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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

How long until I'm able to have my Ubuntu environment on a phone and plug it directly into my monitor, keyboard, and mouse? We already have the OS and peripherals, what's missing? It's not storage on the phone; Apple is selling 256GB iPhones. Is it the processing power?

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Samsung is currently working on Linux for Galaxy which is exactly this.

Also, the processors in your phone are closer to desktop performance that you might think. If you put any weight in GeekBench scores, single core scores for the new A11 are about the same as the single core scores for the Ryzen 1800x.

For all of 5 minutes until it's thermally throttled. They never tell you that on the "GeekBench". But yes, for those 5 minutes, it has somewhat the same performance as one of the eight processors on the 1800x.

Frankly, 1/8th 1800x and a whole A11 is about the same power budget, so that's not entirely surprising.

Yeah, also even if you could get rid of the thermal throttling, you're still dumping all that heat into the phone's body which could overheat/damage other components.

Most notably you're dumping it into the battery, which is already heating up itself just fine having to supply the extra current for your full CPU power burst. And sustained high temperatures are a surefire way to rapidly diminish the capacity of LiIon batteries. So I guess it's a good thing they have external power and a fan, even though it's dubious how much that does given the battery isn't seeing any of that airflow and is in the usual protective sleeve that doesn't exactly help thermal conductivity.

There is a reason Tesla watercool every individual metal 18650 cell.

The DeX product page explicitly says Built-in cooling fan, so they're definitely aware of overheating.

It's a single core comparison. According to geekbench a single A11 core is about the same speed as a single 1800X core.

Of course synthetic benchmarks aren't the best, but it is interesting how close arm has gotten to x86.

I played with this at the Samsung Developer Conference and it was the highlight of the show for me. It wasn't enough for me to buy in to the Samsung ecosystem, but it was enough for me to pay attention to what they're doing.

No. It's the willingness of manufacturers to make it possible.

We could have had this many years ago already. The technology was there, the performance was there, it's just that the willingness of phone manufacturers to enable users to do it was lacking and still is for the most part.

Probably because there's not that much demand for it either, outside of techie circles.

You can already do this (for at least two years) with Linux Deploy on Android and VNC to localhost. You start an Ubuntu image within Android and connect to it through an Android VNC client. Keyboard, monitor and mouse can be done through cabling or wireless. I use VR in Samsung GearVR. https://www.androidauthority.com/install-ubuntu-on-your-andr...

By "use VR..." do you mean that use a VNC client in VR mode? How is the resolution?

It's good enough for basic use of apps. I can read my e-books fine, browsing works as well. Yes, the letters are a bit dotty, but that's not an impediment. It's less comfortable as using a high res physical screen in front of you, but for terminal work it doesn't matter that much. I'm not sure about the resolution 1024x768 or higher depending on how close you are to the virtual screen. Do you remember working with 1024x768 screens? It's like that

if only phonecast would support running the dex environment. I would literally not leave gear vr ever again.

Didn't Ubuntu give up on making their OS support mobile? What's missing is the demand for a desktop OS on a phone.

It's being worked on:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/19/samsung-introduces-linux...

You can sign up for updates here:

https://seap.samsung.com/linux-on-galaxy

It's the processor which isn't x86 because of power consumption, etc. This means that even if you get a full blown linux distro, you'll need to compile a lot of shit for it before you can have a full cross platform dev experience.

Ubuntu phone was a step in the right direction. But the phone experience wasn't great so they gave up.

Samsung is trying to figure out the market interest on running Ubuntu directly on the phone. I saw it working at a convention and they directed me to sign up here to beta: https://seap.samsung.com/linux-on-galaxy

Just somebody to do it, and convince the hardware manufacturers it's a good idea. See the now defunct Ubuntu Phone project: https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/

It's definitely not the processing power, modern phones are beasts, they can compete with 10-year old PCs.

You can already do this today. I was doing it on my Samsung Galaxy S3 back in the day.

Essentially you install Ubuntu on top of Android. You then VNC to the Ubuntu Desktop from Android.

Android (using USB on the go) out of the box supports keyboard and mouse.

Not all devices support MicroHDMI, but the S3 did.

Yeah, suprisingly samsung has been sleeper developing something like DeX since the s3, and MHL was pretty dope for the time. Excited that samsung believes in the vision of the one device life.

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