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Comment by nwah1 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but most mobile OSes don't support a full desktop experience well, and you're limited to bluetooth peripherals only. Unless you have a rare phone that comes with a docking station.

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I have an OTG USB hub with Ethernet. Mouse, keyboard, and external drive can plug in all at once, and if I have a place to plug the other end of the cable I get wired network too. It even has power input to drive the peripherals. Add something like GNURoot with the Debian chroot and it's nearly desktop Linux on a tiny screen. It's more of a pain to set up during a meeting than a dedicated docking station would be. It also doesn't currently charge the phone (although there are ways to modify it to do that). It's nice for novelty but a little unwieldy. Using an OTG cable with a keyboard with a built-in hub reduces some of the cable clutter.

Some of the Chromebooks and such have no moving parts. I'm probably taking my Pinebook to the next conference I attend.

>Unless you have a rare phone that comes with a docking station.

Can't you just use any USB-C Dockingstation?

Not all phones support all the alternate modes of USB-C, especially display port or HDMI, so display output is often a hurdle.

Good point. I guess few people use those since phone OSes don't scale well for desktop use.

The latest MacBook is essentially mobile hardware with desktop peripherals and software. Seems like the right way to go rather than bloating a smartphone with desktop software given that the amount of people who want their smartphone to be their only interface to everything is likely a very small minority.

> Sure, but most mobile OSes don't support a full desktop experience well

This is due to the form factor, not the capability of the devices. A high end smart phone is more than capable of producing a good desktop experience.

It's purely a software issue. Microsoft, Ubuntu, and others have come close to building a responsive desktop GUI.

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