Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatheticonion | Hacker News Reader

How cool would it be if the iPhone got a pro variant running the M1 chip, someone unlocked the bootloader and installed Linux on it.

Plug it into a thunderbolt dock and you have a full Linux desktop.

View on HN

The pinephone does this, they call it "convergence".

https://twitter.com/hadrianweb/status/1384548445579583489

https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve...

(be aware the pinephone software is still very much in beta, also sorry I couldn't find a better link then a few tweets)

Does the pine phone still run at 5FPS and barely run youtube videos?

...no? Maybe that was the case when it first came out, but that hasn't been the case for a while.

I'd love to be filled in. I saw some videos of Manjaro which was dreadful (latest version). Ubuntu seemed to run fine until you do something performance intensive (for 2005 standards).

I'd advise you to look at the blogs of Pine64, PostmarketOS, and/or some of the other distros.

If you need more performance, consider Librem 5 instead.

What a loaded question.

No. Even when it first came out you could just run an X11 WM on it and it would run in real time.

If you use acceleration it can play 1080p H264 videos at 60FPS. Any other questions?

Motorola also did it a decade ago. I remember seeing these at RadioShack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Webtop

The dock was a commercial failure.

Yes, so many people seems to be dreaming of that "phone that turns into a laptop" but I don't see it becoming a thing.

It might have made sense 20 years ago when everything wasn't online and sharing files was a pain, but nowadays it makes more sense to have independent devices than a single phone/laptop/desktop.

You need a screen+keyboard anyway, so why would you make that a dumb terminal instead of an independent device?

Also, let's not forget Asus Transformer Book V, which is Android {phone|tablet|laptop} and Windows {tablet|laptop}, 5-in-1:

https://www.gsmarena.com/flashback_the_phone_that_was_a_tabl...

I was always intrigued by the concept, but never really wanted to buy such a device for one simple reason: performance. Mobile phones, especially back then, don't exactly have great performance characteristics for desktop use. The Atrix has a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, those were low specs for a cheap laptop even back then.

The same problem still exists on the PinePhone and Ubuntu's attempt, and Microsoft's failed attempt to use Qualcom chips as mobile workstations have so far all failed. When it comes to powerful yet power-efficient chips, Apple simply has no real competitor. Sure, AMD and Intel can outperform the M1, in some cases even at similar power draws, but Apple has mastered the base and idle power draw and caching that give their devices such a great battery life during simple, normal use.

With the processor unification, Apple may be able to provide a decent experience if they can think of a system that won't kill the battery (external battery the phone switches to?) and can cool the processor sufficiently while it's in a dock. Apple seems more than capable of solving those problems, if they'd want to.

I'm 100% sure I won't buy an iPhoneBook because I strongly dislike Apple's operating systems and the way the company itself operates, but if Apple fans will buy the product, competitors should soon follow with a device I'd find acceptable to use. Maybe, by then, the Linux smartphone ecosystem has grown to the point where it's actually usable for day-to-day operations (unlike the Librem/Pinephone/pmOS in their current state).

> With the processor unification, Apple may be able to provide a decent experience if they can think of a system that won't kill the battery (external battery the phone switches to?) and can cool the processor sufficiently while it's in a dock.

Why not just power the device off the lightning (hopefully Usb-c soon) cable used for docking? That's how all docks work now. When you're charging a single cell (most phones) you draw power from the charger, with the battery helping out during bursts if needed. No need to invent anything.

There are still a lot of things that you can do in a 4-core 1.1GHz Cortex-A53 / 3GiB RAM context of a pinephone, where performance is more than good enough.

Perfectly useable for i3 wm, terminal/ssh usage, light browsing in firefox, playing 1080p@60fps video, viewing photos, and plenty of other things, in docked mode.

As kube-system said, Motorola had this, and Microsoft phone also tried to fill this niche. Personally, I would love to have everything in a phone, with a good docking system for my desk, interop with a living room large monitor, and of course supporting all the dev setups that I use. After seeing what functionality Apple packs into their Apple Watch, it seems like the tech exists for a ubiquitous phone device - if only there was a large enough market so a company like Apple, or a Linux based phone company to build it.

The A14 is basically a M1 with less CPU and GPU cores, so I guess most of the work done for supporting the M1 on Linux could be reused for the A14.

What would be cool is if apps (like Uber etc) were all available on web and many people would actually be ok with a simple Linux-with-a-browser phone

That’s exactly what Firefox OS was. It didn’t work… at the time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

I very much agree with you. It would be amazing. We even have the ".app" domain extension. Apple don't like the idea but I think it's great.

Apple likes the idea fine, they just don’t want every website in the universe being able to send notifications to a user’s device. I don’t understand why people don’t see why that’s a bad idea.

It's more about bridging the gap between mobile and web. Installable web apps that have as much access to the OS as a native app (through user-initiated consent) is a great direction to move towards.

The browser can now run any language through web assembly, threads and all. The HTML/CSS layer is just a portable, expressive markup for visual assets.

I made a fitness goal tracking web app that worked completely offline. If you've used "strong" on android, it's basically a free clone that.

It stored all the records on the browser via indexeddb and the timer would ping you with a push notification when the rest timer would expire.

iOS erases the persisted storage after 7 days and doesn't let me use push notifications. I'd love it if iOS asked "hey this web app wants to store data long term" or whatever, but it doesn't.

Or even just have an option somewhere you can manually toggle per site, to avoid the issue of being bombarded by permission requests.

I would be down with this if apps aren't allowed to ask for notification permissions until the user adds it to the home screen, the same way that game controller and full screen work now. Therefore the user consented for it to "become an app".

If Apple like the idea fine then they don’t fund/pay attention to it accordingly. Safari is full of weird PWA bugs and long standing ones, too.

As for the notifications, it’s easily solved. Softest touch: don’t let a notification prompt show without there being a user interaction first. Hardest touch: only allow it for webapps that are installed to the home screen.

I have a much less charitable view: Apple doesn’t like webapps because they’re a threat to the App Store ecosystem. Not so much from a monetary perspective but an exclusivity one: if you can run all the exact same apps on all mobile platforms they lose an edge. (though I’m sure they don’t mind the money either!)

> Apple doesn’t like webapps because they’re a threat to the App Store ecosystem

Steve Jobs in 2010:

>"We have two platforms we support. One is completely open and uncontrolled and that is HTML 5. We support HTML 5. We have the best support for HTML 5 of anyone in the world. We then support a curated platform, which is the App Store."

https://web.archive.org/web/20100605065858/http://www.cbsnew...

They've been pointing out that you can do anything you like through the web since the App Store was new.

Just because Steve Jobs said it doesn’t make it true. Apple have lagged behind webapp standards for years. Even with the release of iOS 14.5 there are no notes about changes in the browser, despite there being a bunch.

Claiming Apple fully support the web because of something a former CEO said in a marketing presentation over a decade ago just doesn’t work.

Uber is available on the web! m.uber.com

Fwiw so is lyft too actually: Ride.lyft.com

Thank you both. Now I can happily ditch my android and go to WP10 or other alternative OSs!!!!

In the past (pre-Android 10), you could do that with Samsung Galaxy phones - plug them into USB-C dock, launch Linux-on-Dex and you got Linux desktop.

you can do that right now with a PinePhone.

Wait... What?!

EDIT: ah, sadly looks like it's not something that's daily drive-able

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCKMxzz9cjs

you can get a convergence pack with more RAM (3GB) and storage and with a USB-C docking bar (that you can also buy separately). Once plugged, you have a desktop GNU/Linux, I've tested with Plasma Mobile and it's working quite well (got a few crashes, but it's not flagged as fully stable yet).

The software is OKish and getting better at a steady rate. The SOC in the PinePhone is nowhere near beefy enough though.

Running the same stack on an M1-chip would probably a game changer usability-wise.

What changed with Android 10?

Samsung discontinued support for Linux-on-DeX (which was always experimental/beta anyway). I assume whatever hacks they had in place to make the thing work were too hard to port to Android 10 for what was essentially a feature for hobbyists.

You can still use DeX itself to get a desktop environment when you plug your phone into a dock, but it's an Android desktop environment, with Android apps running in floating windows.

Linux on Dex (ubuntu in container) was abandoned and cannot be launched anymore.

Dex itself works, but that is just an Android desktop.

Still works with my Samsung on Android 11.

ETA: actually, still an android interface, not X or anything.

That's why I wrote Linux-on-Dex, not Dex. Dex itself works, Linux-on-Dex doesn't anymore. Linux-on-Dex was Ubuntu container with X11.

Can do that already:

* Termux on any android

* dex on highend Samsung

* moto has something similar

* chromeos also has a built-in VM

This is pretty cool. I could host my development environment on my desktop PC and using Termux, ssh into it and use vim as an IDE.

I can also forward ports so I can access things from my browser, though no debug, console, network tooling. There is an obvious lack of tooling - a full fat Linux desktop would be much better equipped, but it is incredible that this is possible at all.

I'll experiment with this.

The AnLinux app is great to setup a linux rootfs on linux. But it's limited, you can't run docker for example.

I would love to recycle old phones into Kubernetes nodes !

Samsung Dex, Motorola Ready For, and I'm sure there's others. Many have tried this before, "no one" is interested in it.

Maybe Apple can do this themselves by creating a partition in iPhone that contains iPad OS, and releasing an Apple Cinema touch screen, like the Wacom screen, I guess only make sense for them if the profits of people buying the touch screen would be bigger than people buying current devices, iPhone, iPad and current screen.

This has been the dream for so long. Computer in your pocket. Dock at a desktop. Same computer. Ubiquitous

I'm sure you know this but:

"Computer in some far away server. Dock at a local thin client. Connect to VDI via VNC or RDP or comparable."

That really is the dream, but the natural data barrier between phone and desktop is very useful too. I wouldn’t install some npm package on such a Linux iPhone device.

I think the probability of Apple allowing that is pretty slim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com