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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

My whole family uses essentially a TV with GNOME running on an attached micropc. We use something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Android-Gimibox-Wireless-Keyboard-Pro... Works like a Wiimote. We don't have to limit functionality, we just launch a web browser and have the streaming services on the bookmark toolbar. None of our visitors have ever had problems operating this system, even ones who have never heard of linux or GNOME or Wiimotes. You just flip the remote over to type text into the search box. When the keyboard side is "up," the motion pointer and the "bottom side" is disabled. Flip the remote and the keyboard is disabled and the motion control resumes. Intuitive as hell, works great.

My point is that minor adaptations can lead to surprisingly pleasant functionality. Past failures are not reasons to stop trying new things; they're reasons to try other new things.

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Your set up works because you tailored both the hardware and the software to make up for the shortcomings of the devices. Normally a TV remote doesn't have a full fledged keyboard attached to it, so many applications become borderline unusable. What you did is enhance the inputs of your device and this opened up many more possibilities. You also tweaked the software from its ootb configuration to make operations smoother.

None of these devices attempt doing something similar. They offer less options than normal computers and their desktop is left unchanged.

Lastly, what you wrote actually proves my point. You are not using your linux system to do everything a computer does. Your set of functionalities is limited to media consumption and as such you just had to find a workaround for your use case. Could you browse (or even write) your emails on your TV? Sure, but you'd have to use a heavily customized UI and UX if you don't want people to squint their eyes and take ages to navigate everything. And who's going to write such a program? And what about all the other applications that we expect a complete system to have such as a general purpose web browser, a video player, a file browser, etc.? My whole point is that these "pocketable PCs" might be great for a subset of problems, but they have to be tailored for them. They are terrible general computing devices.

You're just making things up. Your "heavily customized UI" is bumping up the font sizes by a couple of points.

Try "bumping the font size up" in Thunderbird and tell me how nicely it scales on your TV

Yeah, we browse all the time on it. Especially IMDB. I'm not sure what part of "it works fine" is confusing you.

> None of these devices attempt doing something similar. They offer less options than normal computers and their desktop is left unchanged.

They have swappable SoCs at their cores, including available on-board FPGA, and the existing product ships a customized Sway UI by default. They are far more configurable than other laptops. One person already modified her mainboard to include a different charging circuit and added an ergonomic keyboard. You have gone from pessimism to outright misinformation in pursuit of your argument. Ask yourself whether you're here to discuss the topic or just win internet debates.

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