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Samsung, Motorola and Huawei have had this for years. Samsung DeX is probably the most popular desktop environment of its type, and has been available for 9 yea
by rchaud 6mo ago
Samsung, Motorola and Huawei have had this for years. Samsung DeX is probably the most popular desktop environment of its type, and has been available for 9 years. Plenty of people use it (like myself), but it's too niche of a use case for the masses.
The 2011 Motorola Atrix came with a proprietary dock to connect to. Modern desktop environments can use the USB-C 3.2 DP ports on the phone to provide video out. Lapdock shells are widely available online.
- gambiting 6mo agoThe thing is, Samsung DEX works great but I've never met anyone who has heard of it even among people who have owned nothing but Samsung phones forever. Samsung just sucks at advertising the feature. They should sell a bundle of phone + portable USB-C screen + Bluetooth mouse and keyboard and the thing would sell pretty well I would imagine. But right now no one even knows this exists.
- rchaud 6mo agoThe product is perfectly fine as it is. The way I see it, if it's being advertised, it's being monetized behind the scenes. That changes incentives and usually makes the product experience worse. All it has to be is a window manager that supports standard desktop KB shortcuts (CTRL-C, ALT+Tab, etc.)
- prmoustache 6mo agoI also think a lot of people actually prefer having a separation of devices.
- pixel_popping 6mo agoI also wouldn't feel safe using Samsung forks for work related stuff where security is very sensitive.
- rchaud 6mo agoDeX is not a fork. It is a UI layer on the phone that activates when you connect to a USB-C display. There is no difference between doing something on your phone and on DeX.
- pixel_popping 6mo agoYeah I meant the Android forks.
- gambiting 6mo agoSo you mean you wouldn't feel safe using a Samsung phone period.
- pixel_popping 6mo agoAbsolutely, the same way as I wouldn't trust Windows for serious work.
- gambiting 6mo agoI wonder what you consider serious work then, because as a developer I think Visual Studio is the most "serious" developer environment there is, and I'd take it over any linux or Mac based setup.
- pixel_popping 6mo agoThink about it like this: Would you manage a fortune in crypto on Windows? I wouldn't, because I just wouldn't even trust my environment at first. And for Visual Studio, I would solely run it in a firewalled VM. MS employees have access to a lot of your work/data/fingerprints which makes it insecure by default. There is also serious privacy concerns, basic one would be that telemetry sends all HWID of devices by default, so if you share a USB stick with a friend, you two are automatically correlated in MS database, not really my cup of tea. Not a big fan of an OS asking for an ID indirectly (via mandatory phone number) as well, mandatory MS account at install time (except if you tamper with the ISO, yeah sure)