Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

1) calls and MMS not working well.

2) Instead of a normal GNU/Linux OS Ubuntu Touch tried really hard to have an Android style immutable OS. Kind of the worst of both worlds since you have a difficult to work with OS but without the app ecosystem of Android that some people believe makes it worth using.

After that I kind of just gave up on the idea that I owned my phone at all and a few years later I gave up carrying smartphones entirely.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/verdre/gnome-shell-mobile

relevant https://xkcd.com/2347/

Apple decided when the iPhone first came out to redo the whole UI stack to be touch-first. There are hardenings for security and battery preservation, but that's arguably the biggest difference between iOS and macOS.

Windows and Linux have tried to retrofit their ecosystems to also work on touchscreens. It hasn't gone well. Too many apps assume a mouse-equivalent pointing system.

Adaptive design has fared best on the web, but it's still not settled. See, for instance, the back-and-forth around density defaults for web apps like Gmail. Some people really like their pointer-friendly dense UIs with hover buttons, and that makes them really hard to use on a touchscreen.

Perhaps ironically, Apple is also in the best position to bridge the gap. Since they own the UI stack that renders most apps on Apple devices, they could do something clever like say "a button is 32px tall if there's a trackpad and 56px tall otherwise." Rules like that could produce an app that truly adapts to the user's primary modality.

The other systems have too many UI frameworks for that to work. Apple could only pull it off because ~everyone uses their component set (I think it's called UIKit). They also have a reputation of declaring the future and making the ecosystem catch up (going all the way back to adopting USB exclusively on the first iMac).

And, a lot of this firmware is extremely buggy too. Have you see ACPI tables in laptops? But, they work under Linux. They shouldn't, but they do.

What doesn't work is the intersection of closed-source firmware and extremely eccentric or evil firmware. I think a lot of Android parts manufactures don't want to upstream their stuff because it's extremely bad and probably filled to the brim to vulnerabilities.

But, Intel upstreams everything, and so does AMD - and it's only improved their firmware quality.

This is demonstrably false, and I don't understand where all these comments from Linux haters came from. My Librem laptops work flawlessly, including suspend.

I don't think it can necessarily work for any kind of application, but for some simpler ones I think it's completely fine.

Phosh (Phone Shell) already exists and works quite well. I'm writing this comment from desktop Firefox running in Phosh on Librem 5 smartphone.

See also: https://videos.puri.sm/pureos/l5-convergence-purism.mp4

If they allowed straight Win32 ports on ARM it could have been interesting. Or if they did it now, where I think x86 emulation on arm is working well these days.

You could connect it wirelessly to your windows laptop and it would take over screen, keyboard and mouse from the laptop. The actual connecting part worked smoothly, but it could only stream one relatively low res screen and even then over a wireless connection it felt sluggish. I couldn't use the laptop while the phone was connected, and this was its biggest handicap because I would have preferred the phone's desktop in a window similar to running a virtualized OS, with easy drag-and-drop and copy-paste.

The experience was that you had the same phone apps with the same feature set as on the phone, but they transformed into desktop layouts. For the first party apps this worked fine, but many of the third party apps didn't work at all or didn't work well, so I ended up largely being stuck with the first party apps, mostly the mobile versions of Outlook and Edge, and the file explorer. At the time these were seriously limited compared to the desktop counterparts. In that version of Edge I couldn't use many of the web apps that I tried. The outlook version was very basic, but I still managed to get some of my email done.

The apps only appeared fullscreen. I get why they did it on the weak phone hardware of the time, but this was very limiting. You could alt-tab however, and there was the windows taskbar. The start menu was the phone's home screen, so you would see the exact same tile layout as you saw on the phone, and clicking a tile would open the app. I really liked this solution because it gave a lot of flexibility while being instantly familiar.

Bottom line it wasn't really suited at being a one stop computing experience, but it was a good way to do the things you would otherwise do on the phone on a larger canvas. It was good for what it was, but it was not in any way a laptop replacement. What really killed it as a useful feature for me was what ultimately killed windows phone: the lack of a decent app catalog. I still think in its time windows phone was the best mobile OS, but the app gap meant that it never stood a chance.

IMO people constantly mischaracterize progress as Great New Inventions By an Innovative Figure, when it's almost always something people already tried (and failed at) years before, and the difference is luck or some surrounding context improves.

I already use all the same accounts and apps and data across my watch, phone, and computer. I don't particularly want to take my watch off to use my phone, or put my phone away to use my computer though.

If my phone had died completely I'd have restored from a backup, but this isn't worth that. Realising how easily everything can vanish, and that there are almost no options to go digging around to find the underlying files made me rethink how much I trust the OS. And that made me look at exporting.

The export options from Safari are fairly complete (in the settings App, in the App section under Safari), and Apple have something similar to Google Takeout. The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.

I wouldn't normally bother, but now I feel I can't trust the OS to manage this stuff I'm motivated.

Anyway, my thought is that once you have this stuff setup robustly without completely trusting the phone or iCloud to just handle everything, that's one aspect of switching completely taken care of.

I would never normally bother, but now I feel I can't rely on the OS to handle things I'm more motivated.

I realise that it must seem like I could have solved this (and still can) by just using iCloud backup/sync. I intentionally chose not to use that for reasons that I'm not convinced really stack up, so I won't go into (vendor lock-in, flakiness, stories of vanishing data, etc.).

Anyway, just thought I'd point out that exporting might be able to take care of the data side a lot better than you might be expecting, and you might be able to just slowly transition, e.g. export all notes, import into another location, tick one off the list.

iCloud export: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306

Edit: Ah, just thinking more about it now, I realise now that while there is a Mail export option, there is nothing for messages in either Download Your Data, or direct from the phone. That's rough.

I can conceive of using maybe a phone, an ultra light headset and a compact keyboard and TouchPad combined?

I'm usually connecting to a real computer over remote desktop however!

You mean, this? https://nexdock.com/

Your suggestion is that people should carry around four devices with them, poorly integrated, clunky, all for the experience of plugging to their phone? At that point, what advantage is there over a laptop?

It seems like this comes down to personal experience. I have literally never seen a place I could plug my phone into an HDMI display (even if I had cables for that, which I don't). As such it strikes me as very impractical, but it sounds like your experience has been drastically different so we come to different conclusions.

How much lighter is it than say a Surface Go that can run Windows or Linux? If they are about the same then it doesn't make sense to fiddle with Linux on a phone. Comes with a keyboard too.

Its small size makes it largely inconsequential from a luggage point of view and it’s already fully set up with all my streaming apps.

It also doesn’t tie up my phone if anyone else wants to watch TV.

If only the Mini had true 4k output, it would be absolutely perfect. But it only does screen mirroring which limits it when plugged into a monitor or hotel television.

And given a sufficiently flexible phone, it'd be nice to have a mode selector pop up when you plug into a new display. Pick between screen mirroring, desktop mode, and a media center, and optionally remember the choice for next time.

Having just looked up the PinePhone again for the first time in a while, it does look like the Ubuntu Touch project is still alive and kicking, and compatible with some modern commercially available phones!

The main thing preventing me from having a non-standard Android phone/distribution as a daily driver is access to mobile banking apps - I'm yet to check for myself but as I understand, having an unlocked bootloader means that banking apps will consider the device "compromised" and will not work.

And the phone should be a Samsung, which has DeX (an Android desktop mode). The official Android desktop mode isn't released yet.