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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Well.. I mean, I've been using $100 PCs-on-a-stick for about a decade now, plugging them into hotel room TVs or my projector at home or wherever I go... just need a cheap wireless keyboard/trackpad. I use that for about half my home entertainment viewing as well. Definitely no need to strap hardware to my head to game/code/surf on a big screen with a tiny device.

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Yes, and people brought their Machintoshes 512k to work with a bag. I sincerely don't understand how your PC-on-a-stick experience has any relation to what I was talking about. You have to connect it to a screen and bring your own peripherals. I don't believe that's what people think when they hear "pocketable PC".

For one, a PC on a stick is much lighter than a Macintosh 512k. And it has no CRT or hard drive that can be smashed during transport. You can slip it into a work backpack or briefcase - try doing that with the Macintosh.

You do have to bring your own peripherals, but being able to move your computer around previously set-up work points is already an improvement from not being able to carry it at all, or carrying around a laptop.

I used the Machintosh example because the use case you're talking about is a completely old fashioned way of intending "portable computing". Portable computing currently means being able to take your device out of your pocket and being able to use it on the go. The Intel stick certainly has its uses, but are unrelated from the topic at hand and strikes me as just an excuse to share something you do that you think is cool.

There's no reason the MNT Reform cannot be used both on the go and in a docking station.

The parent likes to use an "old fashioned" (I disagree with that judgement, but fine) paradigm of portability, so what? Does that make it a less valid choice? "Portable" is a generic term that's not reserved for discussions of any specific kind of portability, so why not coin/use a specific term for "fits in your pocket and is usable on the train" if you need one, rather than silently assume?

Do I understand you correctly that you plug the PC on a stick into the USB port of a TV which it then uses the TV as display and connects to a bluetooth keyboard? Could you give pointers to such devices and perhaos Linux distros that work on them?

this kind of device: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=stick+pc

If you're running Linux, you could use your phone as a touchpad/keyboard with KDE Connect from the KDE project. I use it with XFCE.

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

This requires that you be connected to the same wifi network, right? That can be an issue if you’re at a hotel and don’t have another keyboard to connect to wifi with (plus hotel networks can interfere with this).

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