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Comment by squigz | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious, like what cool things?

Apologies for self-linking here, but it's not just cool things, in my opinion it could transform humanitarian aid work. I wrote a use-case/short-story about it here:

https://ianso.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-we-dont-have.html

I love this. I see this vision, in many forms, yet have trouble articulating in a way that motivates and inspires others, including myself.

I don't think a lack of hardware and software technology is what is lacking, but rather a vision, a dream, a call to action and corresponding courage to act while facing down an invisible enemy that can only been seen by its effects on the world.

Thank you for articulating it clearly. It inspires me to take a step back from building, and consider what I'm building and why.

Like using your phone as a desktop computer, when it's connected to a screen and keyboard and runs a full desktop OS. Having a full access to all desktop apps, development environments. Also this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201496.

Also, choosing the OS means freedom to choose the interface you like or develop your own (or to pay somebody to do that for you). Freedom to not be in walled gardens.

I suppose it would be relatively slow and how too little memory to be usable for programming, for example.

You know, we used to develop on computers with less than a Gig of RAM. A phone with 6/8/12 GB should be plenty enough to to do some development on. Or even less if you don't need to compile.

Seriously, you can run the windows version of GTA V on a phone. It runs pretty ok as well.

I have no troubles compiling most stuff on a phone with 3GB RAM. I even worked on Mesa on it once when I was too lazy to set up cross-compilation. I only struggled with OOMs on some Rust apps so far (and I haven't even had zram set up sensibly back when I tried them, so maybe these would work now).

We don't need multiple OSs for that. One unlocked and FOSS OS is enough.

Just of the top of my head:

Running Firefox with uBlock.

Installing any app I want, not just the ones Apple allows.

Faking GPS data to hide my location from spyware that "requires" location permissions

(To be fair, you can do these on Android "for now", but Google is actively working hards towards the more locked-down Apple "experience")

like running K8s on your old phones?

Calling our friends, maybe? No idea; I've tried desktop Linux on phones years prior and besides maybe being a potential portable cyber security rig it was only a cool oddity.

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