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Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC
- fsflover 1y agoDiscussion in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350293
- dang 1y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350293 - May 2017 (251 comments) Maru OS becomes an open source project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373251 - Aug 2016 (26 comments) Maru OS – Your phone is your PC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11873444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11873444 - June 2016 (2 comments) Maru turns Android smartphones into portable PCs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037937 - Feb 2016 (73 comments)
- doebler 1y ago> Simply plug your phone into an HDMI screen, connect up a keyboard and mouse, and you’ve got a lightweight desktop experience you can take anywhere. No, I can't take it anywhere, because few places I go to have a HDMI screen and keyboard ready for me. And to the ones they do, I carry my laptop.
- fsflover 1y agoYou could also use it with Nexdoc, https://nexdock.com https://nexdock.com
- LoganDark 1y agoLapdocks are an amazing concept, but I haven't found a single one with my preferred keyboard layout yet. Same problem as laptops in general.
- ranger_danger 1y agoyou can always bring a portable screen/keyboard with you
- happyopossum 1y agoI've yet to find a portable screen and keyboard that can even remotely compare in display quality or battery life to a MacBook Air, and the 'portable' combination is usually heavier and always clunkier to set up.
- shortrounddev2 1y agoIf I'm doing that, why wouldn't I just bring my laptop
- fsflover 1y agoSingle place for all your data, easier to manage and back up. Single device to take with you.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoI don't personally think there's any ease of management advantage to be gained, but that depends on whether one wants their phone to have the data that's on their computer. I don't, personally. But I think there's definitely no advantage from a "single device" when you have to take something just as big as taking a laptop anyway.
- shortrounddev2 1y agoI'm not trying to shit on this as a neat tool, but my phone is not the single place for all my data, and I find it considerably harder to manage. If I'm bringing my phone, an external keyboard, and a portable screen (and, presumably, a mouse) with me, it's not really a "single device", it's more like 4 devices that poorly imitate a laptop and don't offer as much functionality
- fuzzfactor 1y ago
- szszrk 1y agoI'm not sure why you neatpick that. I feel the complete opposite. HDMI screens are everywhere. Usb-c ones less but still present. I have a screen at work, with keyboard and USB hub. Same at home. And at most of my friend's homes. I have a screen (tv) in a hotel and flats to rent. I even had one in a cabin recently (use them with tv stick for my kid's shows). I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter than a laptop, that I sometimes carry for multiple reasons. Keyboard is a bit harder, I won't have it provided in a hotel, but there are plenty of small and light models, foldable etc.. I choose current phone specifically for usb-c/HDMI option and a full desktop experience and use it often. It's easy, it's fast, it's stable. Perfect for mobile gaming with a small BT gamepad as well. I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me.
- iAMkenough 1y agoI feel the opposite of you and not sure why you defend it. I can not think of the last time I plugged my phone or tablet into an HDMI screen I didn't own.
- eldaisfish 1y agoi struggle to see your point. Your suggestion is that people should carry around four devices with them, poorly integrated, clunky, all for the experience of plugging to their phone? At that point, what advantage is there over a laptop?
- szszrk 1y ago
- dcminter 1y agoThe use case for me is mostly hotel stays. When travelling for fun I don't particularly want the weight (and risk) of packing my laptop, but I would like to be able to play movies and music on the hotel TV. With a cheap light keyboard I could also do email and similar light admin things with the benefit of the bigger screen. Until recently I was also travelling frequently for work with a heavy MacBook running a variety of Enterprise malware that would prevent me from doing any personal stuff with it - being able to use my own phone for light leisure activities that I normally do on the personal laptop would have been very useful for the boring hotel evenings. Adding another kg+ of laptop to the already heavy backpack was too annoying to put up with - my cheapo bluetooth keyboard and mouse weigh in at a much more acceptable 280 grams. In short, there's a use case - but most phones are too locked down to take full advantage of the possibility.
- jonathanlydall 1y agoI tend to bring my AppleTV + HDMI cable with me whenever we travel. Its small size makes it largely inconsequential from a luggage point of view and it’s already fully set up with all my streaming apps. It also doesn’t tie up my phone if anyone else wants to watch TV.
- dcminter 1y agoYeah, I'm considering a pi500 as a similar alternative. I need to check the weight, but if it's low enough and they release a version with m2 I'll surely try it.
- wishfish 1y agoThis is why my iPad Mini is my main travel device. Small enough that it fits in my pockets. But the screen is big enough that it's comfortable to use. More comfortable than the Pro Max. Have a cheap bluetooth keyboard with integrated stand so the mini can be used as a laptop. Take the mini with me when I go places and leave the keyboard in the hotel. Would make me sad if someone stole the keyboard but it's a far smaller loss than if a laptop was stolen. Gives me a more peace of mind. If only the Mini had true 4k output, it would be absolutely perfect. But it only does screen mirroring which limits it when plugged into a monitor or hotel television.
- m463 1y agoThere are now ar glasses that do HDMI, and there are lots of portable keyboard solutions, with a trackpad or trackpoint or just a mouse. haven't tried it, but I see glasses as an almost practical future.
- ryukafalz 1y agoIf phones consistently gave you a useful desktop environment when you plugged them into a monitor, I imagine that might change. I think offices are the most likely places to have something like this, though. My company has monitors with USB-C dock inputs set up at each desk; you grab a desk and plug your laptop into it when you get there. But they're just using DisplayPort Alt-Mode, and a phone with a desktop mode would work with them as well. I wish I could do that for work; would save me from lugging around a rather heavy laptop. :)
- jez 1y agoI could commute to the office every day with nothing but the shirt on my back and the phone in my pocket if my work-provided device were my phone. I would not need a backpack or briefcase, which means that for any errands or dinner plans after work, I don't fumble with a backpack. I already leave my preferred keyboard+mouse at my office desk. If I needed to fly to another office for a business trip, same story: I could sit down at any desk, grab a spare bluetooth keyboard from IT (if there isn't already one on the bookable desk). If I'm over at a friend's house for dinner and get paged, I could just ask to sit down at their desk and plug my phone in. I would love to not have to carry a laptop around to all the places that I do today.
- sudhirb 1y agoI remember being somewhat sold on this story by the PinePhone, but it seems like it might not be possible to buy one new nowadays. Having just looked up the PinePhone again for the first time in a while, it does look like the Ubuntu Touch project is still alive and kicking, and compatible with some modern commercially available phones! The main thing preventing me from having a non-standard Android phone/distribution as a daily driver is access to mobile banking apps - I'm yet to check for myself but as I understand, having an unlocked bootloader means that banking apps will consider the device "compromised" and will not work.
- technocrat8080 1y agoWhy can't the phone itself act as the input device? Sure it's not a full-fledged keyboard, but it could work wonderfully in a pinch.
- fragmede 1y agoit should at least work as a trackpad.
- thesuperbigfrog 1y agoDoes Maru OS run on the current generation of devices? https://maruos.com/downloads/ https://maruos.com/downloads/ shows releases dated 2019.
- urbandw311er 1y agoIt does look like either the OS or the website have fallen behind.
- jdiff 1y agoLast release on GitHub was also 2019. Repository's seen activity since then, last thing I see is some documentation and GitHub actions committed in 2023, and there's dependabot activity all the way up to 2 weeks ago.
- esafak 1y agoNo release in years: https://github.com/maruos/builds/releases https://github.com/maruos/builds/releases It looks like it is on maintenance mode: https://github.com/maruos/maruos/commits/master/ https://github.com/maruos/maruos/commits/master/
- urbandw311er 1y agoI’d also check out GrapheneOS once the Android 16 QPR1 beta with Desktop Mode gets merged in. Likely to be a more up-to-date experience.
- profsummergig 1y agoThe mouse right-click on a PC. What's the equivalent of that for a phone? Is it press-and-hold?
- zamadatix 1y agoIf you're going for a native touch-first experience. If you're trying to emulate actual PC use (either something like this or an RDP-like experience) I've found letting the screen act as a traditional touchpad which controls a cursor is a far more usable approach. Honestly, better than a lot of actual touchpads out there... In either case the software keyboard popping in and out of existence remains the much more frustrating part of the experience. Docking or bluetooth keyboard/mouse are often required to be practical because of this.
- dizhn 1y agoTwo fingers tap is pretty common on touchpads. Three for scroll wheel click. But you'd attach a mouse with a solution like in the article.
- n8cpdx 1y agoYes, and that’s what windows does on touch screens going back a long while. iOS makes pretty heavy use of right click menus (e.g. on the Home Screen, in Mail). It used to be Force Touch/3D Touch, which is superior, but has more learning curve and doesn’t scale to iPad.
- ConanRus 1y ago"Peek under the hood and you'll find rock-stable Debian Linux" I LOL'd
- bsimpson 1y agoIt'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 both). The linked distribution is running Debian in a container for desktop on top of Android. The rumors about the future of ChromeOS are imagining something similar. Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most. Adapting desktop Linux to mobile seems to be impossibly hard with the amount of resources those distributions have.
- tombert 1y agoI really wanted the Ubuntu phone to succeed. I backed the Indiegogo for their fancy phone, and when that failed I installed Ubuntu OS on a Nexus 5 to play with. I never activated any phone service on it but I think I would have enjoyed it if I had. It was kind of neat to have a smartphone that didn't hide the fact that it was a computer. Even without plugging it in to a monitor or anything, I was able to play with the Chrome dev tools on the fly and it was pretty fun.
- ryukafalz 1y agoI used to use Ubuntu Touch on my OnePlus One for quite a while and it was very nice! I had to switch away because it didn't really support group MMS (still doesn't from what I can tell), and then later US carriers started requiring VoLTE which it didn't support for a while either. But I still hope to switch back someday, that was the most enjoyable phone I'd used since the N900.
- tombert 1y agoI haven't tried to use it full time for the same reason that I haven't tried to take the plunge to the dumb-phone world. A part of me occasionally considers buying one of those cheap KaiOS dumbphones, because I figure that the stuff that's missing could be supplemented with my laptop. The problem I'm always afraid of is that I'm afraid that I'll be missing something. I'll start a job and they'll require some specific proprietary 2FA app, for example. Also, I don't think Signal has a dumb phone app yet and that's basically all I use to communicate. Similarly, I haven't done anything but play with Ubuntu Touch, because I know there would be an app missing that I would need, so I'd be forced to have an Android or iPhone for those edge cases anyway. Startup costs are enormous to break into the smartphone world now, at least if you want to penetrate into the "non-tech-enthusiast" market.
- mcv 1y agoThere's ideas like this every couple of years, and I love the idea, but they never seem to go anywhere. I think Nokia's Maemo/Meego was the first, and it keeps popping up, but it never seems to go anywhere. I understand this one has been dead for a couple of years now too.
- adamors 1y agoWould be a good HN convention to add (dead) after a project like older posts get tagged with the year.
- fsflover 1y agoIt's probably the same as adding (2019) to the title about an OS, isn't it?
- altairprime 1y agoEverywhere I might hook up my phone to a monitor there is already either a preexisting computer hooked up, my laptop with its ultra flat keyboard trackpad combo to hook up, and/or lacking the appropriate back support and table height for me for me to ergonomically use a keyboard and mouse there. This might make sense for someone who travels a lot and wants to work in odd places but the assumption that people can Find A Monitor That Has A Keyboard Flatspace In The Wild is what’s broken. This product would have been wildly successful if they just released it as a laptop case for a phone, Framework-style. Dock your phone into the PCMCIA slot to activate the laptop, etc.
- fsflover 1y ago> 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/ https://nexdock.com/
- altairprime 1y agoYep. Lot more market for that. Dunno how much, though! Does it have a battery?
- eggsandbeer 1y agoHow does this really old stuff make it to the top of hacker news some times? What is going on here?
- politelemon 1y agoWhat's wrong with that?
- WorldPeas 1y agoThere's likely agreement with the sentiment of the project despite it never going anywhere
- hdb385 1y agoIs the device encrypted at rest?
- amelius 1y agoDoes it run my banking app which is Android/iOS based? (Running through an emulator is ok.)
- fsflover 1y agoWaydroid can probably make it run.
- WorldPeas 1y agoI think at this point the niche would be well-served if one could have a competent clamp-on landscape keyboard (so close, clicks keyboard) for their phone they could use to RDP into a better machine that could run while the phone is off. Additionally nice would be if the phone had a fully functional usb-c port that could do DP and usb for docking. At that point I'd have serious thoughts about retiring my backpack or nanote next. It frustrates me how close we are, if such a keyboard existed for $80 or so
- filleokus 1y agoI've been occasionally using Microsoft's RDP Client [0] on my iPhone with external keyboard + mouse with a usb-c cable into my external monitor (with a Logitech RF dongle connected to the back of it). It worked okay, the mouse support is somewhat of a hack, but keyboard works awesome. The biggest annoyance was actually getting RDP to work satisfactory on a linux box with no external monitor plugged in to it (hetzner box). I thought someone would have created an app to run browser on the external screen in full resolution, so I could skip RDP and use vscode server via the browser. But the only option seems to be infinitex2p which is not available in the EU :(. [0]: Which in typical Microsoft idiotic fashion semi recently got renamed to "Windows app"... [1]: https://x.com/infinitex2p https://x.com/infinitex2p
- WorldPeas 1y agoI've run vscode over ssh via tailscale before and it was pretty good, I'm mostly connecting to a remote using rustdesk however, that also requires a "dummy" hdmi to operate. The only thing it needs to make it perfect would be if there were officially supported forwarded web browsing windows in vscode. I wish apple would actually let us use "our" usb-c as.. usb-c
- pkoird 1y agoOne of the things I love about my Samsung device is precisely this feature, i.e. DeX
- stego-tech 1y agoBill Gates spoke of this context-aware OS at a lecture in the mid-00s. He specifically called out future phones (this was pre-iPhone era) that would have location context (work/home/mobile) and load secure, sandboxed datastores and profiles depending on that context. He also spoke at length about how desktop computers would transform into accelerators, like your gaming GPU at home or your additional processors and memory at your workstation. It was a grand vision of ultimate portability, with clear lines between work and personal lives enabled through technology. Then he showed off the Fossil MSN watch, and suggested future iterations may do away with phones entirely and act as methods of identification for digital systems. And then, like all things Microsoft, they abandoned the concepts entirely. Apple and Google cribbed most of the ideas for themselves in some form or another and saw wild success with them, though to date nobody major has really attempted to create that mobile vision Gates spoke of - other than Maru, and for a time, Google on Android. It’s a shame, really. I like the idea of validating my public key via NFC from my Apple Watch to login to work machines or my home boxes (a la SSH). Seems like it’d be easier to wrangle in the long run, especially with job hopping being the norm.
- SlowTao 1y agoOne step ahead is innovation, two steps ahead is a martyr. Microsoft is a lot of the time two steps ahead, but the technology and/or the people are not ready for it. Hasnt harmed their product Microsoft Profit (TM) too much however.
- Terr_ 1y ago> One step ahead is innovation, two steps ahead is a martyr. IMO people constantly mischaracterize progress as Great New Inventions By an Innovative Figure, when it's almost always something people already tried (and failed at) years before, and the difference is luck or some surrounding context improves.
- Almondsetat 1y agoMan, that would be great. Imagine going out for a walk with just your smartwatch. Then you go back home and you insert the watch into a phone case and it gives it more RAM and CPU power and it becomes your phone and you go out again. Then when you come back you put it inside your big box and now you have a computer. All with the same accounts, OS, apps.
- zorrn 1y agoI think Apple would actually be in a position capable of doing this. Slap an M1-4 into an iPhone Case with MacOS. Normally you have an interface like iOS, which shouldn't be hard because iOS is based on MacOS, and when you connect it to a monitor you have normal MacOS. Normal iOS applications need to run on MacOS which I think they already could. You would just have to allow apps to transform the interface between desktop and mobile or allow both interfaces to access the same data. And for apps that aren't working just show a small windows on the desktop and either disallow opening only-desktop apps on iOS or make everything small and allow zooming. You could also make something MacBook-like where you connect your phone or slide it into the side. I think one of the problems here is that Apple then could only sell 1 device to everyone and not potentially three (iPhone, iPad, Mac).
- rramon 1y agoThey could sell MacOS as a mobile app subscription like logic Pro for iPads or for one time fee somewhere between $99 - $199, and many would switch from MacMinis I guess. Pair this with some nice "Vision Air" glasses as a screen replacement..
- fb03 1y agoI don't think this would accidentally eat at Apple's laptop market because the laptop-in-a-stick option would still need an external screen. If you're travelling for work or something, might as well just have your phone AND your laptop, instead of phone + external screen full of messy cables. but YMMV
- FlyingSnake 1y agoThis seems like an abandoned project with no updates since 2019 (!!) Those looking for a more active and stable project: ubports is carrying the torch forward on the convergence front. I have personally used it on my old OnePlus device and it was quite usable. 1: https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/ 2: https://lomiri.com/ https://lomiri.com/
- NelsonMinar 1y ago"Maru is built on the latest Android Oreo." That's Android 8.0, from 2017.
- fsflover 1y agoAlso Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS.
- nashashmi 1y agoThis project could achieve this via the following. Project up an alternate screen. Put an “app” on the screen called maruOS projected at external screen resolution. Then get access to your phone storage and maybe to your phone hardware like mic. Then pretend there is a huge possibility of apps that can run on Maru OS. But it is Too little too late. Samsung DEX did this. Google is supposed to invent this (again). Everyone has failed. All apps need separate desktop versions to do this work. Essentially they need a second desktop app. This means more ram and more storage and more power.
- PlunderBunny 1y agoOne advantage of having 'everything on the phone' is that you wouldn't need a cloud provider to sync between your laptop and your phone - it's a 'stand alone' experience.
- _Algernon_ 1y agoYou'd still want an offsite backup somewhere. Doesn't have to be cloud, but it is the most accessible to most people.
- mistyvales 1y agoI remember doing this with my Windows 10 phone back in 2015 (with a dock). Kinda slow and clunky, but mostly worked for a lot of the basic stuff I was doing with it. I think Motorolla had a similar thing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock
- gxonatano 1y agoHave they invented anything at all? You've already been able to do this with basically any mobile linux distro, as far as I can tell. At least, on the best-supported devices. You don't need a custom OS for it.
- Hotbasil 1y agoNice idea. Also an abandoned project. Samsung also does it.
- gt0 1y agoFor me these efforts feel like a solution to a problem very few people have. People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops. The people who want a portable computer, which needs access to a screen, keyboard, mouse and desk, just seems like a very small niche. Even when you get that computer set up, you end up with something quite slow with limited RAM and storage, unless you've bought a real flagship phone which is more expensive than a good laptop anyway. I tried this with DeX, it's cool, but it's just really hard to see where I'd use it. Some sort of trip where for some reason I can't bring my laptop, but I do have access to the various peripherals required to make a desktop setup.
- thewebguyd 1y ago> 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 high at this point). But then the M1 air came out, and that was pretty much game over for me. I've since upgraded to my M4 pro but it's still small and light enough to go everywhere, I have no need for an all-in-one phone.
- red369 1y agoJust a rather long thought regarding the switching cost from Apple to Android - I rebooted my iPhone yesterday (not unusual for me) and my Safari was empty - no open tabs, no tab groups, no reading list, no history, nothing! I don't use iCloud for Safari so there wasn't much I could do. After trying a few suggestions I found online involving toggling iCloud on and off, I rebooted again, and got back the reading list and the tabs in tab groups, but no history or any open tabs which weren't in a group. If my phone had died completely I'd have restored from a backup, but this isn't worth that. Realising how easily everything can vanish, and that there are almost no options to go digging around to find the underlying files made me rethink how much I trust the OS. And that made me look at exporting. The export options from Safari are fairly complete (in the settings App, in the App section under Safari), and Apple have something similar to Google Takeout. The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server. I wouldn't normally bother, but now I feel I can't trust the OS to manage this stuff I'm motivated. Anyway, my thought is that once you have this stuff setup robustly without completely trusting the phone or iCloud to just handle everything, that's one aspect of switching completely taken care of. I would never normally bother, but now I feel I can't rely on the OS to handle things I'm more motivated. I realise that it must seem like I could have solved this (and still can) by just using iCloud backup/sync. I intentionally chose not to use that for reasons that I'm not convinced really stack up, so I won't go into (vendor lock-in, flakiness, stories of vanishing data, etc.). Anyway, just thought I'd point out that exporting might be able to take care of the data side a lot better than you might be expecting, and you might be able to just slowly transition, e.g. export all notes, import into another location, tick one off the list. iCloud export: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306 https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306 Edit: Ah, just thinking more about it now, I realise now that while there is a Mail export option, there is nothing for messages in either Download Your Data, or direct from the phone. That's rough.
- fmajid 1y agoFunny, Google just announced the Linux Terminal now supports graphical Linux apps. It's closer to WSL2 than a regular app, implementing a fully vrtualized environment. https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-future-plans-3581752/ https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-futu... Unfortunately, even the text-mode-only Android Terminal is incredibly buggy and crashes on GrapheneOS if you have the audacity of typing Ctrl-D to close your session, requiring a full reset (and losing your data in the process). I am not brave enough to try a non-degoogled Android.
- blattus 1y agoAs a consumer I'm excited by the vision these convergent solutions sell, in a futuristic "I just carry one device" way, but I think the reason they haven't kicked off is that in reality you don't just have monitors and keyboards and mice lying around wherever you go. A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you might as well also carry the incredibly thin screen it's attached to on a laptop.
- gleenn 1y agoMy friend has a foldable screen phone and carries a cute foldable keyboard with touchpad. He can plug in when available or just do light stuff at cafes with the keyboard in his bag
- cubefox 1y agoHe could instead use a normal phone, but while plugging in display ("AR") glasses from Xreal, which act like an external monitor. He might also want a foldable mouse in addition to his foldable keyboard. And the phone should be a Samsung, which has DeX (an Android desktop mode). The official Android desktop mode isn't released yet.
- Eji1700 1y agoI've been diving towards this outcome for awhile now. I have a gpd pocket 4 for my machine, but carry a chiri CE 5x3 and the MS arc mouse (and am looking for a second screen). It's an extremely small footprint in my bag, and i'm not sure it can get much smaller. You could remove the keyboard and the mouse from the Pocket 4, but given they're on top of the hardware it wouldn't save that much space. I can, in theory, do the same setup with my phone instead of the pocket though. I'm yet to really hook it all up and test (I expect several points of failure given past experiments), but the idea really is intriguing. It does however require people to get more comfortable with smaller keyboards/mice (please for the love of god, if nothing else, swap left control with caps lock), or at least more portable ones. And as for the ideal of "carry a drive, hook up to hardware as needed", that'll always run into the common issue of who is maintaining the hardware. We need cheap and easy to fix/replace hardware for that to ever really be a thing.
- p_ing 1y agoReminds me of Windows Continuum [0] (2015) which either via an adapter (Microsoft Display Dock) or wirelessly cast your phone to a display, giving you a more desktop-like experience. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum
- dbeley 1y ago> Maru is built on the latest Android Oreo. Yeah this is abandonware, idk why it's being posted and upvoted now. Something similar to real mobile/desktop convergence is still technically possible today with Phosh on PostMarketOS (or Mobian, Mobile NixOS or Arch ARM) and a compatible device with USB-C video out (like the PinePhone).
- Apocryphon 1y agoThere's something charming about the slickness and naviete of this abandonware site.
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoWe’re so close to laptop-free travel! Imagine running linux in UTM (the fast jit version, not the nerfed appstore version) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and VR sunglasses (eg. xreal make good ones that plug in to usb-c), on your iPhone. Or carry a phone that can run linux on bare metal - or can run Wayland in Android Terminal, a new feature in Android 16.
- harel 1y agoI carry my laptop with me all the time when I go on holiday, when I travel with my family etc. I have too many obligations to leave it behind. Many times I carry it for nothing, but sometimes it's needed. If I could have a dev environment on my phone with access to all my projects, and I could transform that phone to a full "computer", I'll be travelling about 1.1kg lighter.
- tetrisgm 1y agoI want something like this. But realistically I’ve had Samsung Dex for years and never use it. I liked the idea of Continuum. Leave my phone in a dock and magically it shows on the monitor and I use my mouse and keyboard. Again, no real life use case. Dex,Chrome OS, whatever distro pinephone and librem use, they all feel like I’d be having a lesser experience than using my iPhone or iPad. I don’t see this changing until Apple or Google decides to make the phones capable of handling apps in a desktop-like experience and environment. iPadOS 26 is very close to that vision. I can’t run that on my phone, but it is almost that perfect portable ubiquitous computer!
- kolja005 1y agoThis is pretty neat. Similarly, I feel like we are really close to smartwatches being able to replace smartphones for all essential tasks. I try to rely on my apple watch with cellular as much as I can and leave my phone at home. I can't wait until agents get a bit better at navigating the web and someone makes a killer UI for the watch. I'll be able to do everything I need to do with a much more ambient device that doesn't suck attention the way a smartphone does.
- maelito 1y agoUsed Samsung Dex for one year. Incredible experience, but closed source and too niche.
- interactivecode 1y agothis is what I want iOS and macOS to become. 1 OS. Plug in your phone and get a computer. unplug and get a phone.