If you want deskktop version of Firefox or Chromium on your phone, you can get them using Termux. But yeah they will be slow.
Dex was kind of nifty if you had a monitor laying around. I’m guessing this is the non-Samsung version feature.
Microsoft tried the same idea about 10 years ago with Continuum, even including a hardware dongle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/continuum-phone
Canonical had something similar, too, back in the days with their Ubuntu Touch and named it Convergence: https://www.linux.com/news/first-ubuntu-touch-tablet-brings-convergence-last/
Ability to recognize non-ASCII characters in the dialer? Nope… Ability to skip auto connect to the Bluetooth device? Nope, never again… Record phone calls? No, fuck you, we don’t like it in US so it is banned to the whole world. Here you are a feature nobody asks for and shut up…
The auto connect for bluethooth is really infuriating. Windows and android both don’t have options for disabling auto connect.
On linux you can only select between trust and no tust which effectively means auto connect. BUT WHY DONT THEY JUST CALL IT AUTO CONNECT.
It’s a real bummer.
do you think I am masochist or what, better give me gnu/linux on mobile ;)
- postmarketOS for older mainstream phones
- Librem 5
- PinePhone and PinePhone Pro
- FuriLabs FLX1
- Liberux Nexx (upcoming)
This paired with virtualization features (hopefully with working sommelier) potentially enable running desktop wayland apps on phone.
To run waydroid on it
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this starts a trend of ultra-cheap “laptops” that are just hardware extensions for phones with no processing capabilities of their own.
“Lapdock” seems to be the popular term. They’ve been around more than 10 years but never gone mainstream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapdock
Really fricking cool!
Thank you for sharing this.
Hopefully this means I can have a GraphineOS laptop (whenever google makes a new Pixel Laptop)
Didn’t canonical try this years ago?
I thought it was part of their justification for Mir like a decade ago.
I swear they’ve been writing the same article for a year.
Much longer than that. But that’s probably because Google keeps picking it up and then dropping it again.
And they chose to highlight as a feature making it like a pC, “you also get Windows PC–like abilities such as snapping windows to the left and right of the screen.”
Reminds me of just a few months ago when they sold the Samsung Galaxy S20-something using all the features that come with either Google Gemini 1.5-2.0 or Android 15. All features that my phone has. Nothing unique but the homegrown app store nobody likes
Can we bring back PalmTops ?
Now the question is if people will be stupid enough to replace all the freedoms their desktop OS still gives them with the vendor controlled shit show that is mobile OS.
That ship has sailed. Hence this being called a “post-PC era”.
Narrator: They did.
My guess is that people who would use DEX is also people who are satisfied with ChromeOS. Which is just as closed down.
Hopefully, when Android does this, they will be under same gatekeeper restrictions in the EU as Windows.
Dude I tired DEX once, I saw I couldn’t rotate the monitor or even find some type of settings and I never tried it again.
I use DEX (not directly to the monitor, but the desktop app) to have easier access to my personal Firefox and messenger apps when I’m at work. I don’t want to run any of my personal stuff on the work laptop (not even in a VM) and I hate typing on the phone’s tiny touch keyboard, so DEX is a great alternative.
100% they will and want this. I’m a power user and even I see this as the future.
Have you worked in a non-tech field with people? Modern OSs and office apps are not intuitive to them. Hell, a lot have problems with just their phones as is.
I suppose you mean the same effect I have noticed with our younger apprentices who know very little about the way computers work anymore since they grew up with phones only, they don’t even know what a file system is any more.
Some older, some younger, yeah.
Unless you invested a lot of money and time, you are certainly already running an OS with a lot of BLOBs at the most important parts (WIFI driver, etc).
Given AOSP and a decent smartphone, I am basically at exactly the same level I am with running Linux on my desktop. Actually, the smartphone could be better, if it is a Pixel, because at least I’ll have 100% hardware support. … and again, AFAIK one will be able to run Debian in a virtual environment.
Long story short: I would never buy hardware with vendor lock in, but middle to high class Android smartphones are actually standardized hardware which run excellent with Linux. Total win for me.
The times when you couldn’t get PCs with 100% hardware support on Linux were 15+ years ago. You can still find the occasional one today that doesn’t have it but it is not hard to get 100% support.
… I do not want to argue with you and Linux hardware support certainly is much better than decades ago (I was there, I know :-P) … but even my hardware, which was bought with Linux support in mind, I have several problems… one of my laptops WIFI card has problems with Linux sleep mode, one of my Lenovo machines has audio trouble with the microphone after being used for longer online calls and the list goes on. I hope that I am just very unlucky with my hardware picks, but when you have known hardware components in a mass produced device like Google Pixel, I hope we get Apple level support of hardware.
Well, obviously there are still bugs in hardware drivers on Linux, the point was more that those bugs are not any more common than on any other OS and that Linux probably supports more hardware than some of the Windows operating system versions now.
Apple level of hardware support is hard for Linux because Apple provides that by limiting supported hardware to a tiny, tiny subset of available hardware they produce themselves.
I’m not an android user, but doesn’t it let you do whatever you want? What things can’t a person do using Android as a desktop that a windows or mac user can do?
Android is very much designed with every application in its own little silo that needs the permission of the OS vendor or something off-device (like a cloud service both apps access) to communicate with each other. This means, among other things, a very limited ability to do software development on the device and run your own applications, a very limited ability to automate applications, no chaining of workflows (e.g. read some sensor in one app, process the data in another, graph it in a third). You also generally don’t have administrator/root access on the device and if you do get around that restriction a lot of the applications for things like banks will refuse to work. You can’t properly control which data your device collects and where it sends it. Your ability to debug the behavior of your own applications and device is severely limited.
Thanks for the heads up. This is good to know.
I typically use my work computer for just zoom meetings. I could see my possibly being able to replace my work computer with this.
Of course I’d still keep Linux on my personal laptop.
i‘m hyped for a graphene desktop mode. that wouldn’t be a replacement for my laptop/ desktop computers but still very much sick. and if i can run a terminal with neovim and tmux or ssh into other machines it would be a dope backup/ micro setup. probably not very useful, but fun i think
I have a dying laptop and am very much interested in replacing it with my phone + Nexdock (or similar)
If you sit in a room and you can see the bars, you know you are trapped, if you sit in a room, but you cant see the bars, you are going to think you are free
What freedoms are you referring to?
A beta build of Android 16 contains an early version of Google’s new Android Desktop Mode that, in the future, could let users simply plug their smartphone into a monitor and use it like a laptop or desktop computer.
It seems this is an instance where the headline tells the full story
Cool. Samsung did this a decade ago though.
Everyone is abandoning Android with a passion thanks to Google’s bullshit.
Everyone is abandoning Android
What do you mean?
But yeah. Fuck Google
Samsung did this a decade ago though.
Cool. But then you have to buy and deal with a Samsung.
And it’s only on their premium phones.
Ubuntu did this a decade ago too
The Motorola Atrix 4G had a Desktop Mode (Webtop was its name and it was Ubuntu based) in 2011 before Samsung. They even released a cradle dock, that you could connect to a tv or monitor, and a laptop dock for it and the source code on Sourceforge (my guess is to be GPL compliant).
I got that phone specifically for the desktop mode. It had a full blown Firefox browser installed and you could run your apps along side it.
I was blown away and thought, “This is the future for computers” but I was incredibly wrong. After the short honeymoon period i found it to be sluggish and clunky when using an android app. The hardware although phenomenal for a phone couldn’t provide an optimal experience for a desktop.
