Android on the desktop: Not really “good,” but better than you’d think | Hacker News Reader

Android on the desktop: Not really “good,” but better than you’d think

arstechnica.com

64 pointsBerislavLopac27 comments

I tried this a few years ago with an android on a stick device. It's definitely doable, but I'm fortunate to have the resources to not need such a thing.

I had Android running on a Mele Quad[1], with a mouse, keyboard and a big TV. The main problems were the awkward mouse controls and the fact you can only run one program at once, but for random web browsing it was fine. It's not going to replace my laptop any time soon though.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mele-A1000g-Quad-Android-Black/dp/B0...

I used an Asus Transformer Prime as my laptop for some time, and in some ways the experience described here sounds like it's actually gotten worse on an interface level since 4.0.

For the most part though, I found it reasonably decent for just a "monkeying around on the internet" desktop, but when I needed to actually do work, it quickly became useless. Google Docs on Android is a fucking travesty of a thing, and MS Office was not yet available at the time.

The experience on the Transformer Prime was pretty bad as well, for those who don't know.

A grand vision held back by the hardware.

> it's actually gotten worse on an interface level since 4.0.

I have never tried to use Android as a 'laptop OS' (even though the Pixel C is so very tempting) but from what I can gather, the interface has been rethought profoundly for 4.0 and focused on the mobile use case.

According to the rumors, Google is supposed to deliver a more polyvalent version of the OS (and more importantly of its own apps)... Let's see what happens (or not) at Google I/O.

I too have a Transformer Prime TF201 and find it fantastic for browsing. The years have not been kind to it; not only is it stuck on Android 4.2 it has become very slow and the battery in the keyboard half has died.

So I bought an ultra-cheap Windows 7" tablet. While it's much better from an application point of view (you can run Word on it, Visual Studio, and so on) it's really hard to use the traditional desktop without a mouse - everything is too small to be a touch target.

We reached peak Tablet usability somewhere around 4.3/4.4. At this point Android actually seemed to use some of that landscape screen space to do things like have the quick-settings menu drop down on the right-hand side of the screen, and have the notifications bar drop down from the left-hand side.

Then Google decided to merge the two, and since then it's been back to the "tablet is giant phone" interface.

Ars Technica has done several articles on Google's failure to follow its own design examples when reviewing tablets: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/the-nexus-10-lollipop...

If Google brings the full version of Chrome to Android, it will be a viable desktop OS. Not a good one, but certainly usable.

I few days ago I made a related question, but I got no answer. I'll link it here, maybe somebody can answer it.

Why can't Android run the full Chrome browser? Why can't Android's Chrome run Google Docs and Sheets? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716287

Why can't we simply have a regular desktop Linux on a tablet form factor?

You can. There are however a couple of things that make it hard:

1. The Android kernel is essentially a fork of the Linux kernel with a bunch of non-upstream features and non-upstreamable crapware drivers written by the phone/tablet vendors. By and large mainstream Linux distros are only happy to ship upstream kernels. This means you'd need to run a hybrid distro userspace + Android kernel, which sucks because of missing kernel features, lack of integration with distro packaging, and lack of security updates for the kernel (unless you apply them by hand each time yourself).

2. Mainstream Linux desktops suck without a mouse and don't have any multitouch features -- despite groups like GNOME fetishizing iOS, they haven't "got" what makes it good nor provided a competent replacement. Also the form-factor of a phone or tablet is quite different from a laptop or desktop and so requires somewhat special GUI software - single app at a time, on screen keyboard, larger text, page-sized forms without decorations and so on.

Anyway, you can look at Ubuntu Phone as a good place to start.

been watching the progress towards higher and higher powered mobile devices and I can see a point if someone decides to do it when your compute and 'emergency screen' is your mobile device and you get to home/office and dock to your keyboard/mouse/screen setup and you are away.

I've actually done this in the past on my Nexus 7. It's really not too bad. There's a few things to get used to as mentioned in the article. With the rise of online IDEs, cloud technologies, and a remote desktop app, I can actually do all of my work on an Android tablet.

I'm really surprised that we haven't seen more phone + car integrations. I realize CarPlay is on a few models, but you'd think it would be all over the place by now.

It is all over the place. Cars play the phone musics, and answer the phone - the two useful actions for it, they could also sync GPS targets, but that requires cooperation with Google/Apple.

It just works, so people don't talk about it anymore.

bluetooth isn't really about interaction though, and voice activation doesn't give you enough control or feedback.

I'd really just like my dash screen to show the contents of my phone... or better yet ... have the phone adapt to the dimensions of the screen, and change the layout/interaction style, etc.

So...it's pointless? I guess I get the drive from G/A/M for OSes that are unified across devices - it makes life easier from their perspective, and from the perspective of people developing for their systems (and I count myself among those ranks) to just have one OS to develop for. But I don't understand why users would or should accept this (which, yes, according to the fcking XKCD that'll get posted five seconds after I say this in accordance with internet law, means it'll be the biggest thing in the world in five years). It seems like for users this just means you get an OS that isn't optimized for any use case.

Wish I could try Remix OS in a VM.

Yes that's what I am thinking too. Where can I download Remix OS?

Is RemixOS open source? https://forum.jide.com/index.php?p=/discussion/563/source-co... . Seems a bit shady.

Well, I will wait for Google to merge/combine ChromeOS and Android somehow to offer the best of both worlds then. An Android smartphone/tablets that offers ChromeOS capabilities (or an mouse+keyboard centric) window manager when connected to a monitor/projector would be awesome. I think this will be the future.

For desktop usage, I would have expected a look at Office solutions.

They demonstrate MS Office in the slideshow.

Android is an OS for text messaging and web browsing. If that's all you want to do then it's great! Otherwise it's absolutely aweful.

I would say navigation on it is fantastic, setting alarms ("ok google set alarm for 10 minutes" - spot on every time), getting weather reports ("ok google what's the weather like"), and occasionally reading a PDF instruction manual while at the instrument in question are things that android do modestly well. I think that comprises the use cases for android for me.

All the things you have described are "phone" type applications rather than desktop applications (consumption versus creation in my mind). Ok, that's very much a generalisation, but I think that what the original comment was getting at.

I'm not so sure. With media apps like Netflix, BBC iPlayer, VLC etc and a fairly capable if somewhat basic version of MS Office available? Throw in the aforementioned web browsing as well and it's probably viable for 80% of a casual computer users' needs.

The OS itself shouldn't really matter as long as it can stay out of the way in the background, one thing Android does offer is a large ecosystem of apps.

And that would distinguish it from other operating systems in what ways?

Users of other operating systems are often not doing much more in their daily activities, and recent OS updates tend to support that more and more (OS X's notifications, Windows start screen and metro apps etc.)

Apart from that, what does centering on messaging/browsing take away from e.g. word processing or other office uses? Or how is multiplexing browser views inherently different from multiplexing terminal windows?

I'm not saying that I'm particularly fond of the way Android does things, but I don't think its focus is to blame for that.

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