> It's a decade later and this is still a fringe activity?

Manufacturers don't have much incentives for convergence. They sell less devices and less applications.

It encourages local-first, instead of cloud-first. It requires more thought on UI.

Samsung has great hardware, they could do it if they wanted. But their software seems to have no direction.

Depends, it works pretty well with tablets and bluethooth devices, to the point that it killed the netbook market.

Nowadays any 14 laptop that is as useful as those Asus used to be, including technical specifications, are no longer 300 euros, rather more like 1000 euros, as the 300 euros crowd is rather happy with tablet + keyboard cover combo.

I own a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 smartphone that I don't use anymore because the tactile functionnality gets unresponsive every few minutes and can stay so for a few seconds up to hours.

The screen is working because it reacts to power and volume up/down buttons.

I realized recently that the mounting a usb-c to female usb-a adapter I could use the wireless dongle of my Microsoft wireless all in one keyboard/trackpad and control the smartphone that way. Sadly its usb-c port doesn't support external monitors so I haven't found any practical use for it. I guess I should look for a miracast dongle if such thing exists but that would limit the usage to home wlan I guess and not be as portable as I think it could.

You can just run Android apps on the Quest directly.

The nReal glasses will act as a monitor for your phone.

It's not as easy as you think though. Streaming video at acceptable VR resolution and framerate isn't trivial.

I guess you could get a headset to act like a car and get Carplay running, but full RDP of an iPhone...does anything do that?

Victure has its own 3d desktop.

It has its own apps and it's own browser. I tried opening a couple epub readers but trying to open a file didn't bring up any file open dialog from the browser.

I felt pretty bad for the headset makers. Quite clear they were entirely beholden to an Android where most apps have extremely limited capability sets, where they have to really reinvent the universe afresh for their headset.

Not exactly the same but I use my Steamdeck for this while I'm traveling. It's honestly pretty nice. Although carrying around an old M1 mac with Asahi Linux on it isn't that much of a hassle either.

Librem 5 phone runs a desktop OS without any artificial restrictions. It's CPU is relatively slow though as the OP mentioned.

I'm using Phosh, GNOME based, on my Pinephone and its fairly good (this comment was written with a tweaked desktop Firefox install on said Pinephone). The lack of powerful, efficent, mobile(read: smartphone), linuix friendly hardware is becoming the bigger issue these days!

Not the OP, but if they mentioned they did it from Termux you can install an X server and a full desktop browser like Firefox either directly or via a chroot/proot "container" via for example proot-distro [0].

[0] https://github.com/termux/proot-distro

I recompiled chromium for Android to activate the boolean option that actives the dev tools. Haha.

https://github.com/laem/chromium

It takes such a long time to compile chromium that this wasn't a good solution in the long term, but worked perfectly.

Don't remember how I did then, long term. But yes, this was one of the major hurdles.

Kiwi browser has one!

I think there are hacks to load up devtools in a new tab and connect it to another tab of the same browser.

devtools is just a set of html and javascript after all, and talks to the page its debugging via a websocket with special powers.

When I had Dex I could run Ubuntu on it. I just used Firefox.

Microsoft lost the oem control game to google. neither can survive pumping their own hardware, and google used ms own playbook to capture phone OEMs. ms will never have any chance at all on mobile.

> I have this fantastic ARM-based smartphone on my desk, why can't I plug it in to a keyboard and monitor and use it as a real computer?

The monitor requires hardware support that's semi-rare, but the rest should work? It's been a long time since I saw a phone that didn't support USB host mode so you can in fact just plug in a keyboard and mouse if you have an adaptor/dock. Beyond that, you're just limited by software availability, but on Android you can use F-Droid to get Termux. Not sure about iOS; maybe iSH?

I keep a Raspberry Pi for when I need to do some ARM64 stuff, but yes I agree it's a bit frustrating. Though, I'd love to skip ARM altogether and go to RISC-V

https://medium.com/@l4em/theres-a-computer-in-your-pocket-67...

The fact that newer iPads use the exact same silicon as MacBooks is just insult to injury. There's a grown-up computer hidden inside but you're not allowed to use it.

> At least they're trying to view the tablet as a multipurpose PC,

Maybe in their marketing materials. Trying to do something useful on an Android tablet is painfull. The on screen keyboard uses half of your screen.

Don't read too much into it, it's not about the principle insomuch as its about the efficiency of killing off Chrome OS to merge it into Android, and a continual game of whac-a-mole to woo Samsung execs so they don't put too much investment into software. It'll work about as well as the years of efforts to get devs to do apps the Google way in time for the Pixel Tablet launch.

Imagine the iPad with an actual OS. Unfathomable.

Your wording makes it sound like you think Google out of its way to break termux. What makes you believe that? Its execution model is at odds with the security model Android pushes for so of course it'll come with some challenges. It tries to provide an environment suitable for a legacy application model that doesn't really take security as seriously. The only real way to win here is by using a VM which is what ChromeOS did. That allows sufficient isolation such that it need not try to force something to work in an environment not built for it.

People haven't yet got the memo that Linux syscalls aren't official APIs on NDK, and the Google way is to use Java/Kotlin userspace.

So naturally Google breaks "private" APIs whenever they feel like.

That is called a 2in1 laptop?

Can the Lenovo tablet run a customizable Android variant?

It's Android, and it was 200 bucks from Lenovo, including a pen.

Part of my reason for being cheap is that I've seen more than one tablet get destroyed, while playing music. One got blown over by the wind at an outdoor gig, the other somehow got knocked around in my instrument case and the screen cracked in half.

Ours are 11 inch. To make matters worse, the aspect ratio is 5:3, meaning that typical sheet music (based on 8.5x11 paper) uses only part of the screen.

I'm a jazz bassist, so I'm mostly reading chord symbols when not just playing from memory. Having the sheets on stage lets me consult rehearsal markings and jog my memory as needed. Sometimes it stays in my bag, or at the edge of the stage, until I need it.

The one band I play in that has more complicated charts is entirely paper based, and will be for the foreseeable future. My kids both play classical, and they have 13" iPads -- there's pretty much no avoiding it nowadays. But after shelling out for them, I decided that I didn't need that much technology.

Lenovo tablets have split screen, floating windows over fullscreen applications, and the option to put all applications into windows kind of like in the post.

Though admittedly split screen is the most useful of those

Always is a bit of a stretch. The split screen feature came with Android 7 in 2016.

The fact that Dex has not made a bigger splash is entirely on Samsung's marketing department. I agree it's not -fully- there as a replacement for computers, but I remember owning an s20 for over a year before even knowing it was a thing. When I tried it I thought "finally."

We carry these things with us everywhere and they are more than capable (hardware wise) for what 99% of time spent on desktops/laptops can do, especially in the corporate world. The limitation is the form factor. I'm really just floored that there hasn't been a bigger push to turn our smartphones into our computers.

Now if DeX would actually be performant... unfortunately Samsung just loves putting dogshit SoCs and flash into anything that is not the Galaxy Phone lineup, not to mention their own pre-installed bloatware and general Android bloatification causing further performance issues.

The person who lent me the iPad didn't have a keyboard. I'll note that though.

I would assume that I'd agree, but I've never attempted to use something like a Surface with a keyboard. For me, a desktop OS and a full size laptop keyboard are just two non-negotiables if I'm working on pretty much anything.

Emacs in its final form? Sadly, for those of us not versed in Elisp, such power remains a pipe dream.

To be clear the tablet is crap (just one comical example: the Battery Saver mode enables dark mode, but the screen is an LCD! Wat!) but I'm pretty sure my keyboard/mouse issues aren't specific to the model, but due to the fact that most Android devs don't even consider that use case.

I am not talking about Google's Android. I am talking about GrapheneOS and in Google's blog post they mention that this is coming to AOSP.

Go on! Substantiate that. From a platform level. Please, I'm very curious.

This is the classic "security through obscurity" argument. Yes it makes it harder to find vulns and develop exploits when the source isn't available, but once there are enough users to make it worth it, people are gonna fuzz the shit out of it regardless whether it's open or not.

At least with open source, you have white hats (and gray hats to some extent) using the available source to get hints. These end up getting reported a lot more than for closed OSes. There may seem like more CVEs for Linux than Macos for example, but that isn't proportional to the number of vulns, researchers, or exploits out there.

That said though, even if open were less secure (which I don't think it is), it is still a better and more ethical model for software and would be worth the security risk. Luckily for the world, open is more secure (or at least equally secure).

Edit: guess we’re not having a fruitful discussion about this then. Shame.

When you started with the low-grade trope "Change my view" you already indicated you weren't interested in a discussion, just arguing for the sake of arguing on the internet.

Why do you think bad actors "audit" open source more than good actors?

Isn't it more the case that all actors audit all software? Open source just has potentially more "auditors" than closed source?

(I don't understand what you mean by "usual exploits" and "keys to the castle")

Why don't you think they get audited by "good" actors.

[dead]

> mine has so many bugs

What bugs? I have mine for like 3 month and its probably the best expierence I had on any android device over the last dekade. Everything works so well and smooth.

The only thing i critize is that the dock is not USB-C powered (so I could relocate it in the kitchen to watch stuff while cooking).

Even in that case it's pretty weak. It lacks workspaces/spaces that desktop OSes have these days, and isn't extensible the way Win/Mac/Linux desktops are.