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Comment by maelito | Hacker News Reader

In 2018 I spent 1 year with my Samsung Galaxy S8 as my only computer. Developed a big national website and a new programming language from Termux.

Going to work with only my computer in my pocket was awesome. No sync between devices anymore.

Forced me to use monitors at work and home which is good for the neck. Had a 15 inch monitor when I was on the move, then a lapdock.

Sadly, I was quite alone and Samsung Dex being not open source nor well funded, some bugs where quite irritating in the long term.

I dream of a linux smartphone powerhouse. Linux smartphones have mediocre processors.

Give me a linux smartphone with an apple silicon processor !

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In 2014 I spent a week with my Samsung Galaxy S4 as my only computer. (My laptop was damaged and it took a while to repair. IT asked if I wanted a loaner and I said I'd get back to them if the phone proved inadequate.)

I was testing embedded hardware, so my main tasks involved a UART port into a dev board. One Bluetooth serial interface later, I was in business; there were some Arduino IDE ports or something similar that had a respectable serial terminal, and that's all I needed to see log messages.

Monitor plugged in over Samsung's weird MHL-HDMI thing; knockoff cable was only a few bucks. It had a power passthrough, so I used the otherwise-useless Cisco VoIP phone on my desk (I was a contractor and the phone wasn't active) as a USB power source to charge the S4.

Bluetooth keyboard, Alt-Tab works for switching apps, and having real keys makes composing email a breeze. Bluetooth mouse, pops up a cursor on the screen and works just like touch with better ergonomics. Bluetooth headphones, for taking conference calls and listening to music.

I wanted for nothing, and the whole mess fit into my coat pockets, I didn't bother carrying a backpack that week.

It's a decade later and this is still a fringe activity?

> It's a decade later and this is still a fringe activity?

Manufacturers don't have much incentives for convergence. They sell less devices and less applications.

It encourages local-first, instead of cloud-first. It requires more thought on UI.

Samsung has great hardware, they could do it if they wanted. But their software seems to have no direction.

Not only that, it centralizes even more of your daily life into one device, slowly inching towards bus factor 1.

15 years from now when passports and driving licenses have gone digital, imagine dropping your phone and it smashes.

Your identification, debit/credit card, drivers license, car key, transit card.. all temporarily inaccessible.

Now imagine that you also just lost access to your only device you can do work on.

Hell no.

I own a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 smartphone that I don't use anymore because the tactile functionnality gets unresponsive every few minutes and can stay so for a few seconds up to hours.

The screen is working because it reacts to power and volume up/down buttons.

I realized recently that the mounting a usb-c to female usb-a adapter I could use the wireless dongle of my Microsoft wireless all in one keyboard/trackpad and control the smartphone that way. Sadly its usb-c port doesn't support external monitors so I haven't found any practical use for it. I guess I should look for a miracast dongle if such thing exists but that would limit the usage to home wlan I guess and not be as portable as I think it could.

Depends, it works pretty well with tablets and bluethooth devices, to the point that it killed the netbook market.

Nowadays any 14 laptop that is as useful as those Asus used to be, including technical specifications, are no longer 300 euros, rather more like 1000 euros, as the 300 euros crowd is rather happy with tablet + keyboard cover combo.

It's wild there are plenty of AR headset's arriving such as Visor, that can't just plug into your phone and spawn a full desktop. Instead they want you to plug into a Windows or Apple laptop, or battery kit.

Android fully understands the idea of running multiple apps, at different resolutions, simultaneously and yet, no product in this space due to I assume restrictive APIs.

You can just run Android apps on the Quest directly.

The nReal glasses will act as a monitor for your phone.

It's not as easy as you think though. Streaming video at acceptable VR resolution and framerate isn't trivial.

I guess you could get a headset to act like a car and get Carplay running, but full RDP of an iPhone...does anything do that?

Do they not have direct video output over cables?

> full RDP of an iPhone

Like iPhone mirroring?

I have left the Apple eco system for the most part, but I remember 10 years ago demoing on my Mac what was happening on my iPhone.

Well you need input so no, not just mirroring.

Victure has its own 3d desktop.

It has its own apps and it's own browser. I tried opening a couple epub readers but trying to open a file didn't bring up any file open dialog from the browser.

I felt pretty bad for the headset makers. Quite clear they were entirely beholden to an Android where most apps have extremely limited capability sets, where they have to really reinvent the universe afresh for their headset.

I've been dreaming of a good "convergence" device that I can use as a phone but also dock and use as a PC for probably a decade at this point. I've kind of lost hope, it might happen some day but I doubt any time soon.

Not exactly the same but I use my Steamdeck for this while I'm traveling. It's honestly pretty nice. Although carrying around an old M1 mac with Asahi Linux on it isn't that much of a hassle either.

I do the same with my Steamdeck! It's really a remarkable device. I'm incredibly appreciative to Valve for making it open and Linux-based.

Desktop mode is pretty good, and it works with most hardware. It's plenty powerful enough to be a portable laptop, plus after the work is done you can pretty easily grab a few hours on a game :-D

Librem 5 phone runs a desktop OS without any artificial restrictions. It's CPU is relatively slow though as the OP mentioned.

GNOME could be great for this usecase. I've never liked GNOME too much since version 2. But the latest iteration, after so many years of churn, looks fantastic both on desktop and mobile.

Small Linux tablets, such as Surface Go or Starlabs do touch and desktop pretty well on GNOME. Sadly, I don't think there is a good mobile equivalent to the S8 you used to use.

I'm using Phosh, GNOME based, on my Pinephone and its fairly good (this comment was written with a tweaked desktop Firefox install on said Pinephone). The lack of powerful, efficent, mobile(read: smartphone), linuix friendly hardware is becoming the bigger issue these days!

How did you manage with the web inspector? There's no built-in web inspector on any mainstream mobile browser that I'm aware of and the only way to do it would be to use firebug.js like the good old days.

Kiwi browser has one!

Thanks a lot for that mention, I never heard of it and its inspector seems to work fine.

I just found it, myself. Great so far.

I think there are hacks to load up devtools in a new tab and connect it to another tab of the same browser.

devtools is just a set of html and javascript after all, and talks to the page its debugging via a websocket with special powers.

yes, I recompiled chromium for that https://github.com/laem/chromium

But it's a heavy task in the long run.

When I had Dex I could run Ubuntu on it. I just used Firefox.

Yeah but it was only ever available for the S9 and only for a year or so before they killed it again :(

Yeah, I had Note9 at the time. It was glorious.

Not the OP, but if they mentioned they did it from Termux you can install an X server and a full desktop browser like Firefox either directly or via a chroot/proot "container" via for example proot-distro [0].

[0] https://github.com/termux/proot-distro

There's also an app called userland which seems to spin up some kind of VM. I don't know if android supports KVMs or if it's a real userspace chroot type of deal.

I toyed with it briefly, the performance is about what I expected given the hardware I was using. Which is to say, not a terrible amount of overhead

You can yeah but it's super slow even with my high end phone

I recompiled chromium for Android to activate the boolean option that actives the dev tools. Haha.

https://github.com/laem/chromium

It takes such a long time to compile chromium that this wasn't a good solution in the long term, but worked perfectly.

Don't remember how I did then, long term. But yes, this was one of the major hurdles.

I thought Microsoft would pull this off with Windows Phone. A real desktop OS in my pocket when I plug it into a dock! Alas. I'm impressed you made Dex work as a daily driver.

Microsoft lost the oem control game to google. neither can survive pumping their own hardware, and google used ms own playbook to capture phone OEMs. ms will never have any chance at all on mobile.

I had to do a bunch of ARM32/ARM64 development the other day and it was frustrating to be in a situation where my only choices were an ARM VM in the cloud or to buy a mac. I have this fantastic ARM-based smartphone on my desk, why can't I plug it in to a keyboard and monitor and use it as a real computer? Maybe one day.

I keep a Raspberry Pi for when I need to do some ARM64 stuff, but yes I agree it's a bit frustrating. Though, I'd love to skip ARM altogether and go to RISC-V

> I have this fantastic ARM-based smartphone on my desk, why can't I plug it in to a keyboard and monitor and use it as a real computer?

The monitor requires hardware support that's semi-rare, but the rest should work? It's been a long time since I saw a phone that didn't support USB host mode so you can in fact just plug in a keyboard and mouse if you have an adaptor/dock. Beyond that, you're just limited by software availability, but on Android you can use F-Droid to get Termux. Not sure about iOS; maybe iSH?

Have you tried using Termux? You can install Linux distros using it.

Yeah the shift-space issue was really really annoying. It was eventually fixed but due to the short support duration the S8 never got that update.

The S8 was also a bit too memory constrained for DeX. Even my S23 is now. I love DeX but Samsung shouldn't be so frugal with memory.

Would like to hear more about this if you wanted to write a rambling blog post or gasp Twitter thread

https://medium.com/@l4em/theres-a-computer-in-your-pocket-67...

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