside.
    - adrianmsmith 3y ago
      That's true, but I think different people have different needs and preferences. Many companies give developers laptops (even though workstations would be faster) so evidently some people already trade portability for power, so having your phone be your main computer would just be a further step in that direction. For people who aren't developers, e.g. managers doing email, browsing, Excel etc., I'm sure a phone would be powerful enough.
fsflover 3y ago
> There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. <...> But it went nowhere. It didn't go nowhere. This is exactly how my Librem 5 works, running a full desktop GNU/Linux.
_trampeltier 3y ago
HP did build a mobile phone with Windows Mobile (X3) and something they called Lapdock. It was like a slim Notebook, but just the screen and the keyboard. You could connect it wit the phone with a cable or even wireless. All the CPU and memory was in the phone. The Lapdock was just really just a second screen and a real keyboard. I have no Idea, why no other company made something like that for android phones. I mean all the tech is already there an it works (DEX).
disparate_dan 3y ago
I loved this idea too, but I think we’ve come to realise it in a different way, more or less, purely by syncing everything to the cloud. I feel that the transition between my phone, iPad and PC is pretty seamless with continuity of all the data I care about, and different views and interaction models based on the capabilities of the devices.

by ases 3y ago

oh_sigh 3y ago

Perhaps it will now that third party app stores will be force onto apple. Granted, you still won't be able to jailbreak your iphone by just typing in the root password, but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024.

gumby 3y ago
> ...but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024. If you live in the EU. I look forward to Emacs on the ipad.
- fragmede 3y ago
  There's already a ymacs port in the App store.
fragmede 3y ago
Compilers and interpreters have been allowed for a while now (with some caveats). Pythonista is an iOS Python IDE that lets you write apps on your iPhone.

xbonez 3y ago

Samsung Dex [0] is bringing that vision back, maybe? [0] https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/ https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/

RajT88 3y ago
Can confirm. I recently demoted my old Samsung S7 to be Wifi-only and work stuff-only. MFA, mobile email when I'm not at my desk, etc. When I travel for personal stuff, I now just take my personal laptop and my phone. If I need to get into my work stuff, I'm pretty damn effective with all the cloud tooling I can get into from the browser under Dex. Screen real estate is the biggest issue which Dex handily solves, with a close second being things like MS Teams being a little clunky in Dex mode (not a dealbreaker). It's all more than sufficient when I get pinged on personal travel, since I'm not likely to need to be at 110% like I am if I'm working at 2pm on a Tuesday. Why would I want to do this? Because every time I take time off, something goes off and nobody knows what to do about it, so I get pinged.
- lostmsu 3y ago
  Why do you need DeX, if you bring your laptop.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    Personal laptop is much thinner and lighter, and I'm less concerned with losing it on travel compared to my work laptop. Also - accessing work resources requires a crap-ton of security policies applied to the device (full control including remote wipe, a stack of security & endpoint management software, just to be able to authenticate with my work account) which I don't want to install/grant on my personal laptop.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      That's an interesting value system. Why is losing a work laptop more concerning than losing your personal laptop? losing either of them isn't great, but the company has far more resources than you to protect and replace the laptop than you do.

teddyh 3y ago

It’s not completely dead. Software side: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-convergent-welcome-to-the-future/ https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co... Hardware side: https://nexdock.com/explore-nexdock/ https://nexdock.com/explore-nexdock/

ryukafalz 3y ago
I want to like this setup, but the NexDock's input devices (especially the touchpad) are so bad. Like, near unusably bad. Which, for a device that's mostly I/O, is a shame. I own two NexDocks despite this, for the record. My favorite lapdock though is the one meant for the HP Elite X3 phone. Only downside of that one is that the hinge isn't quite strong enough to hold up a phone with a magnetic mount.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

MikusR 3y ago

Samsung Dex came out in 2017. And does just that.

BLKNSLVR 3y ago
Are there alternatives to Dex?
- lazycouchpotato 3y ago
  Motorola has Ready For https://www.motorola.com/we/ready-for https://www.motorola.com/we/ready-for

TillE 3y ago

> given the power inside mobile devices Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery. While desktops are essentially dead outside the enthusiast space, I'm really happy that everyone still owns a laptop. It's more or less the ideal computing device, reasonably portable with its own screen and a real keyboard.

zozbot234 3y ago
> Lots of power, very little cooling. It's designed to be used in bursts. If you've ever played a high-end game on your phone, you'll notice it gets very hot and rapidly drains the battery. "Gaming" phones exist that try to address this issue. But they're expensive, you're paying flagship prices for a brick-like form factor and a very limited OS update lifcycle compared to actual flagships.
p1necone 3y ago
You could maybe fix this with a cooled dock. I'm thinking of all kinds of wacky designs involving exposed heat pipes/metal on the outside of the phone that makes contact with something on the dock.
- wffurr 3y ago
  Asus makes a cooling attachment for their “gaming phones”: https://rog.asus.com/us/power-protection-gadgets/docks-dongles-and-cables/aeroactive-cooler-6-model/ https://rog.asus.com/us/power-protection-gadgets/docks-dongl...
memefrog 3y ago
Desktops definitely aren't "dead outside the enthusiast space". About 2/3 of Steam users use desktops, for example. That's not enthusiasts, that's a large % of young people. Just thinking about people I know, everyone has a desktop in the household, even if they don't use it all the time. And of course every serious software developer uses a desktop - laptops can't sustain compiling anything for too long without getting hot. Hell, my laptop fans started going full blast yesterday because I opened the 'Stylus' addon in Firefox and it decided to use 100% of my CPU to render a text editing panel, and I have a good laptop. Laptops can barely handle a bit of Javascript. Desktops are not as popular as they once were but they aren't anywhere near dead.

fuzzy2 3y ago

That sort-of existed though. Windows Phone could do it (Continuum), and so could select Motorola Android phones (via Lapdock). However, we'll just have to accept that most people don't want this. It's a niche use case.

fragmede 3y ago
But with the long tail of the Internet, the dozens of us in the niche are a valuable market to target.

kajecounterhack 3y ago

For those interested, Motorola's Atrix phone and Webtop platform were high on this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop

scosman 3y ago

iPadOS is mostly delivering on what you describe. Plug into monitor, mouse, keyboard, window manager, multitasking. Only gap is the “open/unlocked” bit, but Apple is making slow progress there. It shows the horse power is there in iPhone. I’d guess it’s a UX decision to limit to iPad - iPad apps can scale up to monitor size, but I never want to use an app designed for a 6 inch screen on a 27 inch screen.

jeroenhd 3y ago
iPadOS has some real weird limitations when it comes to big screens. For example, the small iPads don't support stage manager despite being more than powerful enough to drive a measily 1080p display. Their weird window managed also makes for a suboptimal desktop experience, with the weird mouse blob making the entire thing look more like a non-touch tablet than a real desktop. They could also just as easily implement this in their iPhones (I'm sure Apple's take on Continuum and Dex will be called "revolutionary" when it comes out) if they wanted to, but I suppose they don't want their phones to compete with their expensive tablets in terms of features.

dotnet00 3y ago

As others have mentioned, Samsung DeX does this very well. Plus, there are several apps out there for setting up a near Linux desktop experience on the device. Previously DeX itself used to support running Linux applications, it's a shame they dropped that. As a result, along with the ability to access my proxmox VMs if needed, I've been able to retire my laptop in favor of just a Galaxy Tab Ultra. It's overall pushed me heavily into Samsung's devices. They are not that much worse than most Android phone makers, have nice integration with their other devices, but don't lock things down as much as Apple. The wacom pen support across both the Ultra tab and phone has also been a huge draw for me. Makes me wish my desktop pentab also supported the same kind of pen for seamless interoperation.

vorpalhex 3y ago
Samsung has this reputation of being bloatware heavy with a lot of their default apps having ads. Is that still true?
- MikusR 3y ago
  Never was.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  Yes, they load up Android with their own versions of apps in an attempt at end-user lock-in to their ecosystem, plus various other, what I consider, unnecessary padding that's not uninstallable. The new life breathed into an older Samsung device by the installation of LineageOS is what I consider the proof of this. Overall it's entirely subjective, however. I prefer minimal base Android so that I can choose which apps are allowed to annoy me with their various reminders to create an account, log in, look at these new features, rate me, etc. Other (less technologically savvy) family members love their Samsung apps and the ecosystem, and just find my setup to be confusing or overly complicated.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Right. Whereas we want to strip the software down to the bare minimum into some sort of platonic ideal state, it turns out all the Samsung stuff is actually quite useful and actually is what most people want. It's really quite useful stuff!

yaky 3y ago

Microsoft attempted Continuum [1] with some of their Windows Phones. And as of now, PinePhone and Librem5 support USB-C dock with HDMI output. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum

NovaDudely 3y ago
The entire vision behind Windows 10 cross platform apps was inspirational. Code once run then across phone, tablet, desktop, and Xbox. And Hololens... I guess. The implementation was terrible and was saddled the failing Mobile division.
- rodgerd 3y ago
  Indeed. I have a Nokia 950 and in many ways WinPho was a really nice phone OS; Microsoft's endless jerking about of developers as it went 6.5 -> 7.x -> 8 -> 10 did it no favours.
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    Absolutely, as soon as developers and customers found a nice place - they would pull the rug from under them. I got into the WinPho around Win 8/8.1 and it was pretty cool and the update to Win10 showed to much promise that vanished the instant they stopped working on the hardware. To be fair if I was in Nadella's position, even though I loved the Lumia line - I would have done the same. I have said that in technology one step ahead is an innovator, two steps ahead is martyr. Windows phone was Martyr.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I think Microsoft finally got it right around Windows 10, but the damage had already been done. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/8/10 had caused too much damage to the brand. Now, Samsung Dex is doing what Microsoft wanted to do, but very few people know about it. That probably has to do with how uncommon USB-C docks are, and how many of those docks use DisplayLink instead of a normal standard to do video. It's a real shame, because a modern phone is more than powerful enough for most people's computer work.

tinus_hn 3y ago

Apple has a better solution with Continuity, if you are near your Mac there is an icon for the activity you are doing on the iPhone that you can click to continue it on the Mac. So you can just finish an email using the keyboard if you want. That’s what Apple built and released and it’s easy to use and quite useful every once in a while. You can be sure they also built and tried what you are proposing, but they found it just isn’t a great experience. Sounds great, doesn’t work. Samsung actually released it, pretty much no one uses it. You can try it for yourself and you will also probably find it’s not as great as you’d imagine.

ianburrell 3y ago

Phones are powerful enough these days, but computers are more powerful. I carry work laptop between home and office, but I couldn't do work on phone. Computers are also cheap, I am using Raspberry Pi 4 as spare desktop. The main use case I see is traveling. But where are you going to connect the phone while traveling? I guess some hotels still have office center. I guess could use the TV in hotel room but then need keyboard. I think phones should have external display support for playing on hotel TVs. Instead of phone that plugs into monitor, what you should be looking into is tablet with keyboard that connects to monitor. It can be used as tablet or small laptop while traveling. Tablet OS and apps will work better on larger screen than phone. I don't know of any OS that does tablet, small laptop, and big displays well, iPadOS does first two and Windows does second two. Apple are missing an opportunity with iPads.

fragmede 3y ago
What doesn't Samsung Dex do well for your three form factors?

zmmmmm 3y ago

I thought about this quite a bit when my phone and table started supporting Samsung Dex. It's a great system and I could literally do every single thing I need to on my phone. In the end I couldn't justify it though. It's really not a big deal to take a laptop and its several orders of magnitude more powerful, doesn't drain the battery on my phone etc etc. I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. In the end it just really isn't that bad to carry a laptop.

noisy_boy 3y ago
> I'm sort of rethinking it again as VR/AR type devices become available and wondering if it would be great to be able to have a phone in my pocket and a set of AR glasses to work on a terminal etc. > But it comes back to the same thing: that poor puny device in my pocket is just so weak and already so battery challenged that I don't really want it to do more. Does it though? Combined with the VR/AR type devices + a VM/host in cloud, your phone can run VSCode snappily with all the heavy lifting being done on the remote host. I tried this approach for a specific use case and really liked it - hardly any lag, full power of Linux, doesn't matter from where I connect and unlike the physical host, I don't need to take care of the VM. Of course, this is a developer-specific use case and the phone would indeed struggle in other scenarios requiring a powerful machine locally.

makeitdouble 3y ago

> But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose. I really is not. Current Apple in particular has a strong vision of computers as almost commodities/appliances. The iPod might have been the defining moment, and almost all products after that were all defined by negative functional space. The iPhone is a smartphone that was built around the idea of having neither a keyboard, nor stylus (then later nor side-loaded apps). These characteristics where heavily touted on stage. Nowadays you can plug a keyboard, but it won't help a lot. The iPad was defined as having no advanced window management and no compiling, on top of iOS' other limitations. The iMac was the original "only usb!" computer, and could still be defined today as the no touchscreen computer. Even as of now, the Vision Pro is the headset that's touted as having no primary controllers. But if you look outside of the Apple ecosystem, these limits only apply to where the hardware can't do it. As many have cited, Samsung's phones can actually act as full computers, and som other android phones can too. Same way Samsung's android tablets have advanced window management, can load linux subsytems and do whatever a computer is supposed to do. Windows laptops have touch screens.

paulmd 3y ago
iMacs and MacBooks are definitely not “computers as appliances", and you can absolutely run unsigned code or an independent OS (with a vendor-supported mechanism for alternative booting that has been opened up significant to help Asahi along). On Intel macs you could flatly bootcamp windows if you wanted. Is a windows PC an "appliance"? Not having the ports you want doesn’t make them appliances either, and a touch screen is not a requirement for something to be considered a laptop. Nor, some would say, a positive thing at all. Parasocial attachment (fanboyism) isn't just a positive thing, there is such a thing as negative parasocial attachment, and you are letting your fanboyism make you say silly things. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  For context, I've exclusively used macs as daily work tools for 2 decades. The reason I did so was because I got tired of trying to make BSD work, and also burned out from windows. I've heard many people having the same take, we wanted something that "just works". But to step back, this also means, we don't care as much about raw perfs, we care less about new paradigms, we don't need the bleeding edge, and expect our devices to be stable and useable for 10 years, basically be "classics". And I also know if my mavbook burns down today, I can go to a store, buy the latest 13" laptop and be back where I was in 1 hour at most. They're utterly replaceable. That's basically what we want from appliances. I you care in any way shape or form to push the envelope, macs won't be your choice. The best GPU won't be there, the best CPU isn't (Apple's ARM is good, but not as powerful as the top of the line desktop CPU at full wattage), the best form factors aren't there, the most innovative apps didn't go there. Some companies do crazy things with macs, but they're in a extreme minority. And Apple 100% doesn't care about markets that have no scale.

kristopolous 3y ago

You can do USBC to an external display on Android and then do mouse and keyboard over Bluetooth. I've done it. It's fine? Never stuck with it

karussell 3y ago
Or an USBC dock for a USB keyboard and mouse. ... and the UserLAnd app then gives a normal Linux terminal with all tools or Linux Desktop apps.

dredmorbius 3y ago

OQO were one firm looking at this market. They folded in 2009: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO> (VA Linux's Larry Augustine was associated with this, probably through Azure Ventures, if I recall.) With the advent of very-small-form-factor computers, mobile displays, bluetooth, battery packs, and solid-state storage, you'd think that such a thing might be reasonably viable, though it would all but certainly be fussy. Neither a smartphone/PDA, nor a laptop, nor a desktop, nor a tablet. That tends to be a pretty ugly duckling. That said, the thought of a cluster of devices which could pair / peer with larger and smaller interfaces and provide utility across a wide range of circumstances does seem to have some level of attraction. For now, laptops or ultra-notebooks are sufficiently portable to cover much of the need, and smartphones / tablets too constrained mostly by OS, power, and input limitations to provide a true desktop experience. (This written by someone who has a large e-ink tablet with Termux installed which comes close to providing a very useful on-the-move computing platform.) I've heard that there may be such devices forthcoming. I can only keep an eye out.

zelphirkalt 3y ago

I think there is a GNU/Linux distro which can do that. Not sure whether it was KDE Neon or some feature of Framework laptops or another one, but they had a video where they plugged the phone onto a screen and were aber to use both.

oynqr 3y ago
Isn't KDE Neon desktop only? For phones, postmarketOS and Mobian would be the ones I think of.
sumuyuda 3y ago
https://maruos.com/ https://maruos.com/

niels_bom 3y ago

I think Valve’s Steam Deck does this too, quite successfully.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Does the Deck count? It's just a laptop with a weird keyboard, you don't exactly put it in your pocket. Attaching an external display to s device running Arch isn't all that unique.

planb 3y ago

I just don't see the appeal of this. I still need a screen and a keyboard to use it in desktop mode. Then I can just bring a laptop. My data is in the cloud and my settings sync - so the only way this could be "better" is that I don't have to buy a phone and a laptop I guess?

adrianmsmith 3y ago
> Then I can just bring a laptop. I guess what I was looking forward to was just that phones are smaller. Rather than taking a laptop, you have your phone with you all the time. Imagine getting to the office (where, as you say, there's a screen, keyboard, mouse etc.) and plugging the USB-C cable from the monitor (to which the keyboard/mouse/etc is connected) into your phone, and the iPhone changes to macOS and you can use it like a Mac. That would indeed be no different to carrying your laptop around, but it would be a lot smaller and more convenient than a laptop.
- planb 3y ago
  But in the office, there could be a beefy workstation waiting for me. As long as we're not talking about floating workplace setups (which I'm no big fan of) or cutting costs, I still don't see the upside.
  - adrianmsmith 3y ago
    That's true, but I think different people have different needs and preferences. Many companies give developers laptops (even though workstations would be faster) so evidently some people already trade portability for power, so having your phone be your main computer would just be a further step in that direction. For people who aren't developers, e.g. managers doing email, browsing, Excel etc., I'm sure a phone would be powerful enough.

fsflover 3y ago

> There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. <...> But it went nowhere. It didn't go nowhere. This is exactly how my Librem 5 works, running a full desktop GNU/Linux.

_trampeltier 3y ago

HP did build a mobile phone with Windows Mobile (X3) and something they called Lapdock. It was like a slim Notebook, but just the screen and the keyboard. You could connect it wit the phone with a cable or even wireless. All the CPU and memory was in the phone. The Lapdock was just really just a second screen and a real keyboard. I have no Idea, why no other company made something like that for android phones. I mean all the tech is already there an it works (DEX).

disparate_dan 3y ago

I loved this idea too, but I think we’ve come to realise it in a different way, more or less, purely by syncing everything to the cloud. I feel that the transition between my phone, iPad and PC is pretty seamless with continuity of all the data I care about, and different views and interaction models based on the capabilities of the devices.