7 ms·

It'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

It'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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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.
- fensgrim 1y ago
  IMO it comes down to marketing: can't have the kayfabe of selling something that is "not a computer"/"new kind of computer" and have it act like a "computer" too
  - hx8 1y ago
    Marketing played a role yes, but plenty of other phone operating systems failed that had much stronger marketing then Ubuntu ever would have.
    - tombert 1y ago
      Not a phone, but I really liked the Blackberry Playbook's QNX system. It was extremely smooth and easy to use, and was fairly easy to develop for. They shit the bed by betting on Flash, which was a dying tech, but I was pretty sad when Blackberry just went to "another Android phone", since I thought what they had was pretty neat. Blackberry definitely had much better marketing than Ubuntu has ever had, and for reasons probably too complicated for me to fully understand, they're sort of a joke now.
- msgodel 1y ago
  I ran Ubuntu Touch briefly on a Nexus 5 as well. IIRC the two issues I had were: 1) calls and MMS not working well. 2) Instead of a normal GNU/Linux OS Ubuntu Touch tried really hard to have an Android style immutable OS. Kind of the worst of both worlds since you have a difficult to work with OS but without the app ecosystem of Android that some people believe makes it worth using. After that I kind of just gave up on the idea that I owned my phone at all and a few years later I gave up carrying smartphones entirely.
richwater 1y ago
> but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most This seems to be a product decision not a limitation. Apple cannot implement this without self-cannabalizing sales of the other.
pydry 1y ago
It sounds like a nice idea in theory but I dont think demand is that high.
- fsflover 1y ago
  Except all those people who don't own a computer and are stuck on old Android phones. Debian can allow lifetime updates btw.
- OldfieldFund 1y ago
  Apple has this out of the box with MacBooks + iPhones. But in their case, it's easy to implement.
bee_rider 1y ago
You can get like 65% of the way there by just using i3wm with an onscreen keyboard and really big window borders (so you have somewhere to poke to change windows). But you have to contend with the fact that it is a basically fine touch window manager showing you… applications that were designed without touch in mind at all.
- fsflover 1y ago
  You don't have to suffer: Phosh and convergent apps exist.
fsflover 1y ago
> A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS based on Debian. No Android dependencies and possibility of full desktop mode. How is this not a success?
- happyopossum 1y ago
  You and several thousand other people see it that way, meanwhile the billions of other computer users out here don’t.
  - hgomersall 1y ago
    Do they have a choice? I mean, an actual one that doesn't take significant technical ability.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Those billions need to accept the facts. They're not getting a Windows phone again, and Apple won't likely cannibalize Mac demand with the iPhone. If they want to have their cake and eat it too, they can either run Linux in an Android container, or Android in a Linux container.
    - philistine 1y ago
      People don't want to quickly turn their phone into a desktop, they want to quickly turn their phone into a laptop. Apple's laptops are over 75% of its sales. And if you have the screen and keyboard of a laptop, why not put a CPU, battery et al. in there?
      - fsflover 1y ago
        I think you are missing the point. People don't want to turn anything into anything. They want a minimal number of devices covering all their needs.
    - WorldPeas 1y ago
      then I guess we'll have to wait for companies like huawei with their mate xt, or more likely given friendshoring, the samsung trifold to give people phones that turn into tablets and have a companion keyboard for them to feel this is enough of a threat to address
jklinger410 1y ago
GNOME is still plugging away at this, making sure their entire OS is usable on mobile. Even without a market or audience.
- bsimpson 1y ago
  Both impressively and disappointingly, that seems to be literally one guy in Germany. https://gitlab.gnome.org/verdre/gnome-shell-mobile https://gitlab.gnome.org/verdre/gnome-shell-mobile relevant https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
  - fsflover 1y ago
    Purism company contributed a lot to mobile Gnome UI.
cardanome 1y ago
> 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. Yeah, apple could solve that instantly. Sadly, they decided to play a cash cow strategy of milking existing users instead for trying to grow market share. Apple is so frustrating. Amazing hardware but then they complete shit the bead with the software side of things and act actively hostile against their own users.
- bsimpson 1y ago
  It's a product decision. Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS. Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system. Adaptive design has fared best on the web, but it's still not settled. See, for instance, the back-and-forth around density defaults for web apps like Gmail. Some people really like their pointer-friendly dense UIs with hover buttons, and that makes them really hard to use on a touchscreen. Perhaps ironically, Apple is also in the best position to bridge the gap. Since they own the UI stack that renders most apps on Apple devices, they could do something clever like say "a button is 32px tall if there's a trackpad and 56px tall otherwise." Rules like that could produce an app that truly adapts to the user's primary modality. The other systems have too many UI frameworks for that to work. Apple could only pull it off because ~everyone uses their component set (I think it's called UIKit). They also have a reputation of declaring the future and making the ecosystem catch up (going all the way back to adopting USB exclusively on the first iMac).
  - LamaOfRuin 1y ago
    There are no new native apps, only Electron or similar. This is only sort of sarcasm.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    > Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Concerning Windows, you're right. Concerning GNU/Linux you aren't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085
bboygravity 1y ago
Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for. Indeed I don't think it's reasonable to then also make it work on some completely different phone hardware that has a operational life of like 2 years + full of closed source hardware and drivers. If you want users, the thing has to be usable. For the thing to be usable it needs software with perfect hardware support. Google, Android vendors and Apple (and to some extend System 76) understand this.
- vimredo 1y ago
  For Linux to gain 5% marketshare, I really doubt it "barely works" on a "limited set of hardware that it was designed for". It can run headless on basically anything better than a Pentium, and it mostly just works on average hardware (except fingerprint sensors and Nvidia). I've had no problem with Linux on all my hardware, and I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Besides working with it on servers on regular basis, and having had enough with it on desktops and laptops since 1995, last year I managed to get a NUC, where Ubuntu, Red-Hat and SuSE weren't able to boot from the internal SSD or get along with UEFI, only booting from the external drive worked. So yeah no problem, and yes I know should have gone to the usual forums asking everyone and their dog if someone before me had ever succeeded installing Linux on this brick.
    - knowitnone2 1y ago
      then don't use it. Linux needs less people like you
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        And I don't, Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux and VMs are good enough. If others have fun making it work, good for them, I have better ways to spend the rest of my life on this litte sphere. As what Linux needs, I thought it needs every little user, to make a difference against Apple and Microsoft, after all we are always told that now is the year everyone is going to flee into Linux.
ashishb 1y ago
In the long term markets usually specialize https://ashishb.net/tech/the-android-chrome-merger-saga/ https://ashishb.net/tech/the-android-chrome-merger-saga/
prmoustache 1y ago
I think the true reason is that onñy a small fraction of people are interested in convergence and most people are fine, or even truly desire, to have different devices and experiences. Millions (billions?) of people are happy to leave their phone in another room when working on their computer and vice-versa. Sure you could use a do not disturb button but it would be a major PITA to have enough granularity to allow or disallow certain app/services to notify you and you would be certain to forget to activate/deactivate it when you really want.
- outofpaper 1y ago
  Billions of users don't have a computer they work on and don't realize that this might be an option.
p1necone 1y ago
Imo trying to make a single UX that just changes a little bit to suit different device types is a misguided approach. Using a large screen with a mouse and keyboard is a fundamentally different thing to using a phone with a touch screen. Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!) There are some fuzzy boundaries - e.g. imo Gnome 3 has proven that a single experience can feel good on both a tablet and a single screen laptop with a good track pad. But I think paradoxically you need to take different approaches on different use modes if you want to provide true unity.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Try the KDE applications designed for this, like kasts, alligator, qrca and see for yourself. I don't think it can necessarily work for any kind of application, but for some simpler ones I think it's completely fine.
  - p1necone 1y ago
    > designed for this This is kind of my point - I'm not saying you can't have applications that are usable across multiple UX paradigms, and I'm also not saying you can't write a UX library that automatically translates at least simple applications with little manual effort. I'm just saying this requires active buy in from application developers into the ecosystem - you can't just run everything on all devices and have it magically work (with usability comparable to current state of the art in single device applications).
    - axelthegerman 1y ago
      And to have buy in it needs to exist first :) Like websites nowadays being usually designed for mobile and desktop devices
      - LtWorf 1y ago
        kirigami
LtWorf 1y ago
Plasma mobile is not flawless but it's very good. I use a tablet daily to do tablet stuff: read news or play sokoban while pooping, watching cartoons…
RajT88 1y ago
The people I knew with a Windows phone said it worked awesome for them, the desktop mode. Samsung DeX is not bad! It is not as good as a real desktop, but it will do in a pinch.
- asveikau 1y ago
  I kind of doubt it did work well for them. Microsoft was having an identity crisis at that time where they didn't yet realize nobody wanted their tablet UI on desktop. If they allowed straight Win32 ports on ARM it could have been interesting. Or if they did it now, where I think x86 emulation on arm is working well these days.
  - RajT88 1y ago
    In fairness, most people I knew with Windows phones worked for MSFT. But a few (the ones I talked to the most) were just people interested in the Windows ecosystem. One was running Windows Home Server. Those folks all swore that everything was great (except the app ecosystem). I can only go by what I was told.
- Joeri 1y ago
  I tried out that windows phone continuum feature back in the day to try and get actual work done. Here's what I remember of it. You could connect it wirelessly to your windows laptop and it would take over screen, keyboard and mouse from the laptop. The actual connecting part worked smoothly, but it could only stream one relatively low res screen and even then over a wireless connection it felt sluggish. I couldn't use the laptop while the phone was connected, and this was its biggest handicap because I would have preferred the phone's desktop in a window similar to running a virtualized OS, with easy drag-and-drop and copy-paste. The experience was that you had the same phone apps with the same feature set as on the phone, but they transformed into desktop layouts. For the first party apps this worked fine, but many of the third party apps didn't work at all or didn't work well, so I ended up largely being stuck with the first party apps, mostly the mobile versions of Outlook and Edge, and the file explorer. At the time these were seriously limited compared to the desktop counterparts. In that version of Edge I couldn't use many of the web apps that I tried. The outlook version was very basic, but I still managed to get some of my email done. The apps only appeared fullscreen. I get why they did it on the weak phone hardware of the time, but this was very limiting. You could alt-tab however, and there was the windows taskbar. The start menu was the phone's home screen, so you would see the exact same tile layout as you saw on the phone, and clicking a tile would open the app. I really liked this solution because it gave a lot of flexibility while being instantly familiar. Bottom line it wasn't really suited at being a one stop computing experience, but it was a good way to do the things you would otherwise do on the phone on a larger canvas. It was good for what it was, but it was not in any way a laptop replacement. What really killed it as a useful feature for me was what ultimately killed windows phone: the lack of a decent app catalog. I still think in its time windows phone was the best mobile OS, but the app gap meant that it never stood a chance.
snapplebobapple 1y ago
I think it's more than phone hardware is still really locked down/non standardized, so there aren't a lot of viable options to get alternatives on there without also being a hardware designer and having the bank to go with that. Need a big country to force a standardization on the hardware interface/bios and an opening up similar to what we have in pc components and this will get a lot more interesting. Sadly the chance of that happening is near zero and the interests of google and apple lie in more lockdown, not less.
jaimex2 1y ago
Nokia nailed this 2005 with Maemo actually but didn't have the grit to see it through. Understandable as the risk of going all in on would have been a hard sell to the board vs a slow cosy death they couldn't see coming.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Grit is one possible interpretation. A bad c-suite culture is another. Same as with Kodak.
heisenbit 1y ago
What is the point of convergence when you can sell two devices to one customer?
ksec 1y ago
Because I think ultimately it is only good on paper. In practice you want your computer to be able to act on itself as well. So it is hard to get the balance right. I do think for enterprise and business it should work though. Especially we are all on mobile already and most of the time we need to work on something that is on our phone. I wonder if there could be another blackberry moment on this? Or Something Microsoft Windows could work on, as a way to get back into Mobile. I have long argued they should have spend small R&D on possible Mobile OS just in case opportunities pops up. Bring back Pocket PC. Tie it up with Azure and CoPilot.

tombert 1y ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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.
fensgrim 1y ago
IMO it comes down to marketing: can't have the kayfabe of selling something that is "not a computer"/"new kind of computer" and have it act like a "computer" too
- hx8 1y ago
  Marketing played a role yes, but plenty of other phone operating systems failed that had much stronger marketing then Ubuntu ever would have.
  - tombert 1y ago
    Not a phone, but I really liked the Blackberry Playbook's QNX system. It was extremely smooth and easy to use, and was fairly easy to develop for. They shit the bed by betting on Flash, which was a dying tech, but I was pretty sad when Blackberry just went to "another Android phone", since I thought what they had was pretty neat. Blackberry definitely had much better marketing than Ubuntu has ever had, and for reasons probably too complicated for me to fully understand, they're sort of a joke now.
msgodel 1y ago
I ran Ubuntu Touch briefly on a Nexus 5 as well. IIRC the two issues I had were: 1) calls and MMS not working well. 2) Instead of a normal GNU/Linux OS Ubuntu Touch tried really hard to have an Android style immutable OS. Kind of the worst of both worlds since you have a difficult to work with OS but without the app ecosystem of Android that some people believe makes it worth using. After that I kind of just gave up on the idea that I owned my phone at all and a few years later I gave up carrying smartphones entirely.

richwater 1y ago

> but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most This seems to be a product decision not a limitation. Apple cannot implement this without self-cannabalizing sales of the other.

pydry 1y ago

It sounds like a nice idea in theory but I dont think demand is that high.

fsflover 1y ago
Except all those people who don't own a computer and are stuck on old Android phones. Debian can allow lifetime updates btw.
OldfieldFund 1y ago
Apple has this out of the box with MacBooks + iPhones. But in their case, it's easy to implement.

bee_rider 1y ago

You can get like 65% of the way there by just using i3wm with an onscreen keyboard and really big window borders (so you have somewhere to poke to change windows). But you have to contend with the fact that it is a basically fine touch window manager showing you… applications that were designed without touch in mind at all.

fsflover 1y ago
You don't have to suffer: Phosh and convergent apps exist.

fsflover 1y ago

> A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS based on Debian. No Android dependencies and possibility of full desktop mode. How is this not a success?

happyopossum 1y ago
You and several thousand other people see it that way, meanwhile the billions of other computer users out here don’t.
- hgomersall 1y ago
  Do they have a choice? I mean, an actual one that doesn't take significant technical ability.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Those billions need to accept the facts. They're not getting a Windows phone again, and Apple won't likely cannibalize Mac demand with the iPhone. If they want to have their cake and eat it too, they can either run Linux in an Android container, or Android in a Linux container.
  - philistine 1y ago
    People don't want to quickly turn their phone into a desktop, they want to quickly turn their phone into a laptop. Apple's laptops are over 75% of its sales. And if you have the screen and keyboard of a laptop, why not put a CPU, battery et al. in there?
    - fsflover 1y ago
      I think you are missing the point. People don't want to turn anything into anything. They want a minimal number of devices covering all their needs.
  - WorldPeas 1y ago
    then I guess we'll have to wait for companies like huawei with their mate xt, or more likely given friendshoring, the samsung trifold to give people phones that turn into tablets and have a companion keyboard for them to feel this is enough of a threat to address

jklinger410 1y ago

GNOME is still plugging away at this, making sure their entire OS is usable on mobile. Even without a market or audience.

bsimpson 1y ago
Both impressively and disappointingly, that seems to be literally one guy in Germany. https://gitlab.gnome.org/verdre/gnome-shell-mobile https://gitlab.gnome.org/verdre/gnome-shell-mobile relevant https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- fsflover 1y ago
  Purism company contributed a lot to mobile Gnome UI.

cardanome 1y ago

> 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. Yeah, apple could solve that instantly. Sadly, they decided to play a cash cow strategy of milking existing users instead for trying to grow market share. Apple is so frustrating. Amazing hardware but then they complete shit the bead with the software side of things and act actively hostile against their own users.

bsimpson 1y ago
It's a product decision. Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS. Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system. Adaptive design has fared best on the web, but it's still not settled. See, for instance, the back-and-forth around density defaults for web apps like Gmail. Some people really like their pointer-friendly dense UIs with hover buttons, and that makes them really hard to use on a touchscreen. Perhaps ironically, Apple is also in the best position to bridge the gap. Since they own the UI stack that renders most apps on Apple devices, they could do something clever like say "a button is 32px tall if there's a trackpad and 56px tall otherwise." Rules like that could produce an app that truly adapts to the user's primary modality. The other systems have too many UI frameworks for that to work. Apple could only pull it off because ~everyone uses their component set (I think it's called UIKit). They also have a reputation of declaring the future and making the ecosystem catch up (going all the way back to adopting USB exclusively on the first iMac).
- LamaOfRuin 1y ago
  There are no new native apps, only Electron or similar. This is only sort of sarcasm.
- fsflover 1y ago
  > Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Concerning Windows, you're right. Concerning GNU/Linux you aren't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085

bboygravity 1y ago

Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for. Indeed I don't think it's reasonable to then also make it work on some completely different phone hardware that has a operational life of like 2 years + full of closed source hardware and drivers. If you want users, the thing has to be usable. For the thing to be usable it needs software with perfect hardware support. Google, Android vendors and Apple (and to some extend System 76) understand this.

vimredo 1y ago
For Linux to gain 5% marketshare, I really doubt it "barely works" on a "limited set of hardware that it was designed for". It can run headless on basically anything better than a Pentium, and it mostly just works on average hardware (except fingerprint sensors and Nvidia). I've had no problem with Linux on all my hardware, and I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Besides working with it on servers on regular basis, and having had enough with it on desktops and laptops since 1995, last year I managed to get a NUC, where Ubuntu, Red-Hat and SuSE weren't able to boot from the internal SSD or get along with UEFI, only booting from the external drive worked. So yeah no problem, and yes I know should have gone to the usual forums asking everyone and their dog if someone before me had ever succeeded installing Linux on this brick.
  - knowitnone2 1y ago
    then don't use it. Linux needs less people like you
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      And I don't, Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux and VMs are good enough. If others have fun making it work, good for them, I have better ways to spend the rest of my life on this litte sphere. As what Linux needs, I thought it needs every little user, to make a difference against Apple and Microsoft, after all we are always told that now is the year everyone is going to flee into Linux.

ashishb 1y ago

In the long term markets usually specialize https://ashishb.net/tech/the-android-chrome-merger-saga/ https://ashishb.net/tech/the-android-chrome-merger-saga/

prmoustache 1y ago

I think the true reason is that onñy a small fraction of people are interested in convergence and most people are fine, or even truly desire, to have different devices and experiences. Millions (billions?) of people are happy to leave their phone in another room when working on their computer and vice-versa. Sure you could use a do not disturb button but it would be a major PITA to have enough granularity to allow or disallow certain app/services to notify you and you would be certain to forget to activate/deactivate it when you really want.

outofpaper 1y ago
Billions of users don't have a computer they work on and don't realize that this might be an option.

p1necone 1y ago

Imo trying to make a single UX that just changes a little bit to suit different device types is a misguided approach. Using a large screen with a mouse and keyboard is a fundamentally different thing to using a phone with a touch screen. Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!) There are some fuzzy boundaries - e.g. imo Gnome 3 has proven that a single experience can feel good on both a tablet and a single screen laptop with a good track pad. But I think paradoxically you need to take different approaches on different use modes if you want to provide true unity.

LtWorf 1y ago
Try the KDE applications designed for this, like kasts, alligator, qrca and see for yourself. I don't think it can necessarily work for any kind of application, but for some simpler ones I think it's completely fine.
- p1necone 1y ago
  > designed for this This is kind of my point - I'm not saying you can't have applications that are usable across multiple UX paradigms, and I'm also not saying you can't write a UX library that automatically translates at least simple applications with little manual effort. I'm just saying this requires active buy in from application developers into the ecosystem - you can't just run everything on all devices and have it magically work (with usability comparable to current state of the art in single device applications).
  - axelthegerman 1y ago
    And to have buy in it needs to exist first :) Like websites nowadays being usually designed for mobile and desktop devices
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      kirigami

LtWorf 1y ago

Plasma mobile is not flawless but it's very good. I use a tablet daily to do tablet stuff: read news or play sokoban while pooping, watching cartoons…

RajT88 1y ago

The people I knew with a Windows phone said it worked awesome for them, the desktop mode. Samsung DeX is not bad! It is not as good as a real desktop, but it will do in a pinch.

asveikau 1y ago
I kind of doubt it did work well for them. Microsoft was having an identity crisis at that time where they didn't yet realize nobody wanted their tablet UI on desktop. If they allowed straight Win32 ports on ARM it could have been interesting. Or if they did it now, where I think x86 emulation on arm is working well these days.
- RajT88 1y ago
  In fairness, most people I knew with Windows phones worked for MSFT. But a few (the ones I talked to the most) were just people interested in the Windows ecosystem. One was running Windows Home Server. Those folks all swore that everything was great (except the app ecosystem). I can only go by what I was told.
Joeri 1y ago
I tried out that windows phone continuum feature back in the day to try and get actual work done. Here's what I remember of it. You could connect it wirelessly to your windows laptop and it would take over screen, keyboard and mouse from the laptop. The actual connecting part worked smoothly, but it could only stream one relatively low res screen and even then over a wireless connection it felt sluggish. I couldn't use the laptop while the phone was connected, and this was its biggest handicap because I would have preferred the phone's desktop in a window similar to running a virtualized OS, with easy drag-and-drop and copy-paste. The experience was that you had the same phone apps with the same feature set as on the phone, but they transformed into desktop layouts. For the first party apps this worked fine, but many of the third party apps didn't work at all or didn't work well, so I ended up largely being stuck with the first party apps, mostly the mobile versions of Outlook and Edge, and the file explorer. At the time these were seriously limited compared to the desktop counterparts. In that version of Edge I couldn't use many of the web apps that I tried. The outlook version was very basic, but I still managed to get some of my email done. The apps only appeared fullscreen. I get why they did it on the weak phone hardware of the time, but this was very limiting. You could alt-tab however, and there was the windows taskbar. The start menu was the phone's home screen, so you would see the exact same tile layout as you saw on the phone, and clicking a tile would open the app. I really liked this solution because it gave a lot of flexibility while being instantly familiar. Bottom line it wasn't really suited at being a one stop computing experience, but it was a good way to do the things you would otherwise do on the phone on a larger canvas. It was good for what it was, but it was not in any way a laptop replacement. What really killed it as a useful feature for me was what ultimately killed windows phone: the lack of a decent app catalog. I still think in its time windows phone was the best mobile OS, but the app gap meant that it never stood a chance.

snapplebobapple 1y ago

I think it's more than phone hardware is still really locked down/non standardized, so there aren't a lot of viable options to get alternatives on there without also being a hardware designer and having the bank to go with that. Need a big country to force a standardization on the hardware interface/bios and an opening up similar to what we have in pc components and this will get a lot more interesting. Sadly the chance of that happening is near zero and the interests of google and apple lie in more lockdown, not less.

jaimex2 1y ago

Nokia nailed this 2005 with Maemo actually but didn't have the grit to see it through. Understandable as the risk of going all in on would have been a hard sell to the board vs a slow cosy death they couldn't see coming.

fragmede 1y ago
Grit is one possible interpretation. A bad c-suite culture is another. Same as with Kodak.

heisenbit 1y ago

What is the point of convergence when you can sell two devices to one customer?

ksec 1y ago

Because I think ultimately it is only good on paper. In practice you want your computer to be able to act on itself as well. So it is hard to get the balance right. I do think for enterprise and business it should work though. Especially we are all on mobile already and most of the time we need to work on something that is on our phone. I wonder if there could be another blackberry moment on this? Or Something Microsoft Windows could work on, as a way to get back into Mobile. I have long argued they should have spend small R&D on possible Mobile OS just in case opportunities pops up. Bring back Pocket PC. Tie it up with Azure and CoPilot.