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 !

Google in 2057:

"We're excited to announce that Android Tablets now have a terminal, with full support of terminal applications like 'ed' and 'grep'!"

My spouse and I recently got identical Lenovo tablets. I got mine for reading sheet music, but of course can't pass up the chance to see how close it gets to being a laptop replacement. It's the first device that was close enough to leave my laptop at home on a recent trip... and travel 2 pounds lighter.

Don't know if it's unique to Lenovo or part of Android in general, but these tablets do support the windowing feature. It's Android 13.

I tried out Apple's implementation of desktop windowing on tablets called Stage Manager with a borrowed iPad. It's still not a real replacement for actual laptops. Sure you get multiple windows, but switching between them it still inconvenient: you don't have Command-Tab or Command-` like on a Mac. All window manipulations have to be done with fingers touching the screen. I end up believing a real desktop windowing system is still superior.

I'm a full desktop OS kind of person, but even just enabling windowing on a tablet OS makes it feel like so much more of a full OS. The idea of having your browser and a notes app in a configuration that isn't a forced hard split is a massive win.

They missed the opportunity to copy Samsung DeXes best party trick, getting a desktop interface on a phone by connecting an external monitor. Maybe next year.

It's funny... all of the windows on my desktop are fullscreen or halfscreen. The only floating windows are transient dialogs.

I think a tiling window manager makes more sense for mobile devices, but maybe that's the next step.

I also saw an article a while back that Android might get a task bar for phones as well, that actually seems quite handy.

https://9to5google.com/2024/08/06/android-phones-taskbar-tes...

It's rather amusing to see them so "excited" about introducing features and concepts have been around since Windows 95.

Even the titlebar buttons look like Windows' with the obvious exception of a missing minimise.

On the other hand, maybe they're finally realising the fact that "mobile UI" has been dumbed-down for too long.

I recently acquired an Android tablet (Lenovo M10 — a bit too cheap, but gets the job done).

I also got a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

The only thing that works properly is web apps. All the native apps have terrible keyboard and mouse support. It made me wonder if I'm the only person using it this way.

On that note the only GUI text editor (yes I'm learning Vim in Termux, no it's not a replacement for Sublime!) that's tolerable is VSCode running in the browser.

Surprisingly comfy in fullscreen, but the fact that's it's even necessary is just a testament to what a joke the whole ecosystem is.

Probably over 90% of what I use my personal laptop for is browsing the web, watching videos, listening to music, and writing notes. In a general purpose OS, I value security above all else. Privacy is a close second, and of course stability, ease of use, resource lightness, and application support are also important factors.

I haven't found a desktop operating system that ticks most of the boxes, especially security and privacy. The only OS that ticks all the boxes is GrapheneOS, but it's not really a desktop OS. That's why I'm so excited about these updates, and why I wish there was either a good keyboard/trackpad case for the Google Pixel Tablet running GrapheneOS, or someone would make a laptop that had the necessary requirements to support GrapheneOS.

I code on my work laptop, and if I really wanted to, I could probably SSH or VNC into a Linux box to code on GrapheneOS. There is also pKVM, which will probably make it easy to run Linux VMs on GrapheneOS at some point in the future.

Handling configuration changes for every resize event is horrible. I really dislike Android's design around startup/pause/resume etc of the app.

I've used Android devices for over a decade now, including two tablets which were largely daily drivers.

Android makes a lousy desktop, and the issues go far deeper than windowing.

The single application which Does Not Precisely Suck on Android is Termux. It, the wealth of directly-packaged software, and the wider universe available through other packaging tools (e.g., pip, npn, rpm, ppm, etc.), scripting and programming tools, etc., are what turns Android from a toy to a Real Operating System.

But even Termux is horribly handicapped by Android:

- Filesystem permissions are generally not available, nor is most of the filesystem.

- Keyboard support within and between apps is horrible and inconsistent. Three specific examples: 1) Firefox/Android (a/k/a Fennic Fox) lacks the keyboard shortcuts of desktop Firefox, a longstanding bug Mozilla seem to have no interest in addressing. 2) In Readability, when editing tags, the backspace/delete key does not work, rather one must select and replace text to correct misspellings. 3) In Neoreader (the Onyx BOOX ebook reader) typing text into the search dialogue is wonky in ways I don't specifically recall though it simply shouldn't break that way.

- Android memory management (courtesy the JVM AFAIU) will reap apps without warning. Some manage this reasonably well, many do not.

- There's absolutely abysmal inter-app exchange through copy/paste.

Free-form windowing is good and fine so far as it goes, but Android needs one hell of a lot more done to it before it's a reasonable desktop / laptop replacement.

I still see tablets as most useful for reading text (and perhaps watching videos), and best suited at little else. I'd still recommend a full-featured laptop or notebook for Real Work.

Ah, so basically mobile devices have almost caught up to the Xerox Star?

> If you don’t have a Pixel Tablet handy, access the Pixel Tablet emulator in Android Studio Preview, and select the Android 15.0 (Google APIs Tablet) target. Once your device is set up, select Enable freeform windows option in Developer options to explore the capabilities of desktop windowing and how your app behaves within this new environment.

I noticed this last year on Android 13, and I found it a bit unusable on an 8.4'' tablet and useless on a phone. But i think it has less features in Android 13/14, as the management (maximize/restore) looks a bit different on 15.

It still looks like it doesn't have a minimize icon (also not when maximized), which for me is essential in a desktop environment.

Android Stage Manager…

I do know similar window managers for Android existed in the past and Samsung still got their Dex but making it official emphasizing the responsiveness reminded me a lot of stage manager which Apple decided to make available only for the expensive iPads.

So of course the next question is the long play to replace ChromeOS with this?

Android is inching closer to resolving the ChromeOS / Android split in Android's favor.

Probably a really good thing to not have two OSes when they really could be one. I just with Fuchsia were powering it.

Entirely tangential, but I've been feeling serious nostalgia recently for a couple of small computers I've owned, specifically the tiny 2012 MBA, and the first-edition Asus eee. In both cases, they felt very solid, while also being very light. Does anyone have recommendations for more recent ones that are Linux based, and that I could get a small amount of work done on in an emergency? I worry the market has been completely taken over by Chromebooks that seem to be made out of cardboard

The whole "relaunch the app when the window size changes" design from Android 1.0 was such an enormous mistake. They're really going to pay for it now.

Best usage of tablets I've been able to find is playing Fruit Ninjas. I love my mouse and keyboard

Nice, way better than ipadOS stage manager.

Btw, Firefox Nightly on Android now has a tabbed interface like a desktop, making it better for tablets.

Depending on if I am just reading and watching youtube/music a good android tablet is enough.

Everything old is new again!

They are so excited to just have reinvented last decade desktop envs that were working well before fullscreen apps were imposed to us.

This is a good step forward, but I desperately want to be able to extend a display on Android rather than screen mirroring.

the blackberry-licensed android phones (priv, key, key2... i think since 2016) had a os level hack that made EVERY app windowed.

you could split the window and use two apps. for everything! only annoyance is that some apps reload when you did that, which was annoying the first time only.

i still think HN crowd slept on those phones. a lot.

Think of this in the context of the previous announcement that ChromeOS will eventually be based on Android.

As a long time chromebook user, which runs Android apps - this is more than welcome!

fun fact. this is happening because someone sold pixel tablets as a (cheaper than Chromebook) work platform for contractors at google

What a disappointment. They had freeform mode as a dev option for years, but avoided pushing it as a supported feature. I assumed this was because it fucking sucked. I've tried it. Freeform, desktop-like windows on an 11 inch tablet are simply terrible for multitasking. But no, here they are, releasing the feature with no meaningful changes. The state of tablet multitasking is a travesty, but neither Google nor Apple seem interested in fixing it in any way other than a shitty reproduction of clunky desktop windowing. How about letting us tile more than two windows together? How about letting us stack apps into tabbed panes? How about a sliding environment like PaperWM? Just off the top of my head, any one of those is more likely to increase tablet productivity than "here's a bunch of rectangles; you wrangle them!"

I hope that this works on foldable phones, as well.

Android is going for the PC market.

Congratulations Android, you've successfully recapitulated the evolution to desktop windowing. Took you only 15 years!

Impressive work, they reinvented the Chromebook

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