This Thursday, I signed up for coder.com (featured here on HN) and was able to write some Go code using VS Code in the browser. It was a pretty solid experience.
Performance was fine. I had my email and a podcast player going in the background and, honestly, I could probably do a lot of my day-to-day work with this and an EC2 box for running sites.
But it was glitchy, because Android hasn't really invested in this use case. The Taskbar home screen replacement would close the start menu as soon as it opened 90% of the time. There was a black space at the bottom of the screen which would change height almost randomly. Large windows conflicted with the notification bar and I'd end up opening my notifications when I wanted a new tag in Chrome. Right clicking maps to the back arrow in Chrome for some reason.
But the point is, between modern phone hardware and the cloud, we're not far from a performance perspective. We just have to decide that's where we want to go and commit to it.
You're looking for MaruOS. I've been following development for a while and it had come a long way. While it might not be this project in particular, I feel it's the future of computing.
No one was buying Windows Phones, and no one was making apps for Windows Phones, and this had gone on for many years, and not for lack of trying on Microsoft's part.
How could they not abandon mobile? What options were left to them?
I'm entirely used to one of them (SwiftKey) and I've tried several others as well. They've all offered amazing user experience, but I'm just not comfortable using Microsoft's Launcher for example.
What you need is a standard dock that can break out HDMI, USB ports for input and I/O, and a gigabit NIC. As it turns out, people make those for Macbooks right now.
Work in progress though.
I think we are there for performance, now it's a question of whether anyone gets the software right enough to make it practical. That includes the possibility of making a restorable image of everything on the phone so you can be up and running in an hour if you lose or break it. I have not used dex, so maybe they are already basically there.