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Comment by iKevinShah | Hacker News Reader

> "PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them." (https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-at-d8-post-pc-era-is-ni...)

This feels true more and more.

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And it's like the people who make trucks don't get it and keep trying to make their trucks more like cars to appeal to the car market.

Right. It’s been a bit frustrating to see this in Gnome, but at least I can use another theme to shrink things back down a bit.

And to be fair to Gnome, their apps run on devices ranging from my multi-monitor PC to my Pinephone. Being able to scale reasonably well is, in my case, a massive boon.

I recently got a 2 in 1 laptop and gnome has been much better than any other desktop I've used so far. Beyond the touch friendly UI for touch itself, it's also been good for touchpad use and its touchpad gestures are very fluid. I still use KDE on desktop but for any laptop I'd recommend GNOME for sure.

As someone who owned only 2-in-1 laptops for years now, virtual keyboards are the bane of my use case. Microsoft's is the best one (with Gnome's at a distant second), but that doesn't mean it's good.

This is quite odd considering they've acquired Swiftkey, which is among the first 3 apps I install on a fresh Android.

Yeah virtual keyboards are something I just try to avoid having to use for the most part, Gnome's keyboard gets the job done when I absolutely have to type but if I have to write anything important I'll just switch back to laptop form. Which I guess is the big advantage of 2 in 1 laptops over a full on tablet or laptop

GTK and Gnome are two completely separate things at this point. Gnome, the desktop environment, is under-built and introduces a lot of anachronisms to the Linux workflow. GTK, the app toolkit, scales quite well across mobile and desktop devices, I agree. I certainly like it more than QT's touch-based experiences, and I might just prefer the design language to Apple's own HIG, in a way...

But the PinePhone does not run Gnome, it runs Phosh, based on Gnome. A mobile environment needed to be specifically developed anyway.

And Gnome apps often overflow the screen when they were not specifically designed for phones.

You (and the sibling comment) are right, GTK is not Gnome. Gnome does host some apps that I do use though, such as gnome-calendar, contacts, geary, maps, password-safe, and more. Some overflow, but they're the most usable currently (though I haven't given KDE a fair try recently)

They can't be happy controlling the entire truck market, must keep infinitely growing.

While supporting high school kids throughout this pandemic, I quickly learned that a lot of these kids have near zero experience using Windows, OS X or any other "traditional" desktop operating system. Their computers were their iPhones, iPads and Chromebooks.

The strategies behind ChromeOS and iPadOS made a lot more sense after realizing this. Those operating systems aren't made to appeal to the people who have been using desktop PCs their whole lives. Rather, they're designed to appeal to those whose computing experience is pretty much ChromeOS, iPadOS and similar mobile platforms.

I agree which is why I find ChromeOS's marketing campaign strange[1]. The commercials talk about no viruses, never slowing down, etc. Basically pointing out common issues with traditional OSes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-WPIZcTGpI

I think for most people, the future is phones with a desktop mode. Walk up to any screen/keyboard/mouse and slap down your phone on the wireless charge/data pad to activate and do what you want. When you're done, pick it up and take everything with you.

Even most devs would be perfectly fine with the processing performance of a modern phone if they could install the software they needed.

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