No, I can't take it anywhere, because few places I go to have a HDMI screen and keyboard ready for me. And to the ones they do, I carry my laptop.
Don't ask me how I know . . .
I have a screen at work, with keyboard and USB hub. Same at home. And at most of my friend's homes. I have a screen (tv) in a hotel and flats to rent. I even had one in a cabin recently (use them with tv stick for my kid's shows).
I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter than a laptop, that I sometimes carry for multiple reasons.
Keyboard is a bit harder, I won't have it provided in a hotel, but there are plenty of small and light models, foldable etc..
I choose current phone specifically for usb-c/HDMI option and a full desktop experience and use it often. It's easy, it's fast, it's stable. Perfect for mobile gaming with a small BT gamepad as well.
I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me.
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?
To use my phone as a desktop all I need is the phone itself. USB cable I most often already have to charge it. Phone works as a keyboard and mouse and I have large screen to browse web, play, watch videos. ZERO new devices, only things I already carry and a screen that is already there.
Think about a poor person. Are they better served by a laptop or your proposed solution of four different devices?
Even in my own daily life, i struggle to find places where your solution is practical.
Some only conceptualize scenarios that include those that are quite wealthy, whether intentional or not.
Even if you are not poor, one of the most respectable things you can do is to re-use and recycle rather than consume new.
For minimal cash outlay, surplus PC's can easily be found at zero cost which is naturally an unmatched bargain, compared to used monitors even as low as $10 each, unless you can get the monitors free also, but that's much more uncommon. Surplus keyboards are stacked up everywhere and being thrown away all the time too.
So it's really the monitors (and physical desk space) that's the limiting factor for aspiring low-cost operators. By a long shot.
It's been that way for years so by now with every multi-monitor workspace I have a PC for each monitor, even if I only run one of the PC's at a time usually. Each monitor also has at least two separate inputs which can be chosen from at any time and all the wiring is in place whether it is being actively used or not.
So between my office or home or an employment site a laptop used to be carried with me but now mainly collects dust except for "outreach" or distant travel these days. Laptop chargers still in each location so I didn't have to carry that as often.
Now it's usually only a miniPC (or sometimes two) that I carry for "full-strength" mobile deployment between locations. Chose miniPC's that run on the laptop chargers that were already at each desk. Even more convenient to carry than laptops.
Soon for the PC's that I have appropriately configured at each familiar location, I will only need to be carrying a bootable USB stick instead of either a miniPC or laptop :)
Might as well use the PC's that are already there too, along with the full-size monitors and keyboards ;)
Environment on a stick.
Not much different than the way you could put Windows XP on a bootable FAT32 Memorystick, then put the Memorystick into the Sony phone to utilize its remaining storage space the regular way. The cellphone folders don't interfere with the Windows folders. Then plug in the USB cord from the phone to a PC, boot the PC to USB and the phone acts like a bootable USB stick and your C: drive is the Windows volume on the phone's internal Memorystick.
This still works with Android and SD cards too.
It's good to have but it just ties up the phone and a separate USB stick is the real functional model.
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.
While reading this article I thought it'd be interesting to read this on Android desktop mode and went looking for a cable while forgetting I could just unplug my USB-C laptop.
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.
How does Surface Go states against other commenters comment that suddenly brought poverty into the mix? :) how does Surface Go address poor people, because it's not cheap where I live.
It's a discussion that doesn't make sense.
Until recently I was also travelling frequently for work with a heavy MacBook running a variety of Enterprise malware that would prevent me from doing any personal stuff with it - being able to use my own phone for light leisure activities that I normally do on the personal laptop would have been very useful for the boring hotel evenings. Adding another kg+ of laptop to the already heavy backpack was too annoying to put up with - my cheapo bluetooth keyboard and mouse weigh in at a much more acceptable 280 grams.
In short, there's a use case - but most phones are too locked down to take full advantage of the possibility.
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.
haven't tried it, but I see glasses as an almost practical future.
I think offices are the most likely places to have something like this, though. My company has monitors with USB-C dock inputs set up at each desk; you grab a desk and plug your laptop into it when you get there. But they're just using DisplayPort Alt-Mode, and a phone with a desktop mode would work with them as well.
I wish I could do that for work; would save me from lugging around a rather heavy laptop. :)
If I needed to fly to another office for a business trip, same story: I could sit down at any desk, grab a spare bluetooth keyboard from IT (if there isn't already one on the bookable desk).
If I'm over at a friend's house for dinner and get paged, I could just ask to sit down at their desk and plug my phone in.
I would love to not have to carry a laptop around to all the places that I do today.
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.
https://maruos.com/downloads/ shows releases dated 2019.
It looks like it is on maintenance mode: https://github.com/maruos/maruos/commits/master/
What's the equivalent of that for a phone? Is it press-and-hold?
In either case the software keyboard popping in and out of existence remains the much more frustrating part of the experience. Docking or bluetooth keyboard/mouse are often required to be practical because of this.
iOS makes pretty heavy use of right click menus (e.g. on the Home Screen, in Mail). It used to be Force Touch/3D Touch, which is superior, but has more learning curve and doesn’t scale to iPad.
A dozen years later, nobody has done that well. Ubuntu gave up. Mobile-targeted Linux distributions aren't good (missing functionality, mobile UX, or both). The linked distribution is running Debian in a container for desktop on top of Android. The rumors about the future of ChromeOS are imagining something similar.
Recent iterations of iOS are getting closer to being able to replace a Mac for a class of tablet-owning users who don't need desktop software, but the ecosystems are pretty well separated for most.
Adapting desktop Linux to mobile seems to be impossibly hard with the amount of resources those distributions have.
I never activated any phone service on it but I think I would have enjoyed it if I had. It was kind of neat to have a smartphone that didn't hide the fact that it was a computer. Even without plugging it in to a monitor or anything, I was able to play with the Chrome dev tools on the fly and it was pretty fun.
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.
This seems to be a product decision not a limitation. Apple cannot implement this without self-cannabalizing sales of the other.
I'm writing this from Librem 5 phone running PureOS based on Debian. No Android dependencies and possibility of full desktop mode. How is this not a success?
If they want to have their cake and eat it too, they can either run Linux in an Android container, or Android in a Linux container.
That being said, obviously the Librem phone is missing functionality.
Most computer users are goo goo ga ga level users. Most people in the US use iMessage, for example.
It's not the best messenger, not even close. It's not the most ubiquitous either - doesn't even break top 5 globally. Doesn't have the most features. Not the fastest. Not the most secure. Not the easiest to use.
They just use it because it's already installed and right there. That is how deep their understanding and comprehension can go.
That's why you're downvoted.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/verdre/gnome-shell-mobile
relevant https://xkcd.com/2347/
Yeah, apple could solve that instantly.
Sadly, they decided to play a cash cow strategy of milking existing users instead for trying to grow market share.
Apple is so frustrating. Amazing hardware but then they complete shit the bead with the software side of things and act actively hostile against their own users.
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).
This is only sort of sarcasm.
Concerning Windows, you're right. Concerning GNU/Linux you aren't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085
I installed NixOS on a handheld nearly 2 years ago and tried a whole bunch of touch-oriented options (including tiny ones like Maui). The closest I got to good enough was running the mobile fork of GNOME, using someone on GitHub's custom flake to pull it in at HEAD. I'm very happy that Valve has released SteamOS for other devices so I can offload that tinkering.
Steam is very usable on a touchscreen, but the KDE desktop mode hasn't impressed me.
I am curious why/if Valve hasn't used it for SteamOS's desktop mode though.
I don't really know, but I don't think the use outside of steam is an important use case to them, possibly they don't want to make things too easy, or maybe it wasn't packaged for arch either when they created the base image.
I will type a message or an email on a phone (Android or iOS) but I loathe even typing my username into the Steam Deck via touch.
If you want users, the thing has to be usable. For the thing to be usable it needs software with perfect hardware support. Google, Android vendors and Apple (and to some extend System 76) understand this.
So yeah no problem, and yes I know should have gone to the usual forums asking everyone and their dog if someone before me had ever succeeded installing Linux on this brick.
If others have fun making it work, good for them, I have better ways to spend the rest of my life on this litte sphere.
As what Linux needs, I thought it needs every little user, to make a difference against Apple and Microsoft, after all we are always told that now is the year everyone is going to flee into Linux.
So the market for personal computers has grown massively with phones entering it, and Linux has won here.
As to the general state of Linux usability - I’ve been using Linux since 1995, and professionally for more than 20 years - it’s great for professionally administered servers or workstations, less great for regular desktops / laptops where things pretty never work out of the box which is unfortunately not going to bring in extra users …
GNU/Linux works, HDMI output et all.
With Windows 11 it will happen the same.
My lenovo p14s is a great linux laptop unless you want it to sleep (which it does!) It even wakes up! But 50% of the time the trackpad does not wake up properly ... Making hard to be used as a laptop that I can get things done on
And of course like in the past decades any time, you can always use Linux in VMs. Very reliably. So I stick to that.
Which laptops? Do they all have Nvidia graphics? This is really vague. Your comment is not helpful, and it just looks like usual Linux bashing from people who don't know what they're talking about.
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.
Millions (billions?) of people are happy to leave their phone in another room when working on their computer and vice-versa. Sure you could use a do not disturb button but it would be a major PITA to have enough granularity to allow or disallow certain app/services to notify you and you would be certain to forget to activate/deactivate it when you really want.
Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!)
There are some fuzzy boundaries - e.g. imo Gnome 3 has proven that a single experience can feel good on both a tablet and a single screen laptop with a good track pad. But I think paradoxically you need to take different approaches on different use modes if you want to provide true unity.
I don't think it can necessarily work for any kind of application, but for some simpler ones I think it's completely fine.
This is kind of my point - I'm not saying you can't have applications that are usable across multiple UX paradigms, and I'm also not saying you can't write a UX library that automatically translates at least simple applications with little manual effort.
I'm just saying this requires active buy in from application developers into the ecosystem - you can't just run everything on all devices and have it magically work (with usability comparable to current state of the art in single device applications).
Like websites nowadays being usually designed for mobile and desktop devices
Samsung DeX is not bad! It is not as good as a real desktop, but it will do in a pinch.
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.
But a few (the ones I talked to the most) were just people interested in the Windows ecosystem. One was running Windows Home Server. Those folks all swore that everything was great (except the app ecosystem). I can only go by what I was told.
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.
Understandable as the risk of going all in on would have been a hard sell to the board vs a slow cosy death they couldn't see coming.
This product would have been wildly successful if they just released it as a laptop case for a phone, Framework-style. Dock your phone into the PCMCIA slot to activate the laptop, etc.
You mean, this? https://nexdock.com/
(Running through an emulator is ok.)
It worked okay, the mouse support is somewhat of a hack, but keyboard works awesome.
The biggest annoyance was actually getting RDP to work satisfactory on a linux box with no external monitor plugged in to it (hetzner box).
I thought someone would have created an app to run browser on the external screen in full resolution, so I could skip RDP and use vscode server via the browser. But the only option seems to be infinitex2p which is not available in the EU :(.
[0]: Which in typical Microsoft idiotic fashion semi recently got renamed to "Windows app"... [1]: https://x.com/infinitex2p
Then he showed off the Fossil MSN watch, and suggested future iterations may do away with phones entirely and act as methods of identification for digital systems.
And then, like all things Microsoft, they abandoned the concepts entirely. Apple and Google cribbed most of the ideas for themselves in some form or another and saw wild success with them, though to date nobody major has really attempted to create that mobile vision Gates spoke of - other than Maru, and for a time, Google on Android.
It’s a shame, really. I like the idea of validating my public key via NFC from my Apple Watch to login to work machines or my home boxes (a la SSH). Seems like it’d be easier to wrangle in the long run, especially with job hopping being the norm.
Hasnt harmed their product Microsoft Profit (TM) too much however.
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.
You would just have to allow apps to transform the interface between desktop and mobile or allow both interfaces to access the same data. And for apps that aren't working just show a small windows on the desktop and either disallow opening only-desktop apps on iOS or make everything small and allow zooming.
You could also make something MacBook-like where you connect your phone or slide it into the side.
I think one of the problems here is that Apple then could only sell 1 device to everyone and not potentially three (iPhone, iPad, Mac).
Pair this with some nice "Vision Air" glasses as a screen replacement..
Those looking for a more active and stable project: ubports is carrying the torch forward on the convergence front. I have personally used it on my old OnePlus device and it was quite usable.
Then pretend there is a huge possibility of apps that can run on Maru OS.
But it is Too little too late. Samsung DEX did this. Google is supposed to invent this (again). Everyone has failed. All apps need separate desktop versions to do this work. Essentially they need a second desktop app. This means more ram and more storage and more power.
I tried this with DeX, it's cool, but it's just really hard to see where I'd use it. Some sort of trip where for some reason I can't bring my laptop, but I do have access to the various peripherals required to make a desktop setup.
Especially now with laptops like the Apple Silicon macbook air, with more than enough power and battery life.
I used to want a beefy phone that could run a full Linux desktop when plugged into a monitor, but that was a long time ago (ironically, Google is getting there with some of the Android 16 stuff...too bad the switching cost from Apple for me is too high at this point).
But then the M1 air came out, and that was pretty much game over for me. I've since upgraded to my M4 pro but it's still small and light enough to go everywhere, I have no need for an all-in-one phone.
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.
With iOS 26 you can now export Apple notes to markdown as well, which I've done recently on the beta and put them in my Obsidian folder.
The switching cost for me is more so the stupid little conveniences I'm not quite willing to give up yet. I do regularly take advantage of clipboard sharing, universal control, AirPods device switching, auto-fill from messages & mail for TOTP (which works in Chrome now on macOS 26), and my Apple Watch has been hard to replace last time I tried (was with a pixel watch 2, maybe the 4 will be good enough this time).
I can recreate some of that with KDE Connect & Linux, but last time I tried it wasn't nearly as seamless.
Photos are the most important to me, and I already have those regularly backed up locally.
I suspect I'll switch eventually, I just have to mourn the loss of the little things.
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!
In essence, the hardware completely allows you to have a device that can connect to a monitor via USB, connect to a keyboard via Bluetooth and function as a full-fledged computer.
When you home-base, you're producing more in terms of text, longer form emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. So having a keyboard+monitor+mouse is important.
When you are on the road, you really just need to make calls, text, get driving directions, send short emails, etc. Occasionally make a presentation, which is doable off of the phone without any external devices.
I've done this workflow in short spurts and it's frankly really fantastic, modern productivity tools usually have an Android app version that's fine, or a web-app version that's also fine. I was often also making calls from the same phone that was driving my KVM.
Pretty much the only thing preventing me doing it permanently is multi-monitor support at "homebase", and sometimes being able to print sanely on a corporate printer setup.
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-futu...
Unfortunately, even the text-mode-only Android Terminal is incredibly buggy and crashes on GrapheneOS if you have the audacity of typing Ctrl-D to close your session, requiring a full reset (and losing your data in the process). I am not brave enough to try a non-degoogled Android.
A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you might as well also carry the incredibly thin screen it's attached to on a laptop.
And the phone should be a Samsung, which has DeX (an Android desktop mode). The official Android desktop mode isn't released yet.
I have a gpd pocket 4 for my machine, but carry a chiri CE 5x3 and the MS arc mouse (and am looking for a second screen).
It's an extremely small footprint in my bag, and i'm not sure it can get much smaller. You could remove the keyboard and the mouse from the Pocket 4, but given they're on top of the hardware it wouldn't save that much space.
I can, in theory, do the same setup with my phone instead of the pocket though. I'm yet to really hook it all up and test (I expect several points of failure given past experiments), but the idea really is intriguing.
It does however require people to get more comfortable with smaller keyboards/mice (please for the love of god, if nothing else, swap left control with caps lock), or at least more portable ones.
And as for the ideal of "carry a drive, hook up to hardware as needed", that'll always run into the common issue of who is maintaining the hardware. We need cheap and easy to fix/replace hardware for that to ever really be a thing.
Yeah this is abandonware, idk why it's being posted and upvoted now.
Something similar to real mobile/desktop convergence is still technically possible today with Phosh on PostMarketOS (or Mobian, Mobile NixOS or Arch ARM) and a compatible device with USB-C video out (like the PinePhone).
Imagine running linux in UTM (the fast jit version, not the nerfed appstore version) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and VR sunglasses (eg. xreal make good ones that plug in to usb-c), on your iPhone.
Or carry a phone that can run linux on bare metal - or can run Wayland in Android Terminal, a new feature in Android 16.
Dex,Chrome OS, whatever distro pinephone and librem use, they all feel like I’d be having a lesser experience than using my iPhone or iPad. I don’t see this changing until Apple or Google decides to make the phones capable of handling apps in a desktop-like experience and environment.
iPadOS 26 is very close to that vision. I can’t run that on my phone, but it is almost that perfect portable ubiquitous computer!
Incredible experience, but closed source and too niche.
fsflover•12h ago
dang•9h ago
Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350293 - May 2017 (251 comments)
Maru OS becomes an open source project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373251 - Aug 2016 (26 comments)
Maru OS – Your phone is your PC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11873444 - June 2016 (2 comments)
Maru turns Android smartphones into portable PCs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037937 - Feb 2016 (73 comments)