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Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

I hope some day, somebody will recognize that phones have become our everyday computers, and will create such a device.

A phone that is just that on it's own, but couple it with a dock and it becomes a desktop computer. It will of course require apps to have both phone and desktop UI variants, but given that most serious apps already have both phone and desktop versions i don't really see that as a major problem.

My current phone has just about as much RAM, CPU and GPU as my desktop machine has, so performance should be somewhat "desktop like".

I'm aware this is partially what Ubuntu tried to do with the Ubuntu Phone, but last i checked that project wasn't doing too well.

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The only real problem is the proprietary apps that refuse to support anything except Apple and Google.

The question of Linux-ready phone is basically about writing a better-than-perfect emulator for those apps. Like it was done with Wine/Proton.

They just need to get Anbox working.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anbox

GNOME has been updating software to be resizable so that you can run normal GNU/Linux on a phone with the same programs. I think it's called libhandy. There's also the added benefit of being able to get the mobile UI on a computer to try out, or just to save space on your screen. We will see this used on both the PinePhone and Librem 5.

Samsung Dex has been doing this for years now.

I was surprised how useful Dex has become, and yet no one seems to speak about it.

Currently the only thing holding me back is that my particular phone (S9+) has fairly limited resolution support. IIRC the Note models are supposed to do much better as they have a discrete GPU for Dex output.

But basically all my day-to-day development tasks can be done on Dex and a SSH/terminal app.

I second your sentiment but the Android keyboard (external Bluetooth) is not very Linux friendly. I googled and experimented and there is no way to have an Esc key. I have to work in vi with control ], like on some broken terminal from the 80s. If anybody has a solution I'll pay with an upvote :-)

You can connect any regular keyboard through BT or USB. The escape key just works as expected.

Motorola Atrix and others too.

AFAICT, there are two main reasons it hasn't caught on:

1. It doesn't follow the normal technology adoption curve. Most tech is adopted first by technically savvy individuals who know how to deal with the "quirks" of living on the bleeding edge. And then evangelize it to the normies.

But a docked phone is for the normals, only techies need the power of a standalone computer.

2: A monitor + keyboard + dock can be more expensive and less convenient than a chromebook.

But it's an obvious idea and eventually it will happen. Once Google and/or Apple takes it seriously and integrate it into the base operating system, it'll slowly spread.

I was just thinking about Dex the other day. By any chance do you know if a simple USB C to HDMI cable will work? Or do you need a Samsung specific dongle?

Any cable will do in my experience.

> but last i checked that project wasn't doing too well.

Check it out again :)

OTA-12 is closed to be released https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/15

Replying to myself here.

Everybody seems to be stuck in the past, insisting on differentiating phones and desktops.

Smartphones are a relic from last decade. They were revolutionary when they arrived, and in a few years completely wiped out not only competing phones but also compact cameras, GPS gadgets and more.

Since then not much has changed. Apple invents something and Samsung etc, rushes to ridicule them and then copies the feature. Apple does the same (minus the ridicule). The smartphone innovation for the past 4-5 years has pretty much been limited to a missing headphone jack and a screen notch. Everything else has been incremental upgrades.

Still, the first iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the 3G model had an App Store but no apps in the beginning. And people still bought them. The iPad was ridiculed when it was unveiled, and yet it seems like everybody has a tablet these days. The smart watch was curiosity until Apple launched the Apple Watch, and it was ridiculed for being ugly. Millions of people bought them, and today they’re pretty well underway to disrupting the fitness tracker and health monitoring devices.

Bring the right technology along with a developer friendly environment and that could easily happen again if the technology is disruptive enough.

I don’t just want a phone that is half bad at showing desktop apps. I want a completely new device. Yes it will (probably) be a phone sized gadget, and you will (probably) be able to make calls from it, but it most likely won’t be 2G, 3G or 4G.

It will (probably) be a 5G device that isn’t a phone as we know it, but instead an internet connected device that does everything over the internet.

“Desktop” is also outdated. 5G is here, and with it fast internet for everything that has a processor. Screen technology has also advanced to the point that your wallpaper can almost become a monitor today.

Point your device at the wall (using existing technology like the U1 chip in current gen iPhones) and suddenly your dining room wall is a 4K Cinema Display being broadcast to from your phone. Your kitchen wall or office wall could become a desktop display, again broadcast to from your phone.

It will be a door to the connected world 24/7. The companies will put me under surveillance sending tracking data back to the cloud at the speed of 5G. Very nice next gen tech

This has been tried several times. First one I remember was the Motorola Atrix in 2011. Performance might be better now, but it would fail for the same reason they always do: most people don’t want a phone with a Linux desktop.

And yet, Apple has been successfully pushing a Unix desktop for years.

It's all a matter of how it is wrapped. People don't want a linux desktop with the usual linux tools. People want a desktop/phone with an app store and "point & click".

People also want their usual apps, and we've come a long way in the past decade. Office apps are now on every major platform, and lets face it, Office apps are the bread and butter of desktop platforms. Messaging has moved from desktop messengers 20 years ago, to everything messaging living on a phone, to some extent also including email (which apparently refuses to die)

I don't know much about Android hardware, but the current generation of A13 processors in iPhones has nearly the (benchmark) performance of the low end 2019 Core i7 processor, which should be enough for a large part of users, including developers compiling stuff.

I agree that the next revolution probably won't come from a start up pushing "ready made" phones with a different skin/feature set. And i doubt anyone has the resources to make this happen but a few select players, like Apple, Google, Microsoft and IBM.

For this to work, all the apps that a person expects to see on their computer should be there, running on an ARM chip. So far, Microsoft hasn’t gotten traction there. Apple will of course pull macOS users along, but it’s been running away from modularity since the PowerBook Duo.

You say, it doesn’t have to be native apps - Google Docs, etc works great in the browser. Then you’re competing with Chromebooks, and I’m not sure a modular system can be as cheap as that.

Smartphones are a relic from last decade. They were revolutionary when they arrived, and in a few years completely wiped out not only competing phones but also compact cameras, GPS gadgets and more.

Still, the first iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the 3G model had an App Store but no apps in the beginning. And people still bought them.

The iPad was ridiculed when it was unveiled, and yet it seems like everybody has a tablet these days.

The smart watch was curiosity until Apple launched the Apple Watch, and it was ridiculed for being ugly. Millions of people bought them, and today they’re pretty well underway to disrupting the fitness tracker and health monitoring devices.

Bring the right technology along with a developer friendly environment and that could easily happen again if the technology is disruptive enough.

As for competing with chromebooks, you’re essentially replacing X devices with a single device.

Of course you’d still need some kind of external display/monitor, but if connection to those can be wireless you could start seeing some really great combinations.

How about a screen you can fold/roll up and keep in your jacket ? Or just a “notepad” that is a monitor ?

Or in a few years when everything with a processor is probably 5G enabled, and every wall panel is a potential display ? Point your device at the wall (using existing technology like the U1 chip in current gen iPhones) and suddenly your dining room wall is a 4K Cinema Display being broadcast to from your phone.

Your kitchen wall or office wall could become a desktop display, again broadcast to from your phone.

Pine64 has revisited the concept with the PinePhone, which has gotten quite a bit of attention in the UBPorts community (what Ubuntu Touch turned into).

I think/hope it's just a matter of time. Devices are getting fast enough as far as I can see. Apart from Ubuntu Phone there's Samsung Dex as another commenter metionds, and I think Microsoft Continuum was announced even before those existed. But also dropped dead together with Windows Phone IIRC; unfortunately because it looked pretty good.

Been thinking along the same lines. The reason dockable mobile computers still don't exist is more to do with software than hardware.

I believe all mainstream OS's we have today, coming from the pre-mobile era are simply not suitable for this task. If it was possible at least Apple would have built a docakble computer already, and I'm sure they have considered it but probably realized their OS will be the bottleneck. It's already too heavy, there's too much legacy, and a complete rewrite would be an insurmountable task for them.

This problem requires a new, much more efficient and compact kernel/OS that will be free from the legacy of the pre-mobile era. Something designed specifically for low-power mobile devices, possibly with conceptually new kind of a file system with (I actually have some ideas what it could be).

Anyway, just some vague intuitive insights. This is an interesting problem, a niche that's opening in front of us right now, just begging to be filled with something new.

>Apple would have built a docakble computer already, and I'm sure they have considered it but probably realized their OS will be the bottleneck.

I doubt the OS itself will be a bottleneck. All of Apple's devices from phones to computers pretty much run the same kernel. A lot more devices from supercomputers to toasters run Linux. I'd say the OS is already here.

I had high hopes for Apple's Marzipan toolkit, and time will tell if it becomes what i hope it will, but for now it mostly seems to be a way for iOS developers to bring dumbed down applications to the Mac.

And ultimately we'll all end up with a bunch of Electron apps doing almost what we want, only slower.

OS is not a bottleneck. And to me, being able to run existing desktop software on the Phone when docked would be pretty much all that would be useful about this.

But that's my point: the reason it doesn't exist to date is the OS, not because nobody thought about it. I'm sure a lot of people did, some even tried to build a device. A more lightweight and efficient OS would make it more feasible.

There's a ton of various lightweight DE's for GNU/Linux for example. I can run Arch Linux/i3wm just fine on my PinePhone. Actually being a highly portable Arch Linux/i3wm device is what PinePhone does best at the moment for me. lol

And people certainly thought about it. Phone manufacturers just actively work against people running alternative OSes on their phones, by locking up their devices, and making it annoying to unlock them, and by not respecting GPL, and releasing code with huge delays and in a very halfassed manner, and by ignoring calls to upstream their code.

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