They ought to put the status bar at the bottom. All the designers using Macs probably forgot, but Chrome's tab interface was designed for Windows where it could be all the way at the top of the screen. And in general it's more common for desktop apps designed for mouse and keyboard to have frequently accessed UI elements at the top of the window than the bottom. So desktop apps would benefit from being able to use that real estate at the very top of the screen.
This is what you lose when you take a team developing a desktop OS and move it under a team doing a mobile OS.
Elements on the top of the screen have virtually infinite height, and elements in the corners have infinite height and width. You can't aim "too high" for something at the top of the screen.
Status bars on top don't make sense if you have tabs on top. Now your tabs are infinitely smaller, and aiming at them requires a lot more effort.
Mac's original design had the menubar on top, and its windows didn't have tabs, so it all worked fine together. That's not the case for browsers with tabs on top.
The linked article seems to imply that this remains a good design choice even today:
> The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which always places the menu bar on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current program's windowframe.
I guess now that the browser is the one app you probably spend the most amount of time in, it might make a little less sense? Android's lack of a menu bar system makes it make very little sense there.
Apple's design never made sense. It's fine when apps are maximised but it gets very confusing when apps are not maximised and the menu is very far from the app that it belongs to.
Since it only works well for maximised apps, the UX is much better if you just merge the menu into the title bar of apps.
I found it to not at all be confusing once I got used to it—-I find it less confusing and more reliable in practice.
Speaking from 20+ years of Windows use with a local menu bar and 7 years of Linux desktop where I switched to a global menu bar—-it was an instant improvement in quality of life.
I no longer have to hunt for a narrow menu bar strip, just throw the mouse all the way up, and hope to never hunt for it ever again.
I wonder how relevant Fitt's law is with bigger screens and the drastically changed ratio between mouse hand movement and cursor movement on screen. It used to be that you could reach a screen corner with a very simple flick of the mouse hand wrist. But that doesn't feel the same way anymore on modern hardware.
FWIW, Apple's known to have a slightly more aggressive mouse/trackpoint acceleration curve to account for this. (In retrospect it's probably why Apple went all out on luxuriously large trackpads.)
Depends on your configuration, I guess. I just tried this with my mx master with its standard resolution (so no ridiculous 800000 dpi gaming mouse) on a 4k 32" at 100% under windows. I can easily reach a corner with a quick flick of the wrist.
Auto-hide the task bar at the bottom, and you've basically got the Gnome UI. Works just fine. It's the permanent screen reservation of the double task bar that really eats up the usable desk space.
Samsung's task bar (when you enable the DeX integration on a tablet) also supports this and it makes for a fine user experience.
Edit: I've enabled "force desktop mode" on my Pixel 9 Pro and hooked it up to my laptop dock. The UI looks almost exactly the same already. Taskbar at the bottom, notification bar at the top.
It's clearly experimental; my ultrawide screen scales horribly, my keyboard app gets horribly confused, and interacting with the top bar triggers a full-screen tablet overlay that looks a bit weird.
However, Chrome opens multiple windows and browses just fine. There are right-click menus, mouse hover interactions, window resizing features (though some apps require the "force resizable activities" flag). Ethernet Just Works, audio/video just works, and I can operate my phone screen while working in dock mode (so apps that absolutely refuse to work can still be operated through the touch screen).
Hiding the bottom bar doesn't solve the problem because it still takes the corners away. You can't put UI there because the bottom bar will come up and cover it when you mouse into the corner. The OS is taking all four corners for itself. Greedy! Apps should have that space. Apps are what we are here to use and the OS is getting in the way.
macOS doesn't seem to care and that's what all the designers use. I'm guessing people think it's pretty?
The dock would also better if it weren't stretched to the entire screen width by default but perhaps Google is planning to use that space for something. It's also possible they're going to remove the top bar at some point, that'd make the UI standard Windows-shaped.
The Gnome trick for the dock is to only show the dock when hitting the Super button which also brings up the virtual desktops and what macOS might call Launchpad (except not full screen by default). Ubuntu likes to force the dock on you the way macOS does, but you can disable that.
My previous Pixel (a 4a) had problems with getting unduly warm. I've heard it's better on later models but still not solved. How has your 9 Pro done with heat?
I haven't noticed much. It can get hot when I'm taxing it (i.e. running large LLMs), but it takes a lot for the rather underpowered Tensor SoC to get warm.
What I don't get is why they don't design UIs with a status bar on the side - you have so much waster horizontal real estate both in landscape monitors, with every website, code editor having huge bars on the either side of the text.
Smartphones are portrait screens and its clear that having only that much horizontal real estate is enough.
Samsung did not forget, and did it right with DeX.
They did, however, get some of the interactions wrong (not to mention, handling of display resolution), so in the end, you can't exploit Fitt's Law in DeX either.
I would put all bars at the top. On a touch-enabled screen it's much easier to touch something at the top than something next to the keyboard, so I move the taskbar to the top on all my Windows two-in-ones.
Why not at the side, though? Better use of the vertical space and no issues with touchscreens (interactable items on top, hand reaching from the side). That's how I do it on every desktop/laptop machine I own.
And ChromeOS is designed for Chrome's tab bar, so that it is at the top edge of the screen, essentially making it infinitely tall. This is one of the things that makes surfing the web more pleasant and ChromeOS then on Windows and Mac.
With many linux window managers you can move the statusbar to the bottom, hide the titlebar and configure chrome to use the (now hidden) system titlebar for the same effect.
I think that the first smartphones were way smaller than today’s ones played a role. They were not that elongated either, the aspect ratio was way closer to a square. I could easily reach the top bar back then. It was definitely not a hurdle. But of course that’s not true for a long time now.
For me the only feature I want from a taskbar/status bar is ability to hide it permanently so it never comes out until I press a key on a keyboard (like meta/Windows key or even a key combination if needed).
Task bar auto popping just because you weren't precise with your mouse and moved it too far down or to the corner is very annoying to me.
I treat it as a test if desktop environment have "we will force our way down your throat" or "we try to make it great for everyone" attitude. Windows and Apple are choosing the former. KDE is choosing the latter.
I am surprised because somehow they get it on phones (hidden by default, needs a gesture to bring down). Real estate on a laptop is a just as precious, especially vertical real estate.
This looks like it will help a lot of students and families who are on a budget. If you can just plug your phone into a screen you do not need to buy a separate laptop anymore. The browser extensions are the most important part because that is what makes a computer useful. I am glad to see they are thinking about this.
>This looks like it will help a lot of students and families who are on a budget. If you can just plug your phone into a screen you do not need to buy a separate laptop anymore.
Except that android phones with display output are mostly flagships with flagship prices.
But 50 Euros on the used market got me a retired corporate HP/Dell laptop with 1080p screen, intel 8th gen i5 quad core, 8GB RAM and 256GB NVME on which I put Linux. Way better for studying and productivity than my android phone hooked up to the TV.
It's a nice feature to have as a backup in case my laptop dies, but I wouldn't daily drive an android phone as a desktop computer for productivity.
Actually many ridiculously expensive "flagship" smartphones do not have DisplayPort and some do not have even USB 3.
The chances to find DisplayPort in what nowadays have become medium-price smartphones, i.e. $500 to $600, are about as good as finding DisplayPort in a "flagship".
Resell the 8GB of RAM and buy an even better phone then? That's 150 euros of value right there.
Then use the money on a reputable second hand store to buy a used S20 5G 128GB for 150 euros, or a S22 128GB for 145, maybe an S21 Ultra 5G 256GB for 139, and you've got yourself a valiant workstation already (Samsung DeX works great out of the box, no need to wait for Google here). I can also find an S20+ 5G 128GB for 75 euros with display damage (but that doesn't matter when you hook it up to a monitor).
On another website I can find an S20+ 5G with cracks in the edges of the touch screen for 50 euros. That's 12GiB of RAM, 128GiB of storage, a 3200x1440p@120Hz screen and 5G connectivity built in. You're gonna need a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard (that's like what, 5 euros?) to hook it up to the TV but then you're good.
Where is the $150 euros coming from? 8GB of brand new DDR3 or DDR4 is available for $20-$30 from Amazon / Fleabay, and once he sells it the laptop will no longer work.
That's the standard price for 8GB DDR4 RAM in the local major web shop. I'm sure there are cheaper options out there, but people are willing to pay more than that to get a shipping date before October.
I'm seeing plenty of 8 GB DDR4 SODIMMs on ebay for ~$20-30. AFAIK laptop RAM was not hit in the same way since it's not really readily reusable in other types of computer, and laptops don't generally have unused slots to just plop in more RAM.
Why buy a used phone that will stop receiving updates, can't be fixed or upgraded and can't run whatever you want on it when you can use a real computer instead?
Who in their right mind would put Windows on such a device, though? This is THE hardware generation that Microsoft painted a target on with their planned obsolescence strategy. I don't know if there can be a clearer signalling that it is to be avoided at all costs.
It heavily depends on where you live, but plenty of poorer areas that never had much desktop computer penetration because of affordability are going app-first. Richer countries are going app-first for things like banking and government ID too, because the security situation with locked-down phones is a lot better than on the desktop where FreeFortniteRobloxUpdate.exe can drain your savings without you ever noticing it.
You're going to need a phone anyway. Might as well save some money by not having to get a laptop for doing your taxes once a year.
Most normal people don't really care about Google's walled garden. That's a tech person thing. I wouldn't do it, but none of the people who don't have a favourite Linux distro care about any of this.
>Might as well save some money by not having to get a laptop for doing your taxes once a year. Most normal people don't really care about Google's walled garden. That's a tech person thing.
Most "normal people" don't use their phones hooked to their TVs as desktop computers. It's a very niche scenario.
They use their old laptop or tablet from school, university or hand-me-down from parent/relative for that task, since we're going with your assumption of living in a rich country where access to cheap hardware is abundant and 50 Euros is a very basic dinner for 2, so unlikely for people's livelihoods to be threatened by skimping 50 bucks once in their lifetime on some personal computing device besides their phone.
And in the specific case of living in a rich country, you might not even need to spend that 50, since I am yet to meet anyone who in case of need, can't just get a old computer for virtually free as hand-me-down from parent/friend/relative where it's collecting dust, if you just need a PC to do your taxes once a year. It's a lot more realistic scenario than people hooking up phones to TVs to do their taxes.
That's a nicely thought out setup, but why would other people want to do that hassle, instead of just getting a cheap laptop, which is what most people do?
You're making up niche scenarios for the sake of winning an argument, but you don't daily drive, you don't dog-food yourself, they're only good as concepts on paper, but not in practice.
The market for people buying obsolete phones to connect to their TV as their daily driver workhorse computers is insanely small, even on quirky HN let alone outside this bubble. So who do you think you are convincing/converting with this?
Like the most popular Androids are Samsungs and Samsung has been shipping DEX on their flagships since for-ever, and how many of their users actually use it? Or how many buy them just for that feature alone? You haven't discovered an untapped market here that will replace PC/laptops for most average people.
The moto g100 is a good example of a midrange phone with decent specs, including video output. It launched at $400, and can be bought for around $200 these days.
It has a Snapdragon 870, 8gb RAM, 128gb storage, a microSD slot, headphones jack, and a big enough battery to last 2 days. It's a little chunky, and it's not waterproof, but beyond that it's just about everything I ever wanted in a phone.
Motorola, of course, has already abandoned it. But it still gets up-to-date Android via Lineage OS and other community made ROMs.
How did they abandon it? It release october last year according to google.
>but beyond that it's just about everything I ever wanted in a phone.
I get that, but none of this answers my question of why people should use that to a TV, instead of a PC, other than to flex? It really isn't more practical, nor saving you money and you're still limited to the apps of android ecosystem rather than the windows/linux one.
As for why anyone should do it, I'm not really arguing that anyone should. I was just trying to point out that it's more affordable than you might think. (Although it can't beat the deal you got on your laptop.)
I think it might make sense if you already have a laptop dock with a screen and a keyboard at home and at school/work, and your needs were fairly lightweight, and you really valued portability. Or as you suggested, it could just serve as a backup device in case your main laptop gets broken or whatever.
Yeah, fair enough. I actually really like the recent trend of Android manufacturers committing to 7 years of software updates, because yeah, community ROMs really aren't for everyone.
My point was more that there are affordable options if you're inclined to do a bit of tinkering.
There's lineageOS for outdated pixel device, but I think you loose device attestation if you flash that, so your banking, payment and digital-ID apps won't work anymore which is kind of important features for a lot of people.
I still think separating a phone for phone apps and a PC for productivity, is the best choice even if that PC is a 20 year old rustbucket from the dumpster, it will still do more tasks than a phone. You can't learn photoshop on a phone.
The lineageOS kernel isn't guaranteed to be super up to date. It's often based on the manufacturer's kernel. There's also possibly binary blobs involved which can't be checked or updated.
There is a growing trend among banks to keep the web app usable only for emergency purposes (notify bank that your phone got stolen or lost and authorize the installation of the bank on a new phone) and only allow functionality on their mobile apps.
I've seen that claim around, but I have yet to see a bank claim to have this obviously unworkable policy, or to see someone identify a bank that does have it.
I haven't seen any web apps that seem to be intentionally unusable, or any belonging to banks, personally at least. I don't think anybody is doing this as a publicly announced policy. But I have seen several websites for major institutions with major features totally unusable on their website, that should be found in a matter of minutes if they had even one QA person actually trying to use the website after updates. It's not announced, but it's hard to imagine it's not intentional.
For my most recent personal example, go onto State Farm's website and try to create an account. Goes to a blank page. It only seems to work right on their mobile app.
I'm right there with relating to this mindset, however, I recently (in the past 2 weeks) got to experience restoring a new phone from backup without the old one present, and it's becoming essentially a non-issue. I can't think of a single thing that wasn't restored from cloud backup.
"work pc" -- random 50 dollar fire hazard running Linux. Anyway, those Android phones though they are obviously going to be the unreliable part in this story.
Isn't Pixel 10 the first one with fully supported desktop mode?
I remember I was very confused when buying a Pixel 7 to replace my (then 3 year old) Huawei P30 Pro, and the inferior camera + lack of desktop mode made it feel like a net downgrade.
According to Google's help site, no Pixel has a desktop mode (like you can find at Motorola, Samsung and others).
The latest Pixel models have DisplayPort, but their operating system only provides screen mirroring or app window mirroring on an external monitor. Unlike Pixel, the phones with a true desktop mode can display multiple windows on the monitor, and presumably they can have a selectable resolution for the monitor. I assume that for screen mirroring the monitor is used at the same resolution as the phone screen, i.e. either 1080 lines or only slightly more.
Moreover, while the help site states that DisplayPort exists in Pixel 8 and newer, Google does not bother to advertise the existence of this feature in its online shop, where there is no mention about this in the phone specifications.
> operating system only provides screen mirroring or app window mirroring on an external monitor
That's not true. It's probably written that way, because this is still an experimental feature so it is indeed not "supported", but it does work, you just have to toggle a few settings inside developer options.
And in this desktop mode it could make use of my 2k desktop screen, though it is quite buggy (it is a pixel 8 device, for reference)
Good to know, but the fact that the knowledge about the possibility of connecting an external monitor is very well hidden on the Google site and the existence of a true desktop mode is even better hidden from any potential Google customers, does not inspire confidence.
From this state of affairs I cannot be sure that if I bought a Google Pixel it would really be usable with a monitor, as such hidden features could be removed at any time.
Other smartphone vendors clearly specify for their phones whether e.g. they support DisplayPort 1.4, so that they can use a monitor at a decent resolution, and whether they have a desktop mode.
Note that such capabilities were added to the 8 after it launched. When they launched it they did not even mention that it contains displayport alt mode.
I'm ignorant on this topic, can you not just plug a USB dock with HDMI out in any android phone and get a display out? I do it all the time on the previous three pixel phones I've had, but I didn't know that this was limited to those?
USB-C is only a connector/socket - a device having a USB-C socket does not guarantee much beyond being able to plug a USB-C connector into it.
Some USB-C devices only use the port for charging for example. Others might only support USB 2.0.
Getting a display out from something with USB-C socket needs the device to support something called DP Alt Mode.
Note that cables matter too - you can have a DP alt mode enabled monitor and phone, but if you have the wrong cable it won’t work. Welcome to the future.
It is understandable that every cable doesn't have to and shouldn't support every feature. USB cables would be insaney overpriced in that case. For simple charging you don't need a high speed 40gbps cable that can connect an external GPU.
To mitigate the confusion, all simple charging cables should be universally labeled as such and all high speed cables should also have some markings that indicate the maximum speed of the cable or something similar.
You don't wired need display output, just WiFi. Motorola's Smart Connect desktop uses Miracast for using TVs and the like as desktop monitors as well as wired.
I got my moto g84 5G with 8/256 GB for about 170 euros new and it supports it (not wired). Seems to work fine.
Is it any good? Last time I tried miracast the framerate and video quality was total garbage due to shit compression. Barely worked for streaming youtube videos to the TV but no way I could do it for productivity.
Mirecast (when done properly) is basically a video stream over a peer-to-peer WiFi Direct connection. H.264+AAC/AC3/PCM audio sent over RTSP/RTP using a standard IPv4 stack. Better codecs are available on newer devices. Two modern WiFi 6 devices can stream gigabits per second that way if configured right, there's no need for the typical low FPS, lag, and desynchronised audio from a protocol standpoint.
For some reason, a lot of implementations (especially on the receiving end) suck at this. The latency seems to be terrible and TVs and displays seem to care more about reassembling old frames than about showing the latest good signal. However, it's not all that different from what Apple is doing.
Miracast over ethernet/via an access point is something different (something I've never really seen used myself).
> Except that android phones with display output are mostly flagships with flagship prices.
Might well be that this becomes a lot more common on cheaper phones if it becomes a popular feature though. A display port output isn't currently that useful, so it's something it makes sense to cut from budget models. But if this desktop functionality becomes popular that calculus may change.
I am pretty sure brands would rather sell you additionnal devices, like tablets or chromebook (will they be called androidbooks?) than make budget models able to do so.
Do you understand how much are 50 bucks in a third world country? I mean, Android phone is not the cheapest solution for the poor (obviously) but it helps a lot having this kind of features for a family.
>Do you understand how much are 50 bucks in a third world country?
Yes I do, no need to patronize us with that since even in 3rd world countries people have access to old computers from ewaste imports at a reasonable price, we don't all live in straw mudhuts wearing loincloths swinging from branch to branch.
Now tell me which 50 euro phone ships with display output and is readily available. AFAIK Oneplus 7T I had is the cheapest with that feature but still over 50 and official SW goes to Android 12. Not sure if flashing lineage will still keep display output feature.
Then there's the issue of availability in 3rd world countries, where it might be easier to find some scrapped Dell optiplex with a core 2 duo, or a beat up Acer from the windows 7 era for cheap at your local market versus a cheap android with display output capabilities being more of a unicorn. Sure you'll find your Pixel 8s and or Samsung S24s too, but those imports don't come cheap there, compared to the masses of lesser known cheap chinese phones but those don't have display output and their software is shit.
Plus, if you go that route of Pixel 8 as a pc, you still need the budget for an external display, mouse and keyboard and your battery will wear out much faster. So then why not get a cheap laptop which has all the peripherals?
Plus 2, old phones age very poorly performance wise, they slow down a lot due to thermal paste and battery degradation and nobody makes quality OP 7T batteries anymore to do a swap and get back to out of the box performance. What you find on Aliexpress now are fakes or poor quality clones. While a laptop is much easier to repair and maintain as parts wear out or break.
If you can't find an affordable phone with DP-Alt mode, you can get it working by getting clever.
Any Android phone with a USB port can have a dock attached with ethernet, a keyboard, and a mouse. Connect a Chromecast to any HDMI display. Cast to that display.
Then install 1) a taskbar app (there are dozens on Google Play), 2) enable freeform windows in the device and 3) cast your phone to your Chromecast.
Alternatively, even the shitty phones with just USB 2 dongles can enable their desktop mode by using DisplayLink; no DP-Alt mode necessary. Worse on the battery, but works over USB micro if need be.
The biggest hurdle is software support. For getting the display to work, there are plenty of workarounds possible.
> people have access to old computers from ewaste imports at a reasonable price,
Are you joking?
One can get super good condition Dell latitudes with 8th gen Intel with 8GB RAM and 256GB NVMe with 1 year no-questions asked warranty (and original charger) for €100. Similar ones cost 2x or 3x in India. That is not reasonable.
> don't all live in straw mudhuts wearing loincloths
No. But not everyone is earning in Bengaluru campus. Look at the typical Rapido driver.
Can you be specific which countries are you talking about?
Because you seem to be in a word fight with very vague arguments and with someone else with very vague arguments and it's not even clear you're talking about same things.
So can you be clear on:
- Which counties you're talking about?
- Why are those countries important to think about in this case?
- Why doesn't this feature help people from regions that can afford a mid-to-top range smartphone?
Pick any you like, Income/GDP is more important metric rather than which specific country.
>- Why are those countries important to think about in this case?
Why are you asking me? Ask the people who brought up third world countries as the target user base for phones with display output. I'm the one not agreeing with this point since it's stupid.
>- Why doesn't this feature help people from regions that can afford a mid-to-top range smartphone?
I explained already below in detail why. But to reiterate in short, if your monthly income is in the ~200$ a month ballpark, you're not gonna be spending 300$ on a mid-to-top range smartphone just for the display output feature even if you managed to save up that money. Even in Europe some people skoff at paying 300 Euros for a phone but some here think people in nations with 10x less income are somehow the userbase for this feature because in their mind those people can't afford a 20$ dumpster PC, but somehow they can afford a 300$ pixel 8 and external monitor.
I have some friends in Argentina where even just a few USD goes a long way. I occasionally throw them something like $10 USD and that gets them GPU, disk upgrades, etc., it's nuts.
1. In 3rd world countries everyone has a phone, usually android, no matter how poor the are. Irrespective of whether or not it has desktop capabilities. So any phone purchase is already part of their baseline expenses.
2. Any desktop/laptop purchase, even if it is $1, is an extra $1.
3. The screens/keyboards/mouse again will not likely be purchased by individuals themselves. They will have “Internet cafes”, libraries, schools, etc where those screens will be provided.
>1. [...] So any phone purchase is already part of their baseline expenses.
Yeah but that base line expense can be 50$ or $300. Big difference. Not everyone in 3rd world countries has 300 for a Pixel 8. That's the biggest flaw in your argument. That, and the fact that walking around with an exotic 300$ Pixel 8 flags you as a potential target for mugging in the wrong neighbourhoods, verus a beat up 50$ Samsung or Huawei.
>2. Any desktop/laptop purchase, even if it is $1, is an extra $1.
Hence why a 50$ laptop and a 50$ android phone leaves you better off than blowing 300$ on just the phone alone. And if even 1$ is THAT critical to your daily survival, then you're not buying 300$ phones anyway to begin with. You're buying the cheapest you can get so that in case it gets stolen you don't lose 6 months of savings.
>3. The screens/keyboards/mouse again will not likely be purchased by individuals themselves. They will have “Internet cafes”, libraries, schools, etc where those screens will be provided.
You think in 3rd world countries people just have displays with USB-C docks, keyboards and mice everywhere in public and at home? I know it's getting difficult to tell them apart these days, but we're talking about 3rd world countries, not the bay area.
The pixel 8 costs that much now. Give it a few years and check back on it later (when this feature actually drops) and the phone might end up being much more affordable.
Nonetheless, I do agree with you that simply getting a used low-end laptop is cheaper, but being poor in a GDP/capita way is not the only kind of blocker. Being poor in a "my family can buy me a phone because it's a necessity, but we don't have a computer" is not uncommon, and many people end up developing on their phone, simply because that's what they have.
4. used electronics in 3rd world countries are much more expensive compared to developed ones (because not as much units were sold when they were new to begin with), so 50 euros will get you a 3rd gen in a poor condition at best (or some shit tier Celeron N-thousand something with a soldered 4GB RAM)
For one, PCs still make it there via ewaste shipments that then get repaired and sold for cheap, so you can have decent variety of old stuff.
And secondly, even a "3rd gen in a poor condition at best (or some shit tier Celeron N-thousand something with a soldered 4GB RAM)" as you call it, is better for learning marketable skills and making stuff, than whatever you can do on your phone, since office jobs will ask for skills with using a PC, not how skilled you are using a phone.
But hey, if you think you can pass through engineering school with only a phone and no computer, then all power to you.
Just today I got a 15 year used laptop in a "developed country" (Germany) for €30. Windows 10 works in a VM. It did come with Windows 11, but I wiped that. What are you all arguing about?
Btw, I also got a Celeron laptop you were talking about, I got it for free.
You surely do realize that desktop mode on a smartphone needs a display, a keyboard and a pointer device too right? You can get a decent and complete laptop with 1070p screen for the price of a 720p only TV/Monitor.
Some "flagship" and higher-end-midtier phones cheap out on the USB connection. USB 2 over USB-C with USB-PD for fast charging. No video out, slow data transfers.
Maybe when desktop mode becomes more common there will be an incentive to fix the shitty USB situation.
Cheap phones probably won't really have the power to effectively multi-task so I imagine cheap models would rather disable the feature than leave the user with a bad UI.
Sometimes you're lucky to even have conformant USB-PD. For example, OnePlus for a while had "Warp charging" and the phones wouldn't accept high power over regular USB-C PD.
USB-PD support has been made a requirement for GPlay Android. Manufacturers don't need to support USB-PD for their crazy 200W charging circuits, but it's been a while since you had the choice between 5-10W USB2.0 and 80W Warp Charge.
Android Chrome not having extensions is just a build option toggle. It doesn't have extensions because Google doesn't want it to, not for technical reasons.
Yea, I very much doubt they would ever put a browser extension on this. It's funny, I feel as though reading some Google dev's response on reddit about why mobile chrome didn't have extensions was my inflection point when I started to realize they were becoming evil.
>Android Chrome not having extensions is just a build option toggle. It doesn't have extensions because Google doesn't want it to, not for technical reasons.
The leak screenshots are from the dev version of the app. It has not been confirmed to actually have extensions enabled in the prod version, which is what the parent poster was talking about. It would have been prudent to actually read the post I was replying to and the actual article, not just look at pictures.
I don't think this leak implies that (all/some) Android phones will get desktop projection. It just means that Android has a desktop OS and is likely replacing ChromeOS as has been rumored for a while.
So you need to buy a phone, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. And you need a desk where to put the stuff, which is not a given if you are part of a poor family with several kids.
A cheap android phone and a cheap chinese laptop with 16GB of ram is about 300 EUR where I live, and you can use it wherever you want.
My Moto Edge 2024 has "Ready For" which is basically this still today. I plug in the USB-C cable normally connected to my work MacBook and I instantly get a full desktop experience; mouse, keyboard and sound included.
It's how I play Minecraft with my kids when they get the itch. Sometimes if I know I'm only gonna be zoning out on Youtube at night I'll use to to save a few watts too.
It can do 1440p at 120hz, all on a really affordable phone. It's nice.
Phones were way less powerful 15 years ago and native software was much more important. A modern phone CPU running a browser on a larger screen takes care of a lot of what you need these days.
I've only used it when I'm in a pinch but it's handy. Blowing up mobile apps to a larger screen and multitasking isn't ideal certainly but I've been able to handle "email job" type activities while out of pocket. That said I've never heard of anyone else who's actually used it.
> The browser extensions are the most important part because that is what makes a computer useful.
What year were you born? I ask not to lambast but because given infinite time, I doubt I would come to the same conclusion. To me (a 37-year old) that statement sounds like someone who grew up with Chromebooks in school
This has existed for more than a decade. Even my old Samsung S10+ had this feature. It's called Samsung DeX and it is not some handicapped environment like iPad OS either, you can actually get real work done, especially if you're a software engineer.
As Google's domination continues, the US and EU need to force mobile OS vendors to open up platforms for third party app installation without gatekeeping, deep menu toggles, or scare walls.
You already need a phone to pay for parking, order at residents, identify yourself with the government, etc. Two companies should not dictate essential life function interaction.
The monopoly grip on this is so tight that it's almost impossible to compete.
Yeah and we’ll be forced to do this because nobody can afford computers anymore because of Ram and SSD prices because of companies like Google buying it all up at extortionist prices.
We’re going backwards by putting all of our compute back in the warehouse.
What makes a computer useful is the form factor (decent size screen, mouse and keyboard instead of touch controls) and having full control of the system. It has nothing to do with browser extensions.
You can get a monstrously powerful MacBook almost new for under $500. And that includes display, keyboard, touchpad and speakers. And a whole lot more.
It really does look to be a rewrite of ChromeOS to make it a native Android experience with very few tweaks to the User experience that I can see.
I think it's a good idea on Google's part. The trend of consumers using mobiles as their one and only computing experience is still strong.
This will blend the experience consumers have between desktops and their primary computing platform.
It's a trend with Apple as well. It can be seen in iOS/macOS 26 Tahoe. There's lots of untapped potential in those iPads with M-series CPUs. We've also had rumors of a "MacBook Air Lite" sporting a cellphone A-series CPU. The convergence is happening.
I would love to be able to do more with my Google Pixel phone. Right now, the MacBook is my primary workstation, but the possibility of an even more "mobile" productivity setup is very enticing. Now if only I could get an Android tablet with the new "Terminal" feature in Android 15...
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple cannibalized Mac for that forced App Store and services revenue.
Google is about to dip into that market, where desktop users are forced to use the Play Store to install any app. Apple would be foolish to leave that money on the table.
App instalation isn't really even the problem. It is just the capabilities you have that you do not have access to. a modern iPad can easily run macOS as an 'app', if you will. The kernel is there, the userland is there, just not the checkbox from up high. Even Xcode works well in macOS VMs nowadays.
Essentially a clone of Windows 11, and those screenshots make me realise just how much I hate the rounded corners, borderless vagueness, and excess padding of "modern" UI.
Is this serious? Looking at this I feel both bored to death (think "Severance gray office hell" boredom) AND overwhelmed because of the tons of decorations and useless creases and crappy icons and awful text and unnecessary affordances that only made sense 30 years ago when no one knew how to use a computer. Ugh
I agree with the parent comment, but I understand that someone who did not grow up with UIs that looked like that would think otherwise. I do feel that Windows 2000 was peak UI for desktop operating systems, but it's probably due to a combination of nostalgia and the fact that I deeply dislike modern Electron-based UIs with too few decorations and an overly minimalistic and non-customizable "we know best" attitude.
On my Pixel 9a (also on GrapheneOS) the biggest limitation is it can't be set to higher than 1080p, and the upscaling algorithm with my 4K display (not sure where in the chain that happens, monitor or phone) was quite terrible to the point of text legibility being a concern.
The usage experience otherwise is quite good, it's perhaps my preferred way to sync data to and from my phone, I have it all stored on a NAS so I connect to my Type-C display (which has keyboard, mouse, and ethernet connected to its switch), fire up a terminal, type in my rsync commands, and my pictures & music are synced ~instantly at LAN speeds.
Actually, it's the Android 16 Linux Terminal (pKVM) [1], so it's 100% on-device.
Since this is a full VM, unlike Termux, you can run Docker too!
(Though Termux is more stable and lightweight for daily use.)
I have absolutely no interest in expanding the use of Android in my life. I am, in fact, far more interested in going the other way and trying to reduce my reliance on any locked down platforms.
So you may want to consider GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone). By the way, they have a real desktop mode with desktop apps, not mobile apps on a large screen.
I enjoy cool features like this, but as usual, I'm wary of the consequences.
Android is becoming more and more locked down like iOS. Even if it weren't, it's still always been more locked down than a standard desktop or laptop machine running an operating system of the user's choice.
With the advent of smartphones and tablets, already I see non- and semi-technical users often dropping their laptop or desktop and just using their phone or tablet. (I know people who don't even have a laptop/desktop anymore.)
Android having a full desktop interface will just add fuel to this fire, and further normalize running a locked-down OS and device that users don't truly own or control as their only computing platform.
The OG Motorola Droid, for example: While it clearly wasn't a design intent, there was really nothing of any gravity to stop people from using it in any way they wished.
Rooting was a simple matter of running a hacked su command, and voila: One becomes root. The bootloader wasn't locked at all. Custom kernels and userlands were normal. It was a great little pocket computer to goof around with for anyone who cared enough to give it a swing.
Just install the "missing" su binary and...done.
At the time, I felt that this was a perfectly acceptable way to keep it working reliably for regular folk.
In a way I don't know what I think about them preventing me from modifying "their" certified OS. Many products do that (if I buy a Marshall smartspeaker, it's not like if I can modify the software, is it?).
What I want is to be able to properly install an alternative OS (just like I don't care about what Windows or macOS do, as long as I can install Linux), and that goes with the bootloader unlocking/locking.
The problem is for every person who wants to do this, there are hundreds (thousands?) who wouldn't want to - and these people are vulnerable various security exploits that would allow someone evil to take over their device.
This isn't just a made up situation: There are nations that have large teams of people who's job is to figure out how to get software installed on your device of their choice/make/design, allowing them to do whatever they want.
This isn't quite true. The Google Pixels allow me to unlock the bootloader, install my own system, and relock the bootloader. As a result, I run an alternative OS called GrapheneOS which is more secure than Android.
The fact that I can unlock and relock the bootloader is not a security issue or a risk. People who don't know what that means cannot possibly do it by mistake.
Now allowing root access to users on Android, that's a security risk because a user can be tricked into giving root access to some evil app. I don't have root access on my GrapheneOS, even though I chose to install it myself. Because it is more secure like this.
So it sounds like a fair compromise to me: they make Android the way they want, and if I don't like it I can install an alternative OS. Just like I can install Linux if I don't like Windows. What I don't like is that most Android manufacturers actively try to prevent me from doing that, and I don't like it.
> The fact that I can unlock and relock the bootloader is not a security issue or a risk. People who don't know what that means cannot possibly do it by mistake.
The second sentence is false. Lots of people blindly follow things and don't understand consequences until they brick their devices. Those who don’t break something won’t notice if they’ve silently backdoored themselves.
People asking for support after getting themselves into some weird hole they never should have been in because some friend or online article said so is super common.
> The second sentence is false. Lots of people blindly follow things and don't understand consequences until they brick their devices. Those who don’t break something won’t notice if they’ve silently backdoored themselves.
"Lots of people", how many though? Can that number be reduced? What number would be acceptable?
I feel like it _has_ to be possible to devise an unlocking procedure that dissuades most people from self-harm.
The problem is often treated as intractable, but intuitively this seems really unlikely to me. I don't think more than a tiny percentage of Xiaomi owners, for example, would go through the bootloader unlock process which often has a mandatory wait period attached to it without a reason more compelling than an impulse to randomly and blindly follow instructions on the internet.
I would like to see user studies with good methodology before other people decide to barter long-term freedoms away for insufficient benefit.
Why do I so rarely see people who are concerned about the security issues of bootloader unlocking calling for designing hassle and warning into the process. Instead, it's more common to hear that in the name of the average user, all escape hatches must be removed.
After a certain point, someone else's insistence on self-harm ceases to be a good excuse to infringe on my freedom. We don't ban hammers because some people accidentally damage their property/body, and it's a lot easier to do that with a hammer than an unlocked bootloader.
The security model of Android and iOS is vastly superior, and for "normal" users it is not so much of a problem if they don't have control they neither need nor want.
On the other hand, I obviously don't like it when I don't have control over my hardware. But what I hate the most is when the manufacturers prevent me from installing an alternative OS. I like being able to install something like GrapheneOS.
Also the fact that I'm forced (in practice) to use the Play Services is not really about the device being locked down.
Vastly superior security doesn't make you give up freedoms for security. But do tell me how successful the war against scams has been for the average user.
Convincing a user to give their password will always be an issue, that's fundamental. But because phishing exists does not mean that security does not matter.
Without security, there is no need to phish, because the system does not protect anything. Once you have a good security, then the best attack is phishing because it's easier to trick the human than the system. This means that the security is good, not bad.
I think one of the points is that all this attestation stuff does not protect against the majority of the ways users are compromised. Its just remote control with real security benefits, just those benefits largely accrue to companies and at the expense of the user.
If my system is signed and verified at every boot, doesn't that guarantee that my system hasn't been tampered with? Meaning that no malware has found a way to get root access and modify it. I find this valuable.
If you can't use your own keys and verify the process yourself, then no, that is not a guarantee.
Malware developers just have their software signed by the gatekeepers your device is programmed to inherently trust, because the gatekeepers don't give a shit.
The App Store and Play Store are the largest vectors of malware out there, and every year they are responsible for letting their users get scammed to the tune of billions of dollars.
> If you can't use your own keys and verify the process yourself
The thing with security is that it is a gradient. Too many people try to win arguments on security by saying a variant of "anyway you have to trust somebody, so it will never be secure". This is exactly what you are doing here.
Say I trust GrapheneOS, the security model guarantees what I said. Obviously I have to trust something, I won't audit every single line of code and assemble billions of transistors myself.
> every year they are responsible for letting their users get scammed
Second tactic for winning a security argument: "but the users get scammed anyway". Sure they do. Because they have to. If you have a system that popular with zero scam, it probably means that the attackers don't even need to attack the human because the system itself is insecure.
I do see the value in this and also note that this feature has largely been kept from users intentionally on most other platforms. Still, this offers very little protection for the vast majority of scams to which people fall victim.
Phishing will always exist. If a system is very secure, the easiest way to attack it is to phish the human that has control over it. Complaining about that is weird... what do the people who complain want? One of those two:
- "Please make the system less secure, so that the attackers don't have to attack the human because they can just compromise the system directly"
- "Please keep making the system secure, and keep removing rights from the users, because the users prove over and over again that they cannot be trusted with anything"
You see where I am going. If you only optimise for security, then you remove all the freedom. But we obviously want freedom. So it's a compromise.
Now this compromise is a choice, and different systems can make different compromises. The freedom I want is the freedom to choose my system. I want to be able to install GrapheneOS on my phone. Complaining about macOS not being Linux would be weird: if I want Linux, I use Linux. If I use macOS, well then I have to live with the design choices of Apple.
This level of security exists on open as well as closed platforms, the problem is the closed platforms not allowing you to do things that aren't giving your password away (like installing fdroid or using beeper easily). I just have a hard time believing this is superior in any way.
I you run GrapheneOS, it is an open source platform built on top of AOSP (the Android Open Source Project). Part of the security model is that you don't run as root. I am an advanced user and I don't want to run as root on my phone, I am happy with GrapheneOS as it is distributed.
Now if you want to be root, you can install an OS that allows you to be root. Just like I unlocked my bootloader, installed GrapheneOS and relocked my bootloader, you can do that and install whatever you please. I will keep using GrapheneOS because that is the most secure OS I can find for my phone.
The problem, IMO, is not that "some OS are opinionated and don't give you root access while other OSes do give you root access". The problem is that on many phones, you are not free to install the goddam OS you want (e.g. because you can't unlock or relock the bootloader).
Meh, I'm ok with not having root on my phone. What I'm not ok with is not being able to flash whatever I want to run on it later without unlocking and wiping. For this reason I have an automated script to verify Graphene's signatures and replace them with my own. This would give me the ability to extract data using root at a later date, for example.
> What I'm not ok with is not being able to flash whatever I want to run on it later without unlocking and wiping.
The wiping is a security feature: if someone installs a new random system ("random" being defined as "not signed by the same entity"), then they can modify the system in order to attack it. The whole secure boot idea is worthless if you allow that.
I don't disagree. I just don't want the trusted entity to be other than me.
Note that secure boot doesn't become worthless just because you can flash something different. The TPM should notice SB is turned off, and should refuse to decrypt, but there should be a way for the user to back up the key and use it to recover the data later.
Root used to just mean knowing an admin password and rarely using it on desktop platforms for making local changes. It's changed definition for mobile if it now means just being able to run and auto-update apps from fdroid or run an app without the attestation of the company that supplies the OS, which in the worst cases takes away control completely from the user.
Mobile platforms and developers solely supporting their attestation should allow other forms of self attestation that the users want. I don't think I'm confused about anything, and I don't need to muddy the definition of security or root to argue having control over my data and apps on platforms I want to use.
That was an example, I was talking about phishing in general. Phishing will always exist: as long as a human has a right to do something, someone else can trick this human into doing it for them.
Passkeys are great, and they do improve the situation. But they won't remove phishing as a concept.
I think a passkey is a good example of how, when the user has a trusted third party grant them limited instead of unlimited permission to do something (e.g. they can use a secret with the site that created it but they can't extract the raw secret from it to send to an arbitrary site), it is possible to make them immune to a particular type of phishing.
As an example of mitigating another type of phishing, if the user only has the ability to log in to a web site from a particular device or country, an attacker tricking them into providing their password gets a much less useful win.
You could argue they have the "right to do" less in that situation. Sure, that's a reasonable perspective. I'm not passing moral judgement here. But I think that it is a factually true statement that it is indeed possible to mitigate (and even entirely prevent) phishing vulnerabilities by giving end users devices that have stronger security policies - with those policies being written by the device creator, and not edited by the end user themself.
I think this principle applies to every single type of social engineering attack. Limiting the context of permissions lessens the risk of a confused deputy.
I am with you, and for this reason I really want them to fail. The PC is currently still a platform where the user has a relatively large amount of control and digital autonomy, and as long as a sizeable part of the population keeps using it, companies and government institutions cannot ignore it and must support it.
Once 90% of all internet clients are iOS or Android the open internet is dead, and the concept of a general purpose computer on which you can run any computation you want is also inaccessible to the average person. From that point on, everything is a service that you rent from either Apple or Google.
Samsung should not give up DEX, is mature and works exceptionally well with applications that are supported (wireless DEX with my samsung tv works great). Knowing Google, they will give up after 5 iterations or updates will be very slow. It is good for the ecosystem, I hope it will become more mainstream.
Dex and Android desktop mode are not a single new thing, but multiple features that partially have been in Android for years, like external screens, resizable windows and the (currently rather limited) external screen drawer.
I do have it in Pixel 8 after enabling in developer options. It's a bit buggy and low resolution, but does the job when e.g. I want to connect some video I'm already watching on mobile to the external display via USB-C. (You can connect a mouse via Bluetooth to the phone, or via a USB dongle plugged into your monitor, to control it.)
An interesting thing is that you can run apps X and Y on desktop screen while also run app X on mobile screen independently.
No, only the 85% or so of it that's accreted since about 2008. Prior to that it actually made money by offering useful search results without infringing on user privacy. That core business model could still work to power a company about 1/8th the size of current Google. Current Google cannot survive on that model. Something went really wrong when it put growthism above all else.
What went wrong was Google (the old 'do no evil' Google) bought the ad network DoubleClick. The acquired DoubleClick side then took over old Google from the inside out such that what we have today is Doubleclick calling itself "google", no more 'do no evil' old Google anywhere, and all the evil that exists on the advertising side infesting everything they do.
1. Those loading spinners being bumpy pulled my eyes around the screen wildly to the point that they were experiencing pain. They need to be removed.
2. There is a status bar along the top, and an application launcher docked at the bottom. That's way too much vertical space being used, especially on laptops (which I'd wager is going to be the most used viewing modality for this OS). It should be merged into a single bar along one side of the screen.
3. The dropdown at the top left of each window seems to be taking up a lot of space. Especially when you're trying to fit four tabs on the screen. Get rid of it so the tabs can actually be read.
4. At 27 seconds in, there are two close icons in the focused window. That being bad could be a presentation all in itself.
I'm not a visual designer but heres what I think is making it look so bad. The task bar is way to thick. The flat design of the icons needs some shadows or something to make them pop a bit. The rounding on the corners is way to much and needes to be dialed back significantly. There is both a top bar and a bottom bar, pick one ffs dont waste screenspace with both. Also top bar is transparent while bottom is fat and grey. I'd keep the top bar and scrap the bottom.
As far as OS's that look good, #1 KDE Plasma with breeze, MacOS snow leopard, Windows xp and vista.
For desktop use? Windows XP. It's got the right balance of aesthetics and practicality. Windows ME also works, but is more utilitarian. Anything after 7 is just absolute garbage.
This is why Valve invested so much in Linux. They saw the writing on the wall of Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier). Now they have an alternative. If Microsoft charges a 30% tax on all Steam transactions and won't let Steam run unless they do that, Valve can heavily push Linux and Steam Machine sales.
At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons, having disappearing controls depending on window size (scrollbars), or having corners so rounded that the click to drag mostly being outside the actual window.
The Windows 11 UI is annoying, but at least it doesn't look like a kid's toy.
I'm not sure how they could have failed that if that was never their goal in the first place. The entire point of Proton is that the Win32 API is infinitely more stable and worthwhile to target than anything Linux distros offer, and that the financial incentives aren't there for developers to 5x their platform distribution effort to reach 1% more users. An approach that relies on developers doing that would never work, and fortunately for Valve that isn't their approach.
You're thinking of now. Proton didn't exist yet the first time they tried Steam OS.
To be fair to Valve though, back then, there was a lot of movement in direct ports for Linux games. Humble Bundle (before they were bought) was spending real money on it and companies like Feral sprang up to help with titles like Mordor. It looked like there was going to be some real change.
But for various reasons the momentum waned. One of those reasons might be the existence of Proton itself. Some people were very against it because they thought it might lead to less native ports.
Is that a fair comparison? It seems like people have a compelling reason to use Linux (hardware compatibility, avoiding MS spyware, price, etc). I admit it was before my time, but what was the draw for OS/2? Even it's technical superiority to Windows was gone as soon as NT dropped right?
What's the purpose of a native build if the windows build runs just as good, or even better?
They ensured that the devs need not worry about another build target that requires extensive QA. Maybe in the distant future we will get ubiquitous native builds, but honestly and again, who cares?
Proton and Wine means there is a single target now, instead of the fragmented mess that is Desktop Linux today.
I think only the folder is still named Ubuntu12 or something (like Dota 2's folder is still called Dota 2 Beta), libraries in it surely are more recent than that. And even then, native Linux ports of games don't run that well anyway. Especially older ones, like Tomb Raider 2013, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Alien: Isolaton, those all will run much better over Wine. I kind of expect newer ports to fall apart as well in the future. I was playing Hollow Knight the other day (native port) and it drops FPS quite often on my laptop (hybrid amd+nvidia), while through Wine those drops don't exist almost at all.
kernel32+user32+gdi32+d3d[11|12]+dxgi is a pretty great API abstraction for game development. And unlike Linux desktop APIs the Win32 APIs are actually stable, so those games will also work in 5 years, and most importantly, performance is the same or better than on Windows. It's unlikely that game devs directly targeting Vulkan would do any better, and when using a high level engine, any layering overhead in Proton is negligible anyway. And don't even get me started about the state of audio APIs on Linux ;)
Also don't underestimate the amount of workarounds and tweaks that (most likely) go into Proton for games that make poor system API use. Without Proton those game-specific hacks would need to go into MESA, Wayland, X11 or various system audio libraries. At least Proton is one central place to accumulate all the game-specific warts in some dusty corner of their code base.
TL;DR: just think of Proton as an extremely low level and slim cross-platform API for games (not all that different than SDL), and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. And I bet that in 5..10 years Windows will have regressed so much that it might actually be better to run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows (assuming Windows hasn't become 'yet another Linux distro' by then anyway) ;)
> run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows
Already happening, to an extent. Specifically, modern Intel GPUs do not support DirectX 9 in hardware, yet legacy apps run fine. The readme.txt they ship with the drivers contains a paragraph which starts with the following text: “SOFTWARE: dxvk The zlib/libpng License” DXVK is a library which implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan, and an important component of SteamOS.
VS2026 is actually quite decent again (surprising tbh), but the good thing today is that a lot more UI apps support Linux than 20 years ago. E.g. I would just give my artists a Linux desktop running Blender, and generally test on a connected min-spec PC (also for the devs even if they are working on a high-end Windows PC in VStudio). E.g. similar to console-development, the low-end PC is essentially the devkit. Also has the advantage that there will be no performance surprises on release when most gamers try to run the game on their laptop or RTX2060 ;)
One thing I would definitely do is to replace MSVC with Clang, MSVC is just too far behind and it almost looks like MS abandondend it.
29 years is a lot more than the 5.. years time window I'm talking about. 3 decades is basically "I will need an emulator for that" ;)
But I think even a lot of D3D9 games should still work, and that's 2002 stuff. Also try running a 1997 Linux game binary on a modern Linux distro without recompiling, I doubt that's works all that well...
> As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
Maybe not, but they fully solved my problem with games, which was that I could not play on Linux. I started playing again just because of the SteamDeck, I think it's a pretty big achievement :-).
MAME is an emulator running games in fully emulated machines, Proton/Wine is a compatibility layer that runs games natively by the interfaces they expect.
The closest situation would be with comparing Wine running via CPU translation under ARM or RISC-V with how RPCS3 recompiles PowerPC games to native x86 code, but even then the comparison wouldn't be accurate as RPCS3 still does full system emulation whereas Proton/Wine integrates with the underlying OS.
Proton/Wine is closer to Java/JVM than MAME (or any other emulator) and that is when running on a different CPU than x86/x86_64 as on the latter it is just a PE loader with a bunch of DLLs reimplementing various APIs.
Same, but my PC runs on Linux so I don't feel threatened.
I feel like at some point normies may end up just using iPadOS or Android as a "convergent" device: a tablet/phone that they can plug into a docking station and use as a computer.
I am sort of hoping that it will work with something like GrapheneOS, so that I will be able to benefit from it on my phone.
Well, you should feel threatened. Where do you think the push towards TPM and secure boot is heading? Microsoft is insanely envious of how Apple and Google locked down their platforms and have total control over app stores, and that’s what Microsoft wants too. It’s a huge revenue stream they’re leaving on the table. Now that there’s precedent on mobile, they’ll have no problem pushing it through on desktop.
And once all the normies have moved to iPads, there won’t be a big enough market for anyone to manufacture PC hardware for hobbyists anymore.
In general, I don't care so much if Windows or macOS become as locked as Android or iOS, as long as I can install Linux on my hardware.
My point is that many people seem to complain because they want to be root on the Google-certified Android. I disagree with that: Google makes an OS where you cannot be root. If you want an OS where you can be root, you should be able to install another OS on the hardware you bought. Because you should own that hardware. But you don't own Google.
The problem is more that you're forced to use Google's OS. Usually just less convenient, but often in a literal sense too with these government services increasingly requiring attestation.
And also a third party should not be able to inspect my device and discriminate against my owned device. The device should attest its authenticity to me (or my organization that owns it) alone. Arguably, this is a social/political problem more than a technical one, but it tends to have a similar effect by imposing a cost on having control over your own computing (now you need to carry two phones).
Also while you can debate about stuff like Netflix DRM, access to banks and government services is not a privilege, it is a right (for a transaction that isn't otherwise illegal). The counterparty is not subject to freedom of association because in many places it is illegal to have cash transactions over a certain amount, and you can't choose a different government.
Yeah I agree with that as well. Fine if Google wants to lock some stuff on Android, but a bank should not be able to prevent me from using GrapheneOS (or Linux, or whatever I want).
Is that what you are saying or did I misunderstand?
Yeah, but the whole point of Google's locked down system and integrity APIs is to offer a way to subjugate users and transfer power from the users to the providers. Arguably it shouldn't work in an ideal competitive market where most consumers are intelligent, but it is how it is in our world.
Banks, governments, and anything else that's required to participate in society should not depend on proving the loyalty of my device to Google or any other entity that isn't me.
Linux seems to be gaining a lot of traction, both with the fall of windows and gaming being more than feasible.
It makes sense for the tech savvy option to succeed, now that personal computing is disappearing. Average folks won’t use a windows/macbook, they’ll use phones and tablets.
My only concern is ending in a macOS+asahi situation where supporting a single device requires mountains of effort.
Yes, and I also have seen they come back to Windows, when they got into issues sharing software or files with friends, or local goverment requirements, and didn't had a relative to do their IT support for free.
And yet it's undeniable that 2025 had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11
- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux
- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting
- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month
- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months
- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was
- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
Where do you think normies that don't live in cities with Apple stores, or with salaries unable to afford Apple tax, get their smartphones and tablets?
I have made zero mentions of Windows tablets, that market died with Windows 8, replaced by 2-1 laptops.
So just don't use windows? The only reason I use android to begin with is because the mobile centric distros I looked into didn't appear to be to the point I would want to daily drive them yet. If and when that changes I'll switch.
The only real issue is sourcing good mobile hardware that isn't locked down. At least for the time being the pixel line satisfies that.
Many years ago I used to play around with CyanogenMod and Linux.
Life with work and a family became too busy to fuss with that stuff, but I'm rapidly approaching the point where abuse from android and Microsoft make using a less polished OS worth the bother.
Eh, it's better. But it's still a mess unless you're using a device specifically designed for Linux like a Steamdeck or Framework. Expect to spend a lot of time messing around in the console if you install on an arbitrary laptop that came with Windows installed. Wifi problems, sleep problems, external monitor problems, laptop screen brightness problems, graphics card problems.
Is it going to be the same future as Fuchsia OS? There were some good ideas in that one, but then one day it sort of disappeared. Not that that was surprising - Google is good at that.
Unless Google reorganizes and gets more focused, I'd say they are highly likely to repeat their mistakes.
IMHO both Apple and Google are missing a big opportunity here. Both are doing work to blur the lines between desktop and mobile. Both are targeting laptops, ar, phones, and tablets.
These are multiple modalities. Or they should be. But because the way both are structured, these are isolated islands with some interoperability but the whole experience is very device centric.
What's nicer is when you have multiple devices and a clean handover between them. You basically sign in and all your apps and data are there. All the open apps have the same state. They just adapt to the formfactor.
Apple has been taking babysteps here but it's still hopelessly compartmentalizing the market. So switching between devices is a lot of setup and install friction.
And for Google, they've been banging the drum that everything is cloud based since forever. Yet they can't figure out a cross device UX that makes sense. It should be as simple as sign in and all your stuff is there. That was the vision with ChromeOS at some point but then they lost interest, got distracted by Fuchsia, went off and created Flutter and also forgot that Android was the thing that actually has an enormous amount of users and OEMs shipping it.
The trillion dollar opportunity here: if devices become like shoes, many people probably have more than one. Some people have many pairs of shoes for different occasions. But they have only one phone. Because switching between devices is painful. Adding another OS to the mix just kicks that can down the road. Multi device, multi modal access to your stuff is the key thing that they should be nailing. If e.g. Apple were to nail that, some people might have many different devices in different sizes and form factors. The main decision as to which one to use would be based on which is most appropriate for the context.
If you take something like that as the starting point, the logical conclusion is that Google should evolve Android to run on any type of device and make sure that everything plays nice together. Switching between your Android phone(s), tablet, TVs, car, AR/VR goggles, or laptops should not be hard. Devices running a version of Android exist in all those categories. But there's very little/no integration across these.
I don't think nobody has solved the problem of mobile/desktop split so far.
Microsoft's Surface Pro line barely made any difference -- nobody buys it to use it as a tablet, and generally the touch experience is just bad if you have ever used a real tablet.
Apple pretends to try and market iPad as your next computer, but we all know how it works. (They also have this thing that allows phone apps to run natively on MacOS, but that has got near zero traction.)
Samsung tried as well, half-mindedly, and I can confidently say a Samsung phone doesn't work as well as a PC in DeX mode.
So now it's Google. I don't think they can come up with some magic solution to change this.
MacOS can now run a lot of IOS applications. They have icloud to sync a bunch of things. But only for their own applications. But maybe it's more clear if we limit the discussion to just phones. The key question, why do people only buy 1 iphone? Is it because it's perfect for every situation? Or because they can't play nice together?
Switching from one to the other is a PITA. What if that was seamless. You just pick one up and now everything is there. You might have a phone for work, going out, hiking, etc. You might have phones matching different iphones. Apple could be selling you many phones. Losing a phone would be a lot less dramatic because you'd have multiple spares. Do they all have to have the same screen size? Do all of them even need a screen?
Apple sells lots of phones. They could be selling 2-3x more. That's just phones. The way they positioned their VR device and watch is kind of telling. They are both kind of satellite devices. But apparently that requires special apps and a new OS (for both).
For me the best solution would be seperate environments with completely different UIs, but running on the same device (probably in a phone form factor)
Apple's in the best position to offer this because they have both Mobile and Desktop OS's. And their chips are already capable of having two OS's installed side-by-side with a strong security barrier (and also more than fast enough to run a full desktop OS). But alas they haven't attempted it yet.
Yeah they failed pretty hard at least three times on the IoT front. To be fair I think they're finally making some kind of progress with Matter. About 10 years late, but still.
It was an experiment to keep bright engineers busy with cool ideas to show off.Even back then they could have known that it is not a viable idea to make a tectonic platform switch with not much business arguments for it.
I would love for a microkernel, capabilities OS to become standard. Windows and Linux have been bolting on security layers for decades because the modern threat model was barely a concern when they were originally created.
Google actually has the sway that it could drag the industry in that direction.
It is interesting to consider the different developments happening with the big mobile orgs regarding the convergence computing paradigm:
- Samsung’s Dex has been out for a while
- independent devs have been working on Linux “as an app” for some time
- Android desktop interface in this article
- Apple developing video output on iPhones
- Apple working on a Macbook with a mobile chip
- another exciting thing is XR devices and mobile computing
- my concern is convergence computing will reduce the importance of desktop interfaces and the freedom we have to install whatever applications we want
> my concern is convergence computing will reduce the importance of desktop interfaces and the freedom we have to install whatever applications we want
Yep, it absolutely will I expect. All the pieces are being or have been laid to build the new world where only a "trusted" device will be able to use the internet. Us nerds can still have our Linux, but it won't work with much of the internet because we won't be able to pass attestation.
Building to that future is exactly what I would expect from Apple, but Google doing so has surprised me. Google doing so is also the thing that will bring it to pass, so there's a special seed of hatred for them germinating in my heart right now. Hopefully I'm just being alarmist and paranoid, but I really don't think I am.
I think tech companies are realizing that the biggest "mistake" they have ever made was giving so much freedom to the desktop user. They hate that we can look into, modify, and delete files, hate that we can add custom-made software, and hate that we can identify and turn off tracking/telemetry. They realized this with the mobile platform and locked everything down, but by that time it was already too late.
Authoritarian governments (that is, what unfortunately all governments want to be) also love this, since if a few big companies control all computing, they can regulate them to control the public.
Fortunately, there are many computers already in the public's hands (which they can use to perform any computation without government restrictions and without paying/sending data to a company); but more and more people are switching to mobile platforms (and kids start out on these platforms) that I'm worried about the future.
I am somewhat hopeful that local AI will save us. It will be fairly easy to automate interacting with normie devices and services in the near future. It's not impossible to prevent it, but that will probably be annoying enough to the normies for them to reconsider. I see a future where the select few will still be able to use their free devices to operate the nonfree ones remotely, while incrementally taking back control with things like self-hosted tools.
I used to look up to Google and Googlers but that was a big mistake on my part because that only made the following disappointment ever so hurtful. All of the product killing, services/APIs lockdown and disrepair that has been their modus operandi over the last decade made them into just another corporate software company.
> Google doing so has surprised me
Google are absolutely interested in this because more and more people are installing ad blockers and since their main game is advertisement, they can't allow that. The older the retired Google elites become and the less filtered their language becomes, the more you can peer into their minds and decisions leading up to now. Just look at what Eric Schmidt has been doing and saying.
The Chrome Extensions support is the interesting part here. That's often the dealbreaker for using mobile devices as computer replacements.
Google's had this weird situation where Android and ChromeOS overlap more every year. At some point maintaining two operating systems with converging feature sets seems wasteful.
My guess: ChromeOS probably survives for the education market where manageability matters more than capabilities. But for consumers? Android on a big screen with keyboard and mouse might just be good enough.
I'm running AdGuard in Chromium right now. I don't see any ads, even on YouTube. May I ask what did you mean?
Not that I don't think MV3 is limited, but.. we're comparing this against MV2, right? It was already missing basic functionality like full filtering of http responses, I remember a bug about not seeing POST bodies being open for 10+ years..
Is there really a reason to get excited about this? When we look at the path they took with Android on the phones, why should we believe that they will be any different from Microsoft on the desktop?
It is relatively easy to make a secure OS. What is terribly expensive in developer labor is a secure OS that runs a mainstream browser well. Android is an open-source OS that runs a mainstream browser well and is about 100 times more secure than any other open-source Linux distro -- except ChromiumOS. But for some reason, no vibrant open-source project ever formed around ChromiumOS whereas a vibrant open-source project (namely GrapheneOS) has formed around the Android open-source project.
Maybe they will sort out how terrible it is to try and use a keyboard or keyboard like (i.e. remote control on android TV) on Android apps, I hold out little hope.
Oh, I see Google's angle now. They want to make android a viable desktop OS in order to have more users using android Chrome rather than Windows Chrome, because the former lacks extension support, and thus ad blockers. Of course, you can still install brave or kiwi browser or Firefox to your heart's content, but most people won't. It's brilliantly simple. It's not too bad for power users, they'll probably use a different browser, or for developers, given the work they're putting into the Linux containers, but for most users...we'll see the expected result.
> The Google Chrome interface mostly aligns with the current large-screen Android version except for the Extensions button, which is currently only available on the desktop browser.
So would it make sense to sell a folding plastic shell with screen, keyboard and trackpad in it that you can bring in your bag and pull out to plug your phone into it?
As mentioned in TFA, Android has had a "desktop" phone projection mode for years and it doesn't seem to have caught on. This seems to be a distro for dedicated desktop devices, I’m not sure what the point is when its main competitor would be the other OS Google already makes for those devices.
Last time, the hardware was barely capable of driving a 1080p display at a constant frame rate with more than one app open.
These days, phones are more powerful than the laptops they give to kids to study on.
Samsung DeX has existed for years and works as well as it has for ages. We don't need to wait on Google to make this work. At best, Google will make this type of tech available in software so you can Chromecast/Miracast/whatever it to your display when your cheap phone doesn't do DP-Alt mode.
What I think this is more likely to be about is ChromeOS being killed and Android taking its place. It's not secret that Google is working on that, this just seems to be someone dogfeeding the latest build of the desktop Android build.
I'm using this right now on a work trip. Since I don't want to use my work computer for personal stuff, I carry a small bag that has a mouse, small keyboard, USB-C hub, and USB-C to HDMI cable. I set that up while I'm in my hotel room and use my Fold7 as a personal laptop. The items mentioned are all kept neatly in that small bag and it just sits at the bottom of my work bag until I want to use them.
Portable monitor + mouse + keyboard makes more sense to me.
But this can also be cast to a tv, for example. I assume you can use the phone itself as a trackpad. So the only extra hardware you need is a cheap Bluetooth keyboard which you can get for $15.
I had that it was a cool concept but it kinda sucked. It would have been great for doing stuff over SSH but not much else as the hardware was lacking at the time
I've always wanted a keyboard+screen with a slot for a phone as the trackpad. Saving any money over a regular trackpad? No. Cool as hell? I think so at least...
That's already here. Android has native terminal in the developer settings and it even has a Wayland graphical environment. I have run Weston with a desktop chromium inside, playing a youtube video with sound.
The Android terminal has root access. It's a full Debian VM, with hardware-accelerated Wayland graphics through virgl. Of course, that only works on devices supporting pKVM.
True but accessing your own files, pinging, network management etc aren't included in the things an Android terminal user can do. Hence the need for root.
That sounds like more of a need to be able to share files and folders with the terminal app and for there to be a ping command callable from nonroot added.
Maybe, but the user ought to be able to do with their device the equivalent of what a root account can do, even if not especially conveniently. Like seeing what data apps are saving to their devices or spoofing data to prevent apps from gaining unauthorized information. Apps should not be protected from the user, and user should have recourse from apps doings things not in their interest.
If this allows one to still have (linux terminals?), then its (fine?) but Klaster_1 suggests that installing software would become hard without OS vendor blessing.
I mean, is this OS literally just android with a more desktop like UI?
Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
What I would prefer is a linux device phone being more widespread than Android PC. Linux in PC is mostly pretty good.
We probably need some good linux phones. One of the biggest issues I find is that they are really price-y so even though I don't want much specs, I find it troubling to justify a 2x price increase in such sense.
> Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
Samsung Dex still exists and still sucks. It's probably the best desktop experience available on Android but it's nowhere near usable as a daily driver. It feels a like a lightweight window manager from the 2008 era.
It appears ChromeOS is being killed and they're porting much of its feature set into Android. This may be marketed as "ChromeOS", with identical functionality, and consumers won't be none the wiser.
The Android system is such a pain to work with. I’m curious to see whether they actually fixed the fundamentals making it unappealing for general purpose computing or they just stuck Android onto Chromebooks (guessing the latter).
Samsung made DeX at some point for the exact same purpose, but that's a Samsung special.
Google already has this in their Pixel phones (8+). Plug a Pixel into a standard laptop dock (may need to enter dev settings and tick the "force desktop mode" toggle) and you're welcomed by pretty much exactly this UI.
Seemed potentially like a new kernel, rather than a new OS, and thus potentially a replacement for the Android kernel one day.
But that would mean all of the Android SDKs would need to be abstracted away from Linux, but it seems like they abandoned some of that effort and are mostly just emulating Android on Fuschia for now.
My Huawei P20 Pro did this in 2018. It was fabulous, turned the OS into a mini-computer with a taskbar, desktop, icons, browser etc. It was still the best phone Ive ever owned (and I used to work at Google). It was no wonder Google killed with GSM. It was light years ahead even back then and they really hate competition.
I like ChromeOS but really having two different operating systems is a liability.
Despite all the effort they've put into it, chromeOS is worse at running Android apps than android tablets except for support for having them in resizable windows.
All they need to do is improve the support for a laptop mode on android and make chrome on android in the laptop mode equivalent to chrome on ChromeOS and they can kill ChromeOS entirely.
It makes no sense to have to choose between two operating systems
You should be able to get a fully compatible android like experience in tablet mode and a chromebook like experience in laptop mode all in one os
And the ChromeOS like experience should be available on any android tablet if you use it with a keyboard
Windows keeps getting worse, but it's still not as bad as Android. It's like how an iPad with macOS would be great, but a MacBook with iOS would be terrible.
I've been using Fedora part-time and I'm quite happy with it. Although I access the Android ecosystem via Waydroid—which, I know, isn't a true 'Android desktop'—the reality is that few Android apps are actually designed for a desktop experience.
Android makes me feel like it wants to convince me that rooting is considered too dangerous even for advanced users—you have to be a developer to handle it, or you will kill yourself.
But it might be good news for the ARM platform. Given how fragmented ARM is, Windows on ARM has turned out to be an even bigger disaster, making a Linux-based approach a much more promising alternative.
I wonder what does this mean for the attestation layer? If you can run banking apps on a desktop, this would be a massive game changer for many of us who only use normie OSes because of the need to use services that are mobile app only (or with functionally limited web apps). Means we would only need to keep a single phone rather than two
Why on Earth would anyone wilingly use an OS where Google thinks they have the right to block or make it really hard to install non App Store apps? even if initially they allow you, they've shown their plan.
The good part about this is they've invested in bringing extensions support to Chrome.. of course only those "desktop" builds, but the code is there and for now you can use this on normal Android - if you compile it for yourself or download the Chromium APK.
I wonder whether they'll keep pretending that extensions are not supported on Android, perhaps even intentionally breaking support on mobile.. or maybe they'll stop this madness and just support extensions officially..
God this looks like a nightmare. Using Android on a desktop would be a fascist dystopia. Using it on phones is bad enough, computing while wearing a straight-jacket, but now they're going to have complete control of our computers and spy on everything we do on it? I can't imagine a worse outcome for the PC.
They ought to put the status bar at the bottom. All the designers using Macs probably forgot, but Chrome's tab interface was designed for Windows where it could be all the way at the top of the screen. And in general it's more common for desktop apps designed for mouse and keyboard to have frequently accessed UI elements at the top of the window than the bottom. So desktop apps would benefit from being able to use that real estate at the very top of the screen.
This is what you lose when you take a team developing a desktop OS and move it under a team doing a mobile OS.
Elements on the top of the screen have virtually infinite height, and elements in the corners have infinite height and width. You can't aim "too high" for something at the top of the screen.
Status bars on top don't make sense if you have tabs on top. Now your tabs are infinitely smaller, and aiming at them requires a lot more effort.
Mac's original design had the menubar on top, and its windows didn't have tabs, so it all worked fine together. That's not the case for browsers with tabs on top.
Along the way, it seems most designers have forgotten about Fitt's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law#Implications_for_U...
The linked article seems to imply that this remains a good design choice even today:
> The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which always places the menu bar on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current program's windowframe.
I guess now that the browser is the one app you probably spend the most amount of time in, it might make a little less sense? Android's lack of a menu bar system makes it make very little sense there.
Apple's design never made sense. It's fine when apps are maximised but it gets very confusing when apps are not maximised and the menu is very far from the app that it belongs to.
Since it only works well for maximised apps, the UX is much better if you just merge the menu into the title bar of apps.
I found it to not at all be confusing once I got used to it—-I find it less confusing and more reliable in practice.
Speaking from 20+ years of Windows use with a local menu bar and 7 years of Linux desktop where I switched to a global menu bar—-it was an instant improvement in quality of life.
I no longer have to hunt for a narrow menu bar strip, just throw the mouse all the way up, and hope to never hunt for it ever again.
I wonder how relevant Fitt's law is with bigger screens and the drastically changed ratio between mouse hand movement and cursor movement on screen. It used to be that you could reach a screen corner with a very simple flick of the mouse hand wrist. But that doesn't feel the same way anymore on modern hardware.
FWIW, Apple's known to have a slightly more aggressive mouse/trackpoint acceleration curve to account for this. (In retrospect it's probably why Apple went all out on luxuriously large trackpads.)
Depends on your configuration, I guess. I just tried this with my mx master with its standard resolution (so no ridiculous 800000 dpi gaming mouse) on a 4k 32" at 100% under windows. I can easily reach a corner with a quick flick of the wrist.
On my laptop's FHD screen it's even better.
Auto-hide the task bar at the bottom, and you've basically got the Gnome UI. Works just fine. It's the permanent screen reservation of the double task bar that really eats up the usable desk space.
Samsung's task bar (when you enable the DeX integration on a tablet) also supports this and it makes for a fine user experience.
Edit: I've enabled "force desktop mode" on my Pixel 9 Pro and hooked it up to my laptop dock. The UI looks almost exactly the same already. Taskbar at the bottom, notification bar at the top.
It's clearly experimental; my ultrawide screen scales horribly, my keyboard app gets horribly confused, and interacting with the top bar triggers a full-screen tablet overlay that looks a bit weird.
However, Chrome opens multiple windows and browses just fine. There are right-click menus, mouse hover interactions, window resizing features (though some apps require the "force resizable activities" flag). Ethernet Just Works, audio/video just works, and I can operate my phone screen while working in dock mode (so apps that absolutely refuse to work can still be operated through the touch screen).
Hiding the bottom bar doesn't solve the problem because it still takes the corners away. You can't put UI there because the bottom bar will come up and cover it when you mouse into the corner. The OS is taking all four corners for itself. Greedy! Apps should have that space. Apps are what we are here to use and the OS is getting in the way.
macOS doesn't seem to care and that's what all the designers use. I'm guessing people think it's pretty?
The dock would also better if it weren't stretched to the entire screen width by default but perhaps Google is planning to use that space for something. It's also possible they're going to remove the top bar at some point, that'd make the UI standard Windows-shaped.
The Gnome trick for the dock is to only show the dock when hitting the Super button which also brings up the virtual desktops and what macOS might call Launchpad (except not full screen by default). Ubuntu likes to force the dock on you the way macOS does, but you can disable that.
Only designers earning US like wages.
Designers in the remaining 80% of the computing world have to do with what is available.
macOS provides enough utility in the menu bar to justify having it (unified menu -- unlike the Android UI shown in the article).
MacOS is stuck in the past with the top menu and Dock. I don't think they're brave enough to change anything now.
Inexplicably, Samsung removed the ability to hide the taskbar with One UI 8 last year.
They rebuilt DeX on Google's desktop codebase. So obviously a lot of features were lost. Hopefully what we'll gain is wider app support.
My previous Pixel (a 4a) had problems with getting unduly warm. I've heard it's better on later models but still not solved. How has your 9 Pro done with heat?
I haven't noticed much. It can get hot when I'm taxing it (i.e. running large LLMs), but it takes a lot for the rather underpowered Tensor SoC to get warm.
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What I don't get is why they don't design UIs with a status bar on the side - you have so much waster horizontal real estate both in landscape monitors, with every website, code editor having huge bars on the either side of the text.
Smartphones are portrait screens and its clear that having only that much horizontal real estate is enough.
I always put my taskbar on the side, both on MacOS and Windows. Well, I used to on Windows but apparently that’s too much to ask from Windows 11.
Samsung did not forget, and did it right with DeX.
They did, however, get some of the interactions wrong (not to mention, handling of display resolution), so in the end, you can't exploit Fitt's Law in DeX either.
Yeah even on an oldie S6 Lite is good enough.
I would put all bars at the top. On a touch-enabled screen it's much easier to touch something at the top than something next to the keyboard, so I move the taskbar to the top on all my Windows two-in-ones.
Shout out to https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher for forcing this behavior even on Windows 11.
Why not at the side, though? Better use of the vertical space and no issues with touchscreens (interactable items on top, hand reaching from the side). That's how I do it on every desktop/laptop machine I own.
I don't remember why I did that, tbh. Having it at the side works as well, I agree.
And ChromeOS is designed for Chrome's tab bar, so that it is at the top edge of the screen, essentially making it infinitely tall. This is one of the things that makes surfing the web more pleasant and ChromeOS then on Windows and Mac.
With many linux window managers you can move the statusbar to the bottom, hide the titlebar and configure chrome to use the (now hidden) system titlebar for the same effect.
Agreed. Those few little icons at the top are wasting an entire row on the screen. That junk can go in the corner of the taskbar like Windows.
Agree. They should make the desktop UI similar to what is there on ChromeOS or Samsung Dex. The top bar doesn't make sense at all.
I think that the first smartphones were way smaller than today’s ones played a role. They were not that elongated either, the aspect ratio was way closer to a square. I could easily reach the top bar back then. It was definitely not a hurdle. But of course that’s not true for a long time now.
For me the only feature I want from a taskbar/status bar is ability to hide it permanently so it never comes out until I press a key on a keyboard (like meta/Windows key or even a key combination if needed). Task bar auto popping just because you weren't precise with your mouse and moved it too far down or to the corner is very annoying to me. I treat it as a test if desktop environment have "we will force our way down your throat" or "we try to make it great for everyone" attitude. Windows and Apple are choosing the former. KDE is choosing the latter.
I am surprised because somehow they get it on phones (hidden by default, needs a gesture to bring down). Real estate on a laptop is a just as precious, especially vertical real estate.
iOS did exactly this and it’s so much better for usage
This looks like it will help a lot of students and families who are on a budget. If you can just plug your phone into a screen you do not need to buy a separate laptop anymore. The browser extensions are the most important part because that is what makes a computer useful. I am glad to see they are thinking about this.
>This looks like it will help a lot of students and families who are on a budget. If you can just plug your phone into a screen you do not need to buy a separate laptop anymore.
Except that android phones with display output are mostly flagships with flagship prices.
But 50 Euros on the used market got me a retired corporate HP/Dell laptop with 1080p screen, intel 8th gen i5 quad core, 8GB RAM and 256GB NVME on which I put Linux. Way better for studying and productivity than my android phone hooked up to the TV.
It's a nice feature to have as a backup in case my laptop dies, but I wouldn't daily drive an android phone as a desktop computer for productivity.
Actually many ridiculously expensive "flagship" smartphones do not have DisplayPort and some do not have even USB 3.
The chances to find DisplayPort in what nowadays have become medium-price smartphones, i.e. $500 to $600, are about as good as finding DisplayPort in a "flagship".
Which flagships (other than Apple), don't ship with display output?
AFAIK Samsung, Google and all major Chinese brands have display output on their flagships.
Resell the 8GB of RAM and buy an even better phone then? That's 150 euros of value right there.
Then use the money on a reputable second hand store to buy a used S20 5G 128GB for 150 euros, or a S22 128GB for 145, maybe an S21 Ultra 5G 256GB for 139, and you've got yourself a valiant workstation already (Samsung DeX works great out of the box, no need to wait for Google here). I can also find an S20+ 5G 128GB for 75 euros with display damage (but that doesn't matter when you hook it up to a monitor).
On another website I can find an S20+ 5G with cracks in the edges of the touch screen for 50 euros. That's 12GiB of RAM, 128GiB of storage, a 3200x1440p@120Hz screen and 5G connectivity built in. You're gonna need a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard (that's like what, 5 euros?) to hook it up to the TV but then you're good.
Where is the $150 euros coming from? 8GB of brand new DDR3 or DDR4 is available for $20-$30 from Amazon / Fleabay, and once he sells it the laptop will no longer work.
That's the standard price for 8GB DDR4 RAM in the local major web shop. I'm sure there are cheaper options out there, but people are willing to pay more than that to get a shipping date before October.
I'm seeing plenty of 8 GB DDR4 SODIMMs on ebay for ~$20-30. AFAIK laptop RAM was not hit in the same way since it's not really readily reusable in other types of computer, and laptops don't generally have unused slots to just plop in more RAM.
Phones also have ram
Why buy a used phone that will stop receiving updates, can't be fixed or upgraded and can't run whatever you want on it when you can use a real computer instead?
The chances of the 50 euro laptop getting Windows 10 updates longer than a second hand Samsung phone are slim.
As for "can't be fixed or upgraded", ask any macOS user.
Who in their right mind would put Windows on such a device, though? This is THE hardware generation that Microsoft painted a target on with their planned obsolescence strategy. I don't know if there can be a clearer signalling that it is to be avoided at all costs.
I'm running bleeding edge Linux on computers I bought in 2006.
Meanwhile, the phone I bought a year ago is stuck on a 3 year old non-LTS kernel point release, and it will be forever.
Old computers also stop getting microcode updates fairly quickly.
This is a real issue and I don't know why you got downvoted
Why though? You can do so much more with a laptop than be trapped in Google's walled garden.
It heavily depends on where you live, but plenty of poorer areas that never had much desktop computer penetration because of affordability are going app-first. Richer countries are going app-first for things like banking and government ID too, because the security situation with locked-down phones is a lot better than on the desktop where FreeFortniteRobloxUpdate.exe can drain your savings without you ever noticing it.
You're going to need a phone anyway. Might as well save some money by not having to get a laptop for doing your taxes once a year.
Most normal people don't really care about Google's walled garden. That's a tech person thing. I wouldn't do it, but none of the people who don't have a favourite Linux distro care about any of this.
>Might as well save some money by not having to get a laptop for doing your taxes once a year. Most normal people don't really care about Google's walled garden. That's a tech person thing.
Most "normal people" don't use their phones hooked to their TVs as desktop computers. It's a very niche scenario.
They use their old laptop or tablet from school, university or hand-me-down from parent/relative for that task, since we're going with your assumption of living in a rich country where access to cheap hardware is abundant and 50 Euros is a very basic dinner for 2, so unlikely for people's livelihoods to be threatened by skimping 50 bucks once in their lifetime on some personal computing device besides their phone.
And in the specific case of living in a rich country, you might not even need to spend that 50, since I am yet to meet anyone who in case of need, can't just get a old computer for virtually free as hand-me-down from parent/friend/relative where it's collecting dust, if you just need a PC to do your taxes once a year. It's a lot more realistic scenario than people hooking up phones to TVs to do their taxes.
That's a nicely thought out setup, but why would other people want to do that hassle, instead of just getting a cheap laptop, which is what most people do?
You're making up niche scenarios for the sake of winning an argument, but you don't daily drive, you don't dog-food yourself, they're only good as concepts on paper, but not in practice.
The market for people buying obsolete phones to connect to their TV as their daily driver workhorse computers is insanely small, even on quirky HN let alone outside this bubble. So who do you think you are convincing/converting with this?
Like the most popular Androids are Samsungs and Samsung has been shipping DEX on their flagships since for-ever, and how many of their users actually use it? Or how many buy them just for that feature alone? You haven't discovered an untapped market here that will replace PC/laptops for most average people.
The moto g100 is a good example of a midrange phone with decent specs, including video output. It launched at $400, and can be bought for around $200 these days.
It has a Snapdragon 870, 8gb RAM, 128gb storage, a microSD slot, headphones jack, and a big enough battery to last 2 days. It's a little chunky, and it's not waterproof, but beyond that it's just about everything I ever wanted in a phone.
Motorola, of course, has already abandoned it. But it still gets up-to-date Android via Lineage OS and other community made ROMs.
How did they abandon it? It release october last year according to google.
>but beyond that it's just about everything I ever wanted in a phone.
I get that, but none of this answers my question of why people should use that to a TV, instead of a PC, other than to flex? It really isn't more practical, nor saving you money and you're still limited to the apps of android ecosystem rather than the windows/linux one.
> How did they abandon it? It release october last year according to google.
Oh, geez, I didn't realize they abandoned it so hard they even recycled the name! I was referring to the 2021 g100: https://m.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g100-10791.php - it looks like the 2025 recycle lacks video output :/ https://m.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g100_5g_(china)-14228.p...
As for why anyone should do it, I'm not really arguing that anyone should. I was just trying to point out that it's more affordable than you might think. (Although it can't beat the deal you got on your laptop.)
I think it might make sense if you already have a laptop dock with a screen and a keyboard at home and at school/work, and your needs were fairly lightweight, and you really valued portability. Or as you suggested, it could just serve as a backup device in case your main laptop gets broken or whatever.
Who has the time?
I just want to get a new phone and be on my way. The last thing I want to do is download a community OS and/or roms on Day 1
Yeah, fair enough. I actually really like the recent trend of Android manufacturers committing to 7 years of software updates, because yeah, community ROMs really aren't for everyone.
My point was more that there are affordable options if you're inclined to do a bit of tinkering.
A 2-3 generation old pixel on the second hand marker is not expensive at all though.
And you easily add a mouse/keyboard just fine to it.
>A 2-3 generation old pixel on the second hand marker is not expensive at all though.
Sure but at around 300 bucks is still way over 50 bucks.
And even if you get a used Pixel 8, having separate phone and computer adds a priceless layer of redundancy and flexibility.
If someone steals my phone, I don't want to also loose my work PC with it.
You are also buying a soon to be unmaintained device which will fall out of security support.
That $50 PC can run linux with the latest kernel for the next 20 years (maybe longer).
There's lineageOS for outdated pixel device, but I think you loose device attestation if you flash that, so your banking, payment and digital-ID apps won't work anymore which is kind of important features for a lot of people.
I still think separating a phone for phone apps and a PC for productivity, is the best choice even if that PC is a 20 year old rustbucket from the dumpster, it will still do more tasks than a phone. You can't learn photoshop on a phone.
The lineageOS kernel isn't guaranteed to be super up to date. It's often based on the manufacturer's kernel. There's also possibly binary blobs involved which can't be checked or updated.
If your device is on the official supported list then it will always be up to date to a point. You're not gonna get android 16 on 10+ year old phones.
Allow me to present LineageOS 23 for the Nexus 5: https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-unofficial-lineageos-23-0-for-ne...
That's Android 16 on a 13 year old phone. It looks to be a little glitchy and it takes some work to install, but it's possible.
Your banking app might not work but your bank probably also offers a web page that you can just load up in your browser
There is a growing trend among banks to keep the web app usable only for emergency purposes (notify bank that your phone got stolen or lost and authorize the installation of the bank on a new phone) and only allow functionality on their mobile apps.
I've seen that claim around, but I have yet to see a bank claim to have this obviously unworkable policy, or to see someone identify a bank that does have it.
I haven't seen any web apps that seem to be intentionally unusable, or any belonging to banks, personally at least. I don't think anybody is doing this as a publicly announced policy. But I have seen several websites for major institutions with major features totally unusable on their website, that should be found in a matter of minutes if they had even one QA person actually trying to use the website after updates. It's not announced, but it's hard to imagine it's not intentional.
For my most recent personal example, go onto State Farm's website and try to create an account. Goes to a blank page. It only seems to work right on their mobile app.
I'm right there with relating to this mindset, however, I recently (in the past 2 weeks) got to experience restoring a new phone from backup without the old one present, and it's becoming essentially a non-issue. I can't think of a single thing that wasn't restored from cloud backup.
"work pc" -- random 50 dollar fire hazard running Linux. Anyway, those Android phones though they are obviously going to be the unreliable part in this story.
Isn't Pixel 10 the first one with fully supported desktop mode?
I remember I was very confused when buying a Pixel 7 to replace my (then 3 year old) Huawei P30 Pro, and the inferior camera + lack of desktop mode made it feel like a net downgrade.
I use it on my Pixel 8 Pro too It's a toggle in Developer options, Local Desktop.
According to Google's help site, no Pixel has a desktop mode (like you can find at Motorola, Samsung and others).
The latest Pixel models have DisplayPort, but their operating system only provides screen mirroring or app window mirroring on an external monitor. Unlike Pixel, the phones with a true desktop mode can display multiple windows on the monitor, and presumably they can have a selectable resolution for the monitor. I assume that for screen mirroring the monitor is used at the same resolution as the phone screen, i.e. either 1080 lines or only slightly more.
Moreover, while the help site states that DisplayPort exists in Pixel 8 and newer, Google does not bother to advertise the existence of this feature in its online shop, where there is no mention about this in the phone specifications.
> operating system only provides screen mirroring or app window mirroring on an external monitor
That's not true. It's probably written that way, because this is still an experimental feature so it is indeed not "supported", but it does work, you just have to toggle a few settings inside developer options.
And in this desktop mode it could make use of my 2k desktop screen, though it is quite buggy (it is a pixel 8 device, for reference)
Good to know, but the fact that the knowledge about the possibility of connecting an external monitor is very well hidden on the Google site and the existence of a true desktop mode is even better hidden from any potential Google customers, does not inspire confidence.
From this state of affairs I cannot be sure that if I bought a Google Pixel it would really be usable with a monitor, as such hidden features could be removed at any time.
Other smartphone vendors clearly specify for their phones whether e.g. they support DisplayPort 1.4, so that they can use a monitor at a decent resolution, and whether they have a desktop mode.
8 and up support secondary displays
Note that such capabilities were added to the 8 after it launched. When they launched it they did not even mention that it contains displayport alt mode.
Only pixel 8 and up have DP. So 2 generations old. I guess soon it will be 3rd gen.
Old pixels don't have HDMI output, I learned it the hard way when the screen of my Pixel 3a died.
I'm ignorant on this topic, can you not just plug a USB dock with HDMI out in any android phone and get a display out? I do it all the time on the previous three pixel phones I've had, but I didn't know that this was limited to those?
USB-C is only a connector/socket - a device having a USB-C socket does not guarantee much beyond being able to plug a USB-C connector into it.
Some USB-C devices only use the port for charging for example. Others might only support USB 2.0.
Getting a display out from something with USB-C socket needs the device to support something called DP Alt Mode.
Note that cables matter too - you can have a DP alt mode enabled monitor and phone, but if you have the wrong cable it won’t work. Welcome to the future.
It is understandable that every cable doesn't have to and shouldn't support every feature. USB cables would be insaney overpriced in that case. For simple charging you don't need a high speed 40gbps cable that can connect an external GPU.
To mitigate the confusion, all simple charging cables should be universally labeled as such and all high speed cables should also have some markings that indicate the maximum speed of the cable or something similar.
It’s understandable, but the reality is that many people like my 82 year old mother will use the wrong cable and have no clue why it’s not working.
> all simple charging cables should be universally labeled as such
labeling hurts profits.
You don't wired need display output, just WiFi. Motorola's Smart Connect desktop uses Miracast for using TVs and the like as desktop monitors as well as wired.
I got my moto g84 5G with 8/256 GB for about 170 euros new and it supports it (not wired). Seems to work fine.
Is it any good? Last time I tried miracast the framerate and video quality was total garbage due to shit compression. Barely worked for streaming youtube videos to the TV but no way I could do it for productivity.
Same here. The only way to make streaming between devices is the way Apple does it, directly, not via Access Point.
Mirecast (when done properly) is basically a video stream over a peer-to-peer WiFi Direct connection. H.264+AAC/AC3/PCM audio sent over RTSP/RTP using a standard IPv4 stack. Better codecs are available on newer devices. Two modern WiFi 6 devices can stream gigabits per second that way if configured right, there's no need for the typical low FPS, lag, and desynchronised audio from a protocol standpoint.
For some reason, a lot of implementations (especially on the receiving end) suck at this. The latency seems to be terrible and TVs and displays seem to care more about reassembling old frames than about showing the latest good signal. However, it's not all that different from what Apple is doing.
Miracast over ethernet/via an access point is something different (something I've never really seen used myself).
Doesn't Apple do it by having the AirPlay receiver be its own access point? LAN in comparison indeed isn't ideal.
> Except that android phones with display output are mostly flagships with flagship prices.
Might well be that this becomes a lot more common on cheaper phones if it becomes a popular feature though. A display port output isn't currently that useful, so it's something it makes sense to cut from budget models. But if this desktop functionality becomes popular that calculus may change.
I am pretty sure brands would rather sell you additionnal devices, like tablets or chromebook (will they be called androidbooks?) than make budget models able to do so.
> Except that android phones with display output are mostly flagships with flagship prices.
There are exceptions. For example, the Motorola Edge has DP Alt Mode.
https://uperfect.com/blogs/wikimonitor/list-of-smartphones-w...
Do you understand how much are 50 bucks in a third world country? I mean, Android phone is not the cheapest solution for the poor (obviously) but it helps a lot having this kind of features for a family.
>Do you understand how much are 50 bucks in a third world country?
Yes I do, no need to patronize us with that since even in 3rd world countries people have access to old computers from ewaste imports at a reasonable price, we don't all live in straw mudhuts wearing loincloths swinging from branch to branch.
Now tell me which 50 euro phone ships with display output and is readily available. AFAIK Oneplus 7T I had is the cheapest with that feature but still over 50 and official SW goes to Android 12. Not sure if flashing lineage will still keep display output feature.
Then there's the issue of availability in 3rd world countries, where it might be easier to find some scrapped Dell optiplex with a core 2 duo, or a beat up Acer from the windows 7 era for cheap at your local market versus a cheap android with display output capabilities being more of a unicorn. Sure you'll find your Pixel 8s and or Samsung S24s too, but those imports don't come cheap there, compared to the masses of lesser known cheap chinese phones but those don't have display output and their software is shit.
Plus, if you go that route of Pixel 8 as a pc, you still need the budget for an external display, mouse and keyboard and your battery will wear out much faster. So then why not get a cheap laptop which has all the peripherals?
Plus 2, old phones age very poorly performance wise, they slow down a lot due to thermal paste and battery degradation and nobody makes quality OP 7T batteries anymore to do a swap and get back to out of the box performance. What you find on Aliexpress now are fakes or poor quality clones. While a laptop is much easier to repair and maintain as parts wear out or break.
If you can't find an affordable phone with DP-Alt mode, you can get it working by getting clever.
Any Android phone with a USB port can have a dock attached with ethernet, a keyboard, and a mouse. Connect a Chromecast to any HDMI display. Cast to that display.
Then install 1) a taskbar app (there are dozens on Google Play), 2) enable freeform windows in the device and 3) cast your phone to your Chromecast.
Alternatively, even the shitty phones with just USB 2 dongles can enable their desktop mode by using DisplayLink; no DP-Alt mode necessary. Worse on the battery, but works over USB micro if need be.
The biggest hurdle is software support. For getting the display to work, there are plenty of workarounds possible.
> people have access to old computers from ewaste imports at a reasonable price,
Are you joking?
One can get super good condition Dell latitudes with 8th gen Intel with 8GB RAM and 256GB NVMe with 1 year no-questions asked warranty (and original charger) for €100. Similar ones cost 2x or 3x in India. That is not reasonable.
> don't all live in straw mudhuts wearing loincloths
No. But not everyone is earning in Bengaluru campus. Look at the typical Rapido driver.
Can you be specific which countries are you talking about?
Because you seem to be in a word fight with very vague arguments and with someone else with very vague arguments and it's not even clear you're talking about same things.
So can you be clear on:
- Which counties you're talking about? - Why are those countries important to think about in this case? - Why doesn't this feature help people from regions that can afford a mid-to-top range smartphone?
>- Which counties you're talking about?
Pick any you like, Income/GDP is more important metric rather than which specific country.
>- Why are those countries important to think about in this case?
Why are you asking me? Ask the people who brought up third world countries as the target user base for phones with display output. I'm the one not agreeing with this point since it's stupid.
>- Why doesn't this feature help people from regions that can afford a mid-to-top range smartphone?
I explained already below in detail why. But to reiterate in short, if your monthly income is in the ~200$ a month ballpark, you're not gonna be spending 300$ on a mid-to-top range smartphone just for the display output feature even if you managed to save up that money. Even in Europe some people skoff at paying 300 Euros for a phone but some here think people in nations with 10x less income are somehow the userbase for this feature because in their mind those people can't afford a 20$ dumpster PC, but somehow they can afford a 300$ pixel 8 and external monitor.
I'm asking you because you're part of the fight and are talking about costs without providing the context.
So, which one did you pick to talk about to make a counterpoint?
I have some friends in Argentina where even just a few USD goes a long way. I occasionally throw them something like $10 USD and that gets them GPU, disk upgrades, etc., it's nuts.
This is mistaken in a few way.
1. In 3rd world countries everyone has a phone, usually android, no matter how poor the are. Irrespective of whether or not it has desktop capabilities. So any phone purchase is already part of their baseline expenses.
2. Any desktop/laptop purchase, even if it is $1, is an extra $1.
3. The screens/keyboards/mouse again will not likely be purchased by individuals themselves. They will have “Internet cafes”, libraries, schools, etc where those screens will be provided.
>This is mistaken in a few way.
Only when you ignore the numbers.
>1. [...] So any phone purchase is already part of their baseline expenses.
Yeah but that base line expense can be 50$ or $300. Big difference. Not everyone in 3rd world countries has 300 for a Pixel 8. That's the biggest flaw in your argument. That, and the fact that walking around with an exotic 300$ Pixel 8 flags you as a potential target for mugging in the wrong neighbourhoods, verus a beat up 50$ Samsung or Huawei.
>2. Any desktop/laptop purchase, even if it is $1, is an extra $1.
Hence why a 50$ laptop and a 50$ android phone leaves you better off than blowing 300$ on just the phone alone. And if even 1$ is THAT critical to your daily survival, then you're not buying 300$ phones anyway to begin with. You're buying the cheapest you can get so that in case it gets stolen you don't lose 6 months of savings.
>3. The screens/keyboards/mouse again will not likely be purchased by individuals themselves. They will have “Internet cafes”, libraries, schools, etc where those screens will be provided.
You think in 3rd world countries people just have displays with USB-C docks, keyboards and mice everywhere in public and at home? I know it's getting difficult to tell them apart these days, but we're talking about 3rd world countries, not the bay area.
The pixel 8 costs that much now. Give it a few years and check back on it later (when this feature actually drops) and the phone might end up being much more affordable.
Nonetheless, I do agree with you that simply getting a used low-end laptop is cheaper, but being poor in a GDP/capita way is not the only kind of blocker. Being poor in a "my family can buy me a phone because it's a necessity, but we don't have a computer" is not uncommon, and many people end up developing on their phone, simply because that's what they have.
you've missed:
4. used electronics in 3rd world countries are much more expensive compared to developed ones (because not as much units were sold when they were new to begin with), so 50 euros will get you a 3rd gen in a poor condition at best (or some shit tier Celeron N-thousand something with a soldered 4GB RAM)
Few issues with that.
For one, PCs still make it there via ewaste shipments that then get repaired and sold for cheap, so you can have decent variety of old stuff.
And secondly, even a "3rd gen in a poor condition at best (or some shit tier Celeron N-thousand something with a soldered 4GB RAM)" as you call it, is better for learning marketable skills and making stuff, than whatever you can do on your phone, since office jobs will ask for skills with using a PC, not how skilled you are using a phone.
But hey, if you think you can pass through engineering school with only a phone and no computer, then all power to you.
> For one, PCs still make it there via ewaste shipments that then get repaired and sold for cheap, so you can have decent variety of old stuff.
No you can't. Unlike you, I'm talking from experience when I'm telling what €50 gets you in used marked in a non-developed country.
Just today I got a 15 year used laptop in a "developed country" (Germany) for €30. Windows 10 works in a VM. It did come with Windows 11, but I wiped that. What are you all arguing about?
Btw, I also got a Celeron laptop you were talking about, I got it for free.
ok, as you say, I'm not gonna argue about it
You surely do realize that desktop mode on a smartphone needs a display, a keyboard and a pointer device too right? You can get a decent and complete laptop with 1070p screen for the price of a 720p only TV/Monitor.
> Except that android phones with display output are mostly flagships with flagship prices.
My Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE was like $80 in 2015 and had a mini HDMI. I expect nowadays most phones can output display over USB-C.
Some "flagship" and higher-end-midtier phones cheap out on the USB connection. USB 2 over USB-C with USB-PD for fast charging. No video out, slow data transfers.
Maybe when desktop mode becomes more common there will be an incentive to fix the shitty USB situation.
Cheap phones probably won't really have the power to effectively multi-task so I imagine cheap models would rather disable the feature than leave the user with a bad UI.
> USB 2 over USB-C with USB-PD for fast charging.
Sometimes you're lucky to even have conformant USB-PD. For example, OnePlus for a while had "Warp charging" and the phones wouldn't accept high power over regular USB-C PD.
USB-PD support has been made a requirement for GPlay Android. Manufacturers don't need to support USB-PD for their crazy 200W charging circuits, but it's been a while since you had the choice between 5-10W USB2.0 and 80W Warp Charge.
Surprisingly, no. It's a "premium" feature these days.
Android Chrome not having extensions is just a build option toggle. It doesn't have extensions because Google doesn't want it to, not for technical reasons.
It'd be really weird if extensions got enabled/disabled based on whether the USB cable is plugged into a monitor or not.
I expect the eventual production version of this will have extensions if and only if the normal Android Chrome has extensions at that time.
Yea, I very much doubt they would ever put a browser extension on this. It's funny, I feel as though reading some Google dev's response on reddit about why mobile chrome didn't have extensions was my inflection point when I started to realize they were becoming evil.
There's literally a screenshot of Chrome with extensions in the article you're comenting on.
Why are you confidently commenting if you didn't even attempt to read the article?
>Android Chrome not having extensions is just a build option toggle. It doesn't have extensions because Google doesn't want it to, not for technical reasons.
The leak screenshots are from the dev version of the app. It has not been confirmed to actually have extensions enabled in the prod version, which is what the parent poster was talking about. It would have been prudent to actually read the post I was replying to and the actual article, not just look at pictures.
I don't think this leak implies that (all/some) Android phones will get desktop projection. It just means that Android has a desktop OS and is likely replacing ChromeOS as has been rumored for a while.
So you need to buy a phone, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. And you need a desk where to put the stuff, which is not a given if you are part of a poor family with several kids.
A cheap android phone and a cheap chinese laptop with 16GB of ram is about 300 EUR where I live, and you can use it wherever you want.
What might have been...
Windows Phone was on this path ages ago, and looking really good.
I eagerly await one of two dreams (or both):
1. A phone which can seamlessly function as a desktop for my work.
2. A new clamshell Android phone ala Nokia e90, which is good enough for work stuff on the go.
How will this succeed where the Motorola Atrix failed way back in 2011?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/the-motorola-atrix-4...
My Moto Edge 2024 has "Ready For" which is basically this still today. I plug in the USB-C cable normally connected to my work MacBook and I instantly get a full desktop experience; mouse, keyboard and sound included.
It's how I play Minecraft with my kids when they get the itch. Sometimes if I know I'm only gonna be zoning out on Youtube at night I'll use to to save a few watts too.
It can do 1440p at 120hz, all on a really affordable phone. It's nice.
ChromeOS has a bigger influence on the market than a random phone model from CES when Android was still establishing itself.
Phones were way less powerful 15 years ago and native software was much more important. A modern phone CPU running a browser on a larger screen takes care of a lot of what you need these days.
How as adoption been for Samsung's DEX?
I've only used it when I'm in a pinch but it's handy. Blowing up mobile apps to a larger screen and multitasking isn't ideal certainly but I've been able to handle "email job" type activities while out of pocket. That said I've never heard of anyone else who's actually used it.
> The browser extensions are the most important part because that is what makes a computer useful.
What year were you born? I ask not to lambast but because given infinite time, I doubt I would come to the same conclusion. To me (a 37-year old) that statement sounds like someone who grew up with Chromebooks in school
This has existed for more than a decade. Even my old Samsung S10+ had this feature. It's called Samsung DeX and it is not some handicapped environment like iPad OS either, you can actually get real work done, especially if you're a software engineer.
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/app/samsung-dex
As Google's domination continues, the US and EU need to force mobile OS vendors to open up platforms for third party app installation without gatekeeping, deep menu toggles, or scare walls.
You already need a phone to pay for parking, order at residents, identify yourself with the government, etc. Two companies should not dictate essential life function interaction.
The monopoly grip on this is so tight that it's almost impossible to compete.
Yeah and we’ll be forced to do this because nobody can afford computers anymore because of Ram and SSD prices because of companies like Google buying it all up at extortionist prices.
We’re going backwards by putting all of our compute back in the warehouse.
What makes a computer useful is the form factor (decent size screen, mouse and keyboard instead of touch controls) and having full control of the system. It has nothing to do with browser extensions.
> This looks like it will help a lot of students and families who are on a budget.
Playing gameas or what ? Working with files on Android is a PITA.
You can get a monstrously powerful MacBook almost new for under $500. And that includes display, keyboard, touchpad and speakers. And a whole lot more.
It really does look to be a rewrite of ChromeOS to make it a native Android experience with very few tweaks to the User experience that I can see.
I think it's a good idea on Google's part. The trend of consumers using mobiles as their one and only computing experience is still strong. This will blend the experience consumers have between desktops and their primary computing platform.
It's a trend with Apple as well. It can be seen in iOS/macOS 26 Tahoe. There's lots of untapped potential in those iPads with M-series CPUs. We've also had rumors of a "MacBook Air Lite" sporting a cellphone A-series CPU. The convergence is happening.
I would love to be able to do more with my Google Pixel phone. Right now, the MacBook is my primary workstation, but the possibility of an even more "mobile" productivity setup is very enticing. Now if only I could get an Android tablet with the new "Terminal" feature in Android 15...
I highly doubt Apple convergence is going to happen.
A fully capable iPad would mean less sales of MacBook Air and so on.
An iPhone with official docking Desktop UI also never going to happen. Same story.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple cannibalized Mac for that forced App Store and services revenue.
Google is about to dip into that market, where desktop users are forced to use the Play Store to install any app. Apple would be foolish to leave that money on the table.
and you can't install apps as easy on iPhone than on mac right? That's 2 different world that Apple need to cross, and it's unlikely.
App instalation isn't really even the problem. It is just the capabilities you have that you do not have access to. a modern iPad can easily run macOS as an 'app', if you will. The kernel is there, the userland is there, just not the checkbox from up high. Even Xcode works well in macOS VMs nowadays.
IIRC someone managed to run WindowServer on jailbroken iOS – but had to patch out Metal with a stub to do so.
https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/1mn7mk1/your_jai...
Apparently people play Fortnite on Mac by repackaging the iPhone app.
There's no official Mac app, but the Mac/iOS APIs that Unreal Engine needs are similar enough that you just need to change the packaging.
macOS on Apple Silicon officially supports running iOS apps directly.
There’s no magic trick to it really from the developer side, Epic just ticked the opt-out to prevent it being available on the App Store.
Essentially a clone of Windows 11, and those screenshots make me realise just how much I hate the rounded corners, borderless vagueness, and excess padding of "modern" UI.
For contrast, this UI is more my style: https://serenityos.org/screenshot-b36968c.png
SerenityOS GUI is a dream
Is this serious? Looking at this I feel both bored to death (think "Severance gray office hell" boredom) AND overwhelmed because of the tons of decorations and useless creases and crappy icons and awful text and unnecessary affordances that only made sense 30 years ago when no one knew how to use a computer. Ugh
I agree with the parent comment, but I understand that someone who did not grow up with UIs that looked like that would think otherwise. I do feel that Windows 2000 was peak UI for desktop operating systems, but it's probably due to a combination of nostalgia and the fact that I deeply dislike modern Electron-based UIs with too few decorations and an overly minimalistic and non-customizable "we know best" attitude.
Tell me you're nostalgic for Win95 without telling me...
I too love that style, but it won't work today, because many apps today are Electron slop that disregards user preference and styles itself.
Tried the desktop mode on my Pixel 8 running GrapheneOS. It's getting very close to being usable.
https://imgur.com/a/Wfv6Hmt
On my Pixel 9a (also on GrapheneOS) the biggest limitation is it can't be set to higher than 1080p, and the upscaling algorithm with my 4K display (not sure where in the chain that happens, monitor or phone) was quite terrible to the point of text legibility being a concern.
The usage experience otherwise is quite good, it's perhaps my preferred way to sync data to and from my phone, I have it all stored on a NAS so I connect to my Type-C display (which has keyboard, mouse, and ethernet connected to its switch), fire up a terminal, type in my rsync commands, and my pictures & music are synced ~instantly at LAN speeds.
I use Samsung Dex all the time on my S25. Got rid of my laptop completely.
Best part is, I can make "apps" on the fly that I can use from my phone with termux integration.
Dang. is that tmux, cmatrix, mise, and node running on your android device? Or is that an ssh session?
Actually, it's the Android 16 Linux Terminal (pKVM) [1], so it's 100% on-device. Since this is a full VM, unlike Termux, you can run Docker too! (Though Termux is more stable and lightweight for daily use.)
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-linux-terminal-d...
I have absolutely no interest in expanding the use of Android in my life. I am, in fact, far more interested in going the other way and trying to reduce my reliance on any locked down platforms.
So you may want to consider GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone). By the way, they have a real desktop mode with desktop apps, not mobile apps on a large screen.
I enjoy cool features like this, but as usual, I'm wary of the consequences.
Android is becoming more and more locked down like iOS. Even if it weren't, it's still always been more locked down than a standard desktop or laptop machine running an operating system of the user's choice.
With the advent of smartphones and tablets, already I see non- and semi-technical users often dropping their laptop or desktop and just using their phone or tablet. (I know people who don't even have a laptop/desktop anymore.)
Android having a full desktop interface will just add fuel to this fire, and further normalize running a locked-down OS and device that users don't truly own or control as their only computing platform.
It wasn't always so locked-down as it is today.
The OG Motorola Droid, for example: While it clearly wasn't a design intent, there was really nothing of any gravity to stop people from using it in any way they wished.
Rooting was a simple matter of running a hacked su command, and voila: One becomes root. The bootloader wasn't locked at all. Custom kernels and userlands were normal. It was a great little pocket computer to goof around with for anyone who cared enough to give it a swing.
Just install the "missing" su binary and...done.
At the time, I felt that this was a perfectly acceptable way to keep it working reliably for regular folk.
In a way I don't know what I think about them preventing me from modifying "their" certified OS. Many products do that (if I buy a Marshall smartspeaker, it's not like if I can modify the software, is it?).
What I want is to be able to properly install an alternative OS (just like I don't care about what Windows or macOS do, as long as I can install Linux), and that goes with the bootloader unlocking/locking.
The problem is for every person who wants to do this, there are hundreds (thousands?) who wouldn't want to - and these people are vulnerable various security exploits that would allow someone evil to take over their device.
This isn't just a made up situation: There are nations that have large teams of people who's job is to figure out how to get software installed on your device of their choice/make/design, allowing them to do whatever they want.
This isn't quite true. The Google Pixels allow me to unlock the bootloader, install my own system, and relock the bootloader. As a result, I run an alternative OS called GrapheneOS which is more secure than Android.
The fact that I can unlock and relock the bootloader is not a security issue or a risk. People who don't know what that means cannot possibly do it by mistake.
Now allowing root access to users on Android, that's a security risk because a user can be tricked into giving root access to some evil app. I don't have root access on my GrapheneOS, even though I chose to install it myself. Because it is more secure like this.
So it sounds like a fair compromise to me: they make Android the way they want, and if I don't like it I can install an alternative OS. Just like I can install Linux if I don't like Windows. What I don't like is that most Android manufacturers actively try to prevent me from doing that, and I don't like it.
> The fact that I can unlock and relock the bootloader is not a security issue or a risk. People who don't know what that means cannot possibly do it by mistake.
The second sentence is false. Lots of people blindly follow things and don't understand consequences until they brick their devices. Those who don’t break something won’t notice if they’ve silently backdoored themselves.
People asking for support after getting themselves into some weird hole they never should have been in because some friend or online article said so is super common.
> The second sentence is false. Lots of people blindly follow things and don't understand consequences until they brick their devices. Those who don’t break something won’t notice if they’ve silently backdoored themselves.
"Lots of people", how many though? Can that number be reduced? What number would be acceptable?
I feel like it _has_ to be possible to devise an unlocking procedure that dissuades most people from self-harm.
The problem is often treated as intractable, but intuitively this seems really unlikely to me. I don't think more than a tiny percentage of Xiaomi owners, for example, would go through the bootloader unlock process which often has a mandatory wait period attached to it without a reason more compelling than an impulse to randomly and blindly follow instructions on the internet.
I would like to see user studies with good methodology before other people decide to barter long-term freedoms away for insufficient benefit.
Why do I so rarely see people who are concerned about the security issues of bootloader unlocking calling for designing hassle and warning into the process. Instead, it's more common to hear that in the name of the average user, all escape hatches must be removed.
After a certain point, someone else's insistence on self-harm ceases to be a good excuse to infringe on my freedom. We don't ban hammers because some people accidentally damage their property/body, and it's a lot easier to do that with a hammer than an unlocked bootloader.
When you reboot in fastboot mode and enter the commands that break your phone, I think you're responsible.
If you take a hammer and destroy your phone, I think you're responsible.
There are options. However security has consistently found subtle things about most answers and so I hesitate to suggest any.
I have mixed feelings as well.
The security model of Android and iOS is vastly superior, and for "normal" users it is not so much of a problem if they don't have control they neither need nor want.
On the other hand, I obviously don't like it when I don't have control over my hardware. But what I hate the most is when the manufacturers prevent me from installing an alternative OS. I like being able to install something like GrapheneOS.
Also the fact that I'm forced (in practice) to use the Play Services is not really about the device being locked down.
Vastly superior security doesn't make you give up freedoms for security. But do tell me how successful the war against scams has been for the average user.
I am not sure what you are trying to say.
Convincing a user to give their password will always be an issue, that's fundamental. But because phishing exists does not mean that security does not matter.
Without security, there is no need to phish, because the system does not protect anything. Once you have a good security, then the best attack is phishing because it's easier to trick the human than the system. This means that the security is good, not bad.
I think one of the points is that all this attestation stuff does not protect against the majority of the ways users are compromised. Its just remote control with real security benefits, just those benefits largely accrue to companies and at the expense of the user.
If my system is signed and verified at every boot, doesn't that guarantee that my system hasn't been tampered with? Meaning that no malware has found a way to get root access and modify it. I find this valuable.
If you can't use your own keys and verify the process yourself, then no, that is not a guarantee.
Malware developers just have their software signed by the gatekeepers your device is programmed to inherently trust, because the gatekeepers don't give a shit.
The App Store and Play Store are the largest vectors of malware out there, and every year they are responsible for letting their users get scammed to the tune of billions of dollars.
> If you can't use your own keys and verify the process yourself
The thing with security is that it is a gradient. Too many people try to win arguments on security by saying a variant of "anyway you have to trust somebody, so it will never be secure". This is exactly what you are doing here.
Say I trust GrapheneOS, the security model guarantees what I said. Obviously I have to trust something, I won't audit every single line of code and assemble billions of transistors myself.
> every year they are responsible for letting their users get scammed
Second tactic for winning a security argument: "but the users get scammed anyway". Sure they do. Because they have to. If you have a system that popular with zero scam, it probably means that the attackers don't even need to attack the human because the system itself is insecure.
I do see the value in this and also note that this feature has largely been kept from users intentionally on most other platforms. Still, this offers very little protection for the vast majority of scams to which people fall victim.
Phishing will always exist. If a system is very secure, the easiest way to attack it is to phish the human that has control over it. Complaining about that is weird... what do the people who complain want? One of those two:
- "Please make the system less secure, so that the attackers don't have to attack the human because they can just compromise the system directly"
- "Please keep making the system secure, and keep removing rights from the users, because the users prove over and over again that they cannot be trusted with anything"
You see where I am going. If you only optimise for security, then you remove all the freedom. But we obviously want freedom. So it's a compromise.
Now this compromise is a choice, and different systems can make different compromises. The freedom I want is the freedom to choose my system. I want to be able to install GrapheneOS on my phone. Complaining about macOS not being Linux would be weird: if I want Linux, I use Linux. If I use macOS, well then I have to live with the design choices of Apple.
That's the same fallacy as seeing that no one dies of certain diseases, so the vaccines against them don't work.
There are different vaccines from different manufacturers. Attestation from something like keybase should work just as well for banks or whatever.
This level of security exists on open as well as closed platforms, the problem is the closed platforms not allowing you to do things that aren't giving your password away (like installing fdroid or using beeper easily). I just have a hard time believing this is superior in any way.
I think you're confused.
I you run GrapheneOS, it is an open source platform built on top of AOSP (the Android Open Source Project). Part of the security model is that you don't run as root. I am an advanced user and I don't want to run as root on my phone, I am happy with GrapheneOS as it is distributed.
Now if you want to be root, you can install an OS that allows you to be root. Just like I unlocked my bootloader, installed GrapheneOS and relocked my bootloader, you can do that and install whatever you please. I will keep using GrapheneOS because that is the most secure OS I can find for my phone.
The problem, IMO, is not that "some OS are opinionated and don't give you root access while other OSes do give you root access". The problem is that on many phones, you are not free to install the goddam OS you want (e.g. because you can't unlock or relock the bootloader).
Meh, I'm ok with not having root on my phone. What I'm not ok with is not being able to flash whatever I want to run on it later without unlocking and wiping. For this reason I have an automated script to verify Graphene's signatures and replace them with my own. This would give me the ability to extract data using root at a later date, for example.
> What I'm not ok with is not being able to flash whatever I want to run on it later without unlocking and wiping.
The wiping is a security feature: if someone installs a new random system ("random" being defined as "not signed by the same entity"), then they can modify the system in order to attack it. The whole secure boot idea is worthless if you allow that.
I don't disagree. I just don't want the trusted entity to be other than me.
Note that secure boot doesn't become worthless just because you can flash something different. The TPM should notice SB is turned off, and should refuse to decrypt, but there should be a way for the user to back up the key and use it to recover the data later.
Root used to just mean knowing an admin password and rarely using it on desktop platforms for making local changes. It's changed definition for mobile if it now means just being able to run and auto-update apps from fdroid or run an app without the attestation of the company that supplies the OS, which in the worst cases takes away control completely from the user.
Mobile platforms and developers solely supporting their attestation should allow other forms of self attestation that the users want. I don't think I'm confused about anything, and I don't need to muddy the definition of security or root to argue having control over my data and apps on platforms I want to use.
Respectfully, I genuinely don't understand what you are talking about.
You can't provide a passkey to a malicious site without writing your own web browser. And the "password" is a 128-bit integer.
It completely solves the phishing-password-stealing problem.
That was an example, I was talking about phishing in general. Phishing will always exist: as long as a human has a right to do something, someone else can trick this human into doing it for them.
Passkeys are great, and they do improve the situation. But they won't remove phishing as a concept.
I think a passkey is a good example of how, when the user has a trusted third party grant them limited instead of unlimited permission to do something (e.g. they can use a secret with the site that created it but they can't extract the raw secret from it to send to an arbitrary site), it is possible to make them immune to a particular type of phishing.
As an example of mitigating another type of phishing, if the user only has the ability to log in to a web site from a particular device or country, an attacker tricking them into providing their password gets a much less useful win.
You could argue they have the "right to do" less in that situation. Sure, that's a reasonable perspective. I'm not passing moral judgement here. But I think that it is a factually true statement that it is indeed possible to mitigate (and even entirely prevent) phishing vulnerabilities by giving end users devices that have stronger security policies - with those policies being written by the device creator, and not edited by the end user themself.
I think this principle applies to every single type of social engineering attack. Limiting the context of permissions lessens the risk of a confused deputy.
> The security model of Android and iOS is vastly superior
"This app requires access to all your files. OK [X] Close []"
I am with you, and for this reason I really want them to fail. The PC is currently still a platform where the user has a relatively large amount of control and digital autonomy, and as long as a sizeable part of the population keeps using it, companies and government institutions cannot ignore it and must support it.
Once 90% of all internet clients are iOS or Android the open internet is dead, and the concept of a general purpose computer on which you can run any computation you want is also inaccessible to the average person. From that point on, everything is a service that you rent from either Apple or Google.
Samsung should not give up DEX, is mature and works exceptionally well with applications that are supported (wireless DEX with my samsung tv works great). Knowing Google, they will give up after 5 iterations or updates will be very slow. It is good for the ecosystem, I hope it will become more mainstream.
Dex and Android desktop mode are not a single new thing, but multiple features that partially have been in Android for years, like external screens, resizable windows and the (currently rather limited) external screen drawer.
Some "first look"
It's just a slightly different showcase of the same UI shown in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzDO-GS-Bm8
That UI is available to test on any Pixel 10 (maybe even any Android 16 device?)
I do have it in Pixel 8 after enabling in developer options. It's a bit buggy and low resolution, but does the job when e.g. I want to connect some video I'm already watching on mobile to the external display via USB-C. (You can connect a mouse via Bluetooth to the phone, or via a USB dongle plugged into your monitor, to control it.)
An interesting thing is that you can run apps X and Y on desktop screen while also run app X on mobile screen independently.
*I meant "app Z on mobile screen", can't edit anymore.
Google’s entire business is predicated on collecting as much data on users as possible. This OS will be the worst spyware imaginable.
No, only the 85% or so of it that's accreted since about 2008. Prior to that it actually made money by offering useful search results without infringing on user privacy. That core business model could still work to power a company about 1/8th the size of current Google. Current Google cannot survive on that model. Something went really wrong when it put growthism above all else.
> Something went really wrong
What went wrong was Google (the old 'do no evil' Google) bought the ad network DoubleClick. The acquired DoubleClick side then took over old Google from the inside out such that what we have today is Doubleclick calling itself "google", no more 'do no evil' old Google anywhere, and all the evil that exists on the advertising side infesting everything they do.
That ship sailed many years ago with Windows 11, and Windows 10 to some extent.
By the way, you forgot Android itself.
The visual design is just so bad. Its so ugly and souless. I actually feel bad for the UI designer that had to put their name behind that.
Unfortunately, it's just generally true that when a bunch of engineers complain about your UI, it probably will be well received by regular people.
What would you want to see different from this? is there an OS that actually looks good?
Right off the bat:
1. Those loading spinners being bumpy pulled my eyes around the screen wildly to the point that they were experiencing pain. They need to be removed.
2. There is a status bar along the top, and an application launcher docked at the bottom. That's way too much vertical space being used, especially on laptops (which I'd wager is going to be the most used viewing modality for this OS). It should be merged into a single bar along one side of the screen.
3. The dropdown at the top left of each window seems to be taking up a lot of space. Especially when you're trying to fit four tabs on the screen. Get rid of it so the tabs can actually be read.
4. At 27 seconds in, there are two close icons in the focused window. That being bad could be a presentation all in itself.
5. Random padding in the status bar.
Unironically: win 10, or kde plasma - breeze dark.
I'm not a visual designer but heres what I think is making it look so bad. The task bar is way to thick. The flat design of the icons needs some shadows or something to make them pop a bit. The rounding on the corners is way to much and needes to be dialed back significantly. There is both a top bar and a bottom bar, pick one ffs dont waste screenspace with both. Also top bar is transparent while bottom is fat and grey. I'd keep the top bar and scrap the bottom.
As far as OS's that look good, #1 KDE Plasma with breeze, MacOS snow leopard, Windows xp and vista.
MacOS up until Catalina
Windows 7 with the Shine 2.0 theme
Gnome Adwaita
QNX Photon 6
BeOS R5
I'm sure there's more good examples. People here will say Windows 2000, but I don't think it has any grace.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard, GOAT
For desktop use? Windows XP. It's got the right balance of aesthetics and practicality. Windows ME also works, but is more utilitarian. Anything after 7 is just absolute garbage.
What aesthetics/practicality does Windows 10 lose against Windows XP or 7?
Looks great. Hope the team polishes it up before release. The visual nits in shipping Google products make my eyes bleed.
Chrome and Android look like yin and yang: one never knows which one is planned to run inside the other.
I don't want a "PC future" where you can't just install software without OS vendor blessing.
This is why Valve invested so much in Linux. They saw the writing on the wall of Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier). Now they have an alternative. If Microsoft charges a 30% tax on all Steam transactions and won't let Steam run unless they do that, Valve can heavily push Linux and Steam Machine sales.
> Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier)
At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons, having disappearing controls depending on window size (scrollbars), or having corners so rounded that the click to drag mostly being outside the actual window.
The Windows 11 UI is annoying, but at least it doesn't look like a kid's toy.
> At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons
That's just because Microsoft has been there done that already 2 decades ago ;) (IIRC in Windows Vista).
Same with the fine-grained in-your-face permission popups. Introduced by Microsoft in Vista, copied by Apple in Mojave ;)
One more reason for Apple to actually have delivered it properly, given that they had Microsoft's failures to learn from.
Not really, Apple permission prompts aren't different enough. It's just a random prompt to put in your password, with limited information why.
The Windows ones look very different, dim the rest of the screen, and have more info.
Apple's bad ideas look ugly. Microsoft's bad ideas lock you out of your computer, delete your files and give the undeleted files to the FBI.
Having a mandatory sign-in prompt when opening Notepad and two context menus is way worse than anything Apple did in Tahoe.
> At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons,
They did that but made it work well all the way back with Windows 7, maybe even Vista.
And yet they failed to get game devs to natively target SteamOS.
As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
I'm not sure how they could have failed that if that was never their goal in the first place. The entire point of Proton is that the Win32 API is infinitely more stable and worthwhile to target than anything Linux distros offer, and that the financial incentives aren't there for developers to 5x their platform distribution effort to reach 1% more users. An approach that relies on developers doing that would never work, and fortunately for Valve that isn't their approach.
You're thinking of now. Proton didn't exist yet the first time they tried Steam OS.
To be fair to Valve though, back then, there was a lot of movement in direct ports for Linux games. Humble Bundle (before they were bought) was spending real money on it and companies like Feral sprang up to help with titles like Mordor. It looked like there was going to be some real change.
But for various reasons the momentum waned. One of those reasons might be the existence of Proton itself. Some people were very against it because they thought it might lead to less native ports.
Oh, right. I completely forgot SteamOS 1 existed, haha.
Which is exactly my point, keeping game studios on Windows + Visual Studio acomplishes nothing in regards to cut the dependency on Windows gaming.
I wouldn't say that. Software support for Linux is a chicken and egg problem. No software because there's no users because there's no software.
Proton helps fix the users part. If a critical mass is accomplished, that can have real long-term impact.
Helps as much as it helped OS/2.
Is that a fair comparison? It seems like people have a compelling reason to use Linux (hardware compatibility, avoiding MS spyware, price, etc). I admit it was before my time, but what was the draw for OS/2? Even it's technical superiority to Windows was gone as soon as NT dropped right?
How many know what that was?
What's the purpose of a native build if the windows build runs just as good, or even better?
They ensured that the devs need not worry about another build target that requires extensive QA. Maybe in the distant future we will get ubiquitous native builds, but honestly and again, who cares?
Proton and Wine means there is a single target now, instead of the fragmented mess that is Desktop Linux today.
Valve also uses a Linux runtime for Linux native games. I think it's based on Ubuntu 2012.
I think only the folder is still named Ubuntu12 or something (like Dota 2's folder is still called Dota 2 Beta), libraries in it surely are more recent than that. And even then, native Linux ports of games don't run that well anyway. Especially older ones, like Tomb Raider 2013, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Alien: Isolaton, those all will run much better over Wine. I kind of expect newer ports to fall apart as well in the future. I was playing Hollow Knight the other day (native port) and it drops FPS quite often on my laptop (hybrid amd+nvidia), while through Wine those drops don't exist almost at all.
Tbh, why bother?
kernel32+user32+gdi32+d3d[11|12]+dxgi is a pretty great API abstraction for game development. And unlike Linux desktop APIs the Win32 APIs are actually stable, so those games will also work in 5 years, and most importantly, performance is the same or better than on Windows. It's unlikely that game devs directly targeting Vulkan would do any better, and when using a high level engine, any layering overhead in Proton is negligible anyway. And don't even get me started about the state of audio APIs on Linux ;)
Also don't underestimate the amount of workarounds and tweaks that (most likely) go into Proton for games that make poor system API use. Without Proton those game-specific hacks would need to go into MESA, Wayland, X11 or various system audio libraries. At least Proton is one central place to accumulate all the game-specific warts in some dusty corner of their code base.
TL;DR: just think of Proton as an extremely low level and slim cross-platform API for games (not all that different than SDL), and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. And I bet that in 5..10 years Windows will have regressed so much that it might actually be better to run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows (assuming Windows hasn't become 'yet another Linux distro' by then anyway) ;)
> run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows
Already happening, to an extent. Specifically, modern Intel GPUs do not support DirectX 9 in hardware, yet legacy apps run fine. The readme.txt they ship with the drivers contains a paragraph which starts with the following text: “SOFTWARE: dxvk The zlib/libpng License” DXVK is a library which implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan, and an important component of SteamOS.
With game studios using Windows + Visual Studio, what a win!
VS2026 is actually quite decent again (surprising tbh), but the good thing today is that a lot more UI apps support Linux than 20 years ago. E.g. I would just give my artists a Linux desktop running Blender, and generally test on a connected min-spec PC (also for the devs even if they are working on a high-end Windows PC in VStudio). E.g. similar to console-development, the low-end PC is essentially the devkit. Also has the advantage that there will be no performance surprises on release when most gamers try to run the game on their laptop or RTX2060 ;)
One thing I would definitely do is to replace MSVC with Clang, MSVC is just too far behind and it almost looks like MS abandondend it.
Are we boycotting shit software, or the entire company that produced it?
Try running a directx 5 game and let me know how it goes.
29 years is a lot more than the 5.. years time window I'm talking about. 3 decades is basically "I will need an emulator for that" ;)
But I think even a lot of D3D9 games should still work, and that's 2002 stuff. Also try running a 1997 Linux game binary on a modern Linux distro without recompiling, I doubt that's works all that well...
> As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
Maybe not, but they fully solved my problem with games, which was that I could not play on Linux. I started playing again just because of the SteamDeck, I think it's a pretty big achievement :-).
Hardly any different than running MAME.
MAME is an emulator running games in fully emulated machines, Proton/Wine is a compatibility layer that runs games natively by the interfaces they expect.
The closest situation would be with comparing Wine running via CPU translation under ARM or RISC-V with how RPCS3 recompiles PowerPC games to native x86 code, but even then the comparison wouldn't be accurate as RPCS3 still does full system emulation whereas Proton/Wine integrates with the underlying OS.
Proton/Wine is closer to Java/JVM than MAME (or any other emulator) and that is when running on a different CPU than x86/x86_64 as on the latter it is just a PE loader with a bunch of DLLs reimplementing various APIs.
It's actually really different. WINE literally stands for: Wine Is Not an Emulator (yes, the acronym is contained within the acronym itself)
Never heard of MAME before :-)
Same, but my PC runs on Linux so I don't feel threatened.
I feel like at some point normies may end up just using iPadOS or Android as a "convergent" device: a tablet/phone that they can plug into a docking station and use as a computer.
I am sort of hoping that it will work with something like GrapheneOS, so that I will be able to benefit from it on my phone.
> my PC runs on Linux so I don't feel threatened.
Well, you should feel threatened. Where do you think the push towards TPM and secure boot is heading? Microsoft is insanely envious of how Apple and Google locked down their platforms and have total control over app stores, and that’s what Microsoft wants too. It’s a huge revenue stream they’re leaving on the table. Now that there’s precedent on mobile, they’ll have no problem pushing it through on desktop.
And once all the normies have moved to iPads, there won’t be a big enough market for anyone to manufacture PC hardware for hobbyists anymore.
Right, I guess we agree but I was not clear.
In general, I don't care so much if Windows or macOS become as locked as Android or iOS, as long as I can install Linux on my hardware.
My point is that many people seem to complain because they want to be root on the Google-certified Android. I disagree with that: Google makes an OS where you cannot be root. If you want an OS where you can be root, you should be able to install another OS on the hardware you bought. Because you should own that hardware. But you don't own Google.
The problem is more that you're forced to use Google's OS. Usually just less convenient, but often in a literal sense too with these government services increasingly requiring attestation.
Yes, I totally agree with that. I really, really want to be able to install my own OS on the device I am supposed to own.
And also a third party should not be able to inspect my device and discriminate against my owned device. The device should attest its authenticity to me (or my organization that owns it) alone. Arguably, this is a social/political problem more than a technical one, but it tends to have a similar effect by imposing a cost on having control over your own computing (now you need to carry two phones).
Also while you can debate about stuff like Netflix DRM, access to banks and government services is not a privilege, it is a right (for a transaction that isn't otherwise illegal). The counterparty is not subject to freedom of association because in many places it is illegal to have cash transactions over a certain amount, and you can't choose a different government.
Yeah I agree with that as well. Fine if Google wants to lock some stuff on Android, but a bank should not be able to prevent me from using GrapheneOS (or Linux, or whatever I want).
Is that what you are saying or did I misunderstand?
Yeah, but the whole point of Google's locked down system and integrity APIs is to offer a way to subjugate users and transfer power from the users to the providers. Arguably it shouldn't work in an ideal competitive market where most consumers are intelligent, but it is how it is in our world.
Banks, governments, and anything else that's required to participate in society should not depend on proving the loyalty of my device to Google or any other entity that isn't me.
> I am sort of hoping that it will work with something like GrapheneOS, so that I will be able to benefit from it on my phone.
It does. I already tried it on my Pixel 10 Pro. :)
Neither do I. But with Windows slipping badly, Google could start encroaching on their core tech.
Linux seems to be gaining a lot of traction, both with the fall of windows and gaming being more than feasible.
It makes sense for the tech savvy option to succeed, now that personal computing is disappearing. Average folks won’t use a windows/macbook, they’ll use phones and tablets.
My only concern is ending in a macOS+asahi situation where supporting a single device requires mountains of effort.
The fall of windows and Linux gaining traction.
I've seen that written on here, Reddit, /., digg, hell even on usenet back in the day. . . .
Yes, but have you seen you real life non tech friends move to Linux?
I’m seeing it now, and this is new.
Yes, and I also have seen they come back to Windows, when they got into issues sharing software or files with friends, or local goverment requirements, and didn't had a relative to do their IT support for free.
And yet it's undeniable that 2025 had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11 - DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux - Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting - Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month - Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months - I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was - And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
The cycling speech since Window XP Toy's R US L&F days, unfortunely.
Less fragmentation, more focus, OEM support on devices selling on regular stores is needed, otherwise we won't get away from the yearly meme.
> otherwise we won't get away from the yearly meme
What's different in the last decade is that Windows is on an undeniable quality downward spiral, it's simply not important anymore for Microsoft.
E.g. desktop Linux doesn't even need to improve, it just needs to wait for Windows to become worse ;)
Unless it becomes available for normies to buy laptops with it pre-installed at Saturn, Media Market, FNAC, Cool Blue, and co, it won't matter.
They aren't going to buy them from Tuxedo.
"Normies" buy smartphones and maybe a tablet, neither of those has Windows preinstalled either.
Available at Saturn, Media Market, FNAC, Cool Blue show floor.
...and a market share of 0.02% ;)
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/tablet/worldwide
(I guess those 'Windows tablets' are running under convertible laptops or something...)
Where do you think normies that don't live in cities with Apple stores, or with salaries unable to afford Apple tax, get their smartphones and tablets?
I have made zero mentions of Windows tablets, that market died with Windows 8, replaced by 2-1 laptops.
So just don't use windows? The only reason I use android to begin with is because the mobile centric distros I looked into didn't appear to be to the point I would want to daily drive them yet. If and when that changes I'll switch.
The only real issue is sourcing good mobile hardware that isn't locked down. At least for the time being the pixel line satisfies that.
Many years ago I used to play around with CyanogenMod and Linux.
Life with work and a family became too busy to fuss with that stuff, but I'm rapidly approaching the point where abuse from android and Microsoft make using a less polished OS worth the bother.
You'll be happy to hear then that the experience has improved significantly over the past decade.
Eh, it's better. But it's still a mess unless you're using a device specifically designed for Linux like a Steamdeck or Framework. Expect to spend a lot of time messing around in the console if you install on an arbitrary laptop that came with Windows installed. Wifi problems, sleep problems, external monitor problems, laptop screen brightness problems, graphics card problems.
Does it still require wiping your drive and enabling developer mode to install software outside the Play Store like ChromeOS does? DOA if so.
I believe you can run Linux in a container and use apt-get.
https://chromeos.dev/en/linux/setup
Using applications with a GUI isn't a very enjoyable experience in that environment.
Cookie banner doesn't have reject-all button
Isn't that against the rules nowadays?
The rule based world order is over. /s
Is it going to be the same future as Fuchsia OS? There were some good ideas in that one, but then one day it sort of disappeared. Not that that was surprising - Google is good at that.
Unless Google reorganizes and gets more focused, I'd say they are highly likely to repeat their mistakes.
IMHO both Apple and Google are missing a big opportunity here. Both are doing work to blur the lines between desktop and mobile. Both are targeting laptops, ar, phones, and tablets.
These are multiple modalities. Or they should be. But because the way both are structured, these are isolated islands with some interoperability but the whole experience is very device centric.
What's nicer is when you have multiple devices and a clean handover between them. You basically sign in and all your apps and data are there. All the open apps have the same state. They just adapt to the formfactor.
Apple has been taking babysteps here but it's still hopelessly compartmentalizing the market. So switching between devices is a lot of setup and install friction.
And for Google, they've been banging the drum that everything is cloud based since forever. Yet they can't figure out a cross device UX that makes sense. It should be as simple as sign in and all your stuff is there. That was the vision with ChromeOS at some point but then they lost interest, got distracted by Fuchsia, went off and created Flutter and also forgot that Android was the thing that actually has an enormous amount of users and OEMs shipping it.
The trillion dollar opportunity here: if devices become like shoes, many people probably have more than one. Some people have many pairs of shoes for different occasions. But they have only one phone. Because switching between devices is painful. Adding another OS to the mix just kicks that can down the road. Multi device, multi modal access to your stuff is the key thing that they should be nailing. If e.g. Apple were to nail that, some people might have many different devices in different sizes and form factors. The main decision as to which one to use would be based on which is most appropriate for the context.
If you take something like that as the starting point, the logical conclusion is that Google should evolve Android to run on any type of device and make sure that everything plays nice together. Switching between your Android phone(s), tablet, TVs, car, AR/VR goggles, or laptops should not be hard. Devices running a version of Android exist in all those categories. But there's very little/no integration across these.
I don't think nobody has solved the problem of mobile/desktop split so far.
Microsoft's Surface Pro line barely made any difference -- nobody buys it to use it as a tablet, and generally the touch experience is just bad if you have ever used a real tablet.
Apple pretends to try and market iPad as your next computer, but we all know how it works. (They also have this thing that allows phone apps to run natively on MacOS, but that has got near zero traction.)
Samsung tried as well, half-mindedly, and I can confidently say a Samsung phone doesn't work as well as a PC in DeX mode.
So now it's Google. I don't think they can come up with some magic solution to change this.
What is Apple doing to blur the line between desktop and mobile? Is it the abomination they call iPadOS? It's a joke, it's nothing more than iOS+.
They've made it perfectly clear that they want to keep desktop and mobile separate in order to convince their customers to buy all their devices.
MacOS can now run a lot of IOS applications. They have icloud to sync a bunch of things. But only for their own applications. But maybe it's more clear if we limit the discussion to just phones. The key question, why do people only buy 1 iphone? Is it because it's perfect for every situation? Or because they can't play nice together?
Switching from one to the other is a PITA. What if that was seamless. You just pick one up and now everything is there. You might have a phone for work, going out, hiking, etc. You might have phones matching different iphones. Apple could be selling you many phones. Losing a phone would be a lot less dramatic because you'd have multiple spares. Do they all have to have the same screen size? Do all of them even need a screen?
Apple sells lots of phones. They could be selling 2-3x more. That's just phones. The way they positioned their VR device and watch is kind of telling. They are both kind of satellite devices. But apparently that requires special apps and a new OS (for both).
For me the best solution would be seperate environments with completely different UIs, but running on the same device (probably in a phone form factor)
Apple's in the best position to offer this because they have both Mobile and Desktop OS's. And their chips are already capable of having two OS's installed side-by-side with a strong security barrier (and also more than fast enough to run a full desktop OS). But alas they haven't attempted it yet.
I believe the Google Nest devices ship with Fuchsia
I'm sure they will be discontinued in a few days.
See Android Things, does anyone still remember it, or Brillo that was originally supposed to be it?
Yeah they failed pretty hard at least three times on the IoT front. To be fair I think they're finally making some kind of progress with Matter. About 10 years late, but still.
This effort is the abandonment. This is ChromeOS bring shut down, this is the one taking over the many.
It was an experiment to keep bright engineers busy with cool ideas to show off.Even back then they could have known that it is not a viable idea to make a tectonic platform switch with not much business arguments for it.
I would love for a microkernel, capabilities OS to become standard. Windows and Linux have been bolting on security layers for decades because the modern threat model was barely a concern when they were originally created.
Google actually has the sway that it could drag the industry in that direction.
I don't think so. Feels like it was more about getting away from Linux and all the driver issues it entails.
It's a very long-term bet for sure.
It is interesting to consider the different developments happening with the big mobile orgs regarding the convergence computing paradigm:
- Samsung’s Dex has been out for a while - independent devs have been working on Linux “as an app” for some time - Android desktop interface in this article - Apple developing video output on iPhones - Apple working on a Macbook with a mobile chip
- another exciting thing is XR devices and mobile computing
- my concern is convergence computing will reduce the importance of desktop interfaces and the freedom we have to install whatever applications we want
> my concern is convergence computing will reduce the importance of desktop interfaces and the freedom we have to install whatever applications we want
Yep, it absolutely will I expect. All the pieces are being or have been laid to build the new world where only a "trusted" device will be able to use the internet. Us nerds can still have our Linux, but it won't work with much of the internet because we won't be able to pass attestation.
Building to that future is exactly what I would expect from Apple, but Google doing so has surprised me. Google doing so is also the thing that will bring it to pass, so there's a special seed of hatred for them germinating in my heart right now. Hopefully I'm just being alarmist and paranoid, but I really don't think I am.
Some Refs:
Web Environment Integrity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
Private Access Token: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k
I think tech companies are realizing that the biggest "mistake" they have ever made was giving so much freedom to the desktop user. They hate that we can look into, modify, and delete files, hate that we can add custom-made software, and hate that we can identify and turn off tracking/telemetry. They realized this with the mobile platform and locked everything down, but by that time it was already too late.
Authoritarian governments (that is, what unfortunately all governments want to be) also love this, since if a few big companies control all computing, they can regulate them to control the public.
Fortunately, there are many computers already in the public's hands (which they can use to perform any computation without government restrictions and without paying/sending data to a company); but more and more people are switching to mobile platforms (and kids start out on these platforms) that I'm worried about the future.
If this trend continues, then self-hosting may become the final bastion of hobbyist FOSS.
I am somewhat hopeful that local AI will save us. It will be fairly easy to automate interacting with normie devices and services in the near future. It's not impossible to prevent it, but that will probably be annoying enough to the normies for them to reconsider. I see a future where the select few will still be able to use their free devices to operate the nonfree ones remotely, while incrementally taking back control with things like self-hosted tools.
I used to look up to Google and Googlers but that was a big mistake on my part because that only made the following disappointment ever so hurtful. All of the product killing, services/APIs lockdown and disrepair that has been their modus operandi over the last decade made them into just another corporate software company.
> Google doing so has surprised me Google are absolutely interested in this because more and more people are installing ad blockers and since their main game is advertisement, they can't allow that. The older the retired Google elites become and the less filtered their language becomes, the more you can peer into their minds and decisions leading up to now. Just look at what Eric Schmidt has been doing and saying.
>my concern is convergence computing will reduce the importance of desktop interfaces and the freedom we have to install whatever applications we want
The final nail was drilled into the coffin when a judge ruled Google a monopoly with Android a year or so ago.
You would think this is good but:
Apple was not found to be a monopoly with iOS. Why?
Because iOS doesn't allow any competitors, how can they be anti-competitive?
The judge explained this Google when they raised the issue, and just like that, Android wants to become iOS.
Good fucking job judge. 10,000 IQ ruling.
The Chrome Extensions support is the interesting part here. That's often the dealbreaker for using mobile devices as computer replacements.
Google's had this weird situation where Android and ChromeOS overlap more every year. At some point maintaining two operating systems with converging feature sets seems wasteful.
My guess: ChromeOS probably survives for the education market where manageability matters more than capabilities. But for consumers? Android on a big screen with keyboard and mouse might just be good enough.
It will not survive. No point in maintaining both. Just costs money. Device management for mobile phones is also a huge point.
My educated guess: tablet/laptop hybrids with Android OS. Not that Apple has huge success with the same move
Any extensions that do something really "interesting" will be disallowed, cf. Manifest V3.
I'm running AdGuard in Chromium right now. I don't see any ads, even on YouTube. May I ask what did you mean?
Not that I don't think MV3 is limited, but.. we're comparing this against MV2, right? It was already missing basic functionality like full filtering of http responses, I remember a bug about not seeing POST bodies being open for 10+ years..
Is there really a reason to get excited about this? When we look at the path they took with Android on the phones, why should we believe that they will be any different from Microsoft on the desktop?
It is relatively easy to make a secure OS. What is terribly expensive in developer labor is a secure OS that runs a mainstream browser well. Android is an open-source OS that runs a mainstream browser well and is about 100 times more secure than any other open-source Linux distro -- except ChromiumOS. But for some reason, no vibrant open-source project ever formed around ChromiumOS whereas a vibrant open-source project (namely GrapheneOS) has formed around the Android open-source project.
Maybe they will sort out how terrible it is to try and use a keyboard or keyboard like (i.e. remote control on android TV) on Android apps, I hold out little hope.
It's like nobody tests focus + navigation at all.
Oh, I see Google's angle now. They want to make android a viable desktop OS in order to have more users using android Chrome rather than Windows Chrome, because the former lacks extension support, and thus ad blockers. Of course, you can still install brave or kiwi browser or Firefox to your heart's content, but most people won't. It's brilliantly simple. It's not too bad for power users, they'll probably use a different browser, or for developers, given the work they're putting into the Linux containers, but for most users...we'll see the expected result.
This shows a version of Chrome with extensions.
> The Google Chrome interface mostly aligns with the current large-screen Android version except for the Extensions button, which is currently only available on the desktop browser.
Wow, I don't know how I missed that. Guess that theory goes out the window!
I don't want a Chromebook with extra steps I want a real computer.
So would it make sense to sell a folding plastic shell with screen, keyboard and trackpad in it that you can bring in your bag and pull out to plug your phone into it?
As mentioned in TFA, Android has had a "desktop" phone projection mode for years and it doesn't seem to have caught on. This seems to be a distro for dedicated desktop devices, I’m not sure what the point is when its main competitor would be the other OS Google already makes for those devices.
Google is transitioning from ChromeOS to desktop Android by 2028.
This form factor was tried before and it didn’t stick. Why should it be brought back now?
Last time, the hardware was barely capable of driving a 1080p display at a constant frame rate with more than one app open.
These days, phones are more powerful than the laptops they give to kids to study on.
Samsung DeX has existed for years and works as well as it has for ages. We don't need to wait on Google to make this work. At best, Google will make this type of tech available in software so you can Chromecast/Miracast/whatever it to your display when your cheap phone doesn't do DP-Alt mode.
What I think this is more likely to be about is ChromeOS being killed and Android taking its place. It's not secret that Google is working on that, this just seems to be someone dogfeeding the latest build of the desktop Android build.
I guess I fail to see where people will use this then.
Where are there going to be setups where they can plug the 3 things into their phone that aren't already a computer that you can just use as-is?
I'm using this right now on a work trip. Since I don't want to use my work computer for personal stuff, I carry a small bag that has a mouse, small keyboard, USB-C hub, and USB-C to HDMI cable. I set that up while I'm in my hotel room and use my Fold7 as a personal laptop. The items mentioned are all kept neatly in that small bag and it just sits at the bottom of my work bag until I want to use them.
This is to replace ChromeOS.
I think the point is that software wasn't ready and now it might be.
This exists, it is called the NexDock[0]. I have never tried it.
[0]https://nexdock.com/explore-nexdock/
Portable monitor + mouse + keyboard makes more sense to me.
But this can also be cast to a tv, for example. I assume you can use the phone itself as a trackpad. So the only extra hardware you need is a cheap Bluetooth keyboard which you can get for $15.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Jm8IiwURQ
That's 14 years old. Kind of crazy this concept hasn't developed more in the meantime.
I had that it was a cool concept but it kinda sucked. It would have been great for doing stuff over SSH but not much else as the hardware was lacking at the time
Why do you think it’s crazy?
I feel like the market for this product is definitely out there, but manufacturers don't want to cannibalize their own laptop margins.
You mean a laptop?
Mini laptops have been a thing for decades [1], some with cool expanding keyboards [2]. They generally kinda suck.
If I wanted a weird small portable computer, I would buy a steam deck with a "Decktop" [3]. Or, this awesome modern thing [4].
[1] Mid 2000 Sony model: https://www.ebay.com/itm/388376162735?chn=ps&mkevt=1&mkcid=2...
[2] IBM model with expanding keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvcl4kmOxPo
[3] Desktop steam deck keyboard stand...thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXZuAWYujm4
[4] https://www.amazon.com/lanruo
I've always wanted a keyboard+screen with a slot for a phone as the trackpad. Saving any money over a regular trackpad? No. Cool as hell? I think so at least...
Well, that would be nice, honestly - to have Android as another option for desktop OS.
I remember there were some experiments to create a hardware laptop shell to insert smartphone into.
Yep, it is called a "lapdock" now.
If it comes with fully functional command line, unix utils and ability to install linux apps from different stores, that would be great OS.
That's already here. Android has native terminal in the developer settings and it even has a Wayland graphical environment. I have run Weston with a desktop chromium inside, playing a youtube video with sound.
But no root.
The Android terminal has root access. It's a full Debian VM, with hardware-accelerated Wayland graphics through virgl. Of course, that only works on devices supporting pKVM.
A root account violates principle of least priviledge. With proper design a root account should not be needed.
True but accessing your own files, pinging, network management etc aren't included in the things an Android terminal user can do. Hence the need for root.
/mnt/shared has access to your personal files and pinging just works.
This is as the default 'droid' user, but I also have a root user (but that's only root within the terminal)
That sounds like more of a need to be able to share files and folders with the terminal app and for there to be a ping command callable from nonroot added.
"Root" in this case can be normal users without privileges who are granted root-like capabilities granularly, not necessarily a true root account.
Maybe, but the user ought to be able to do with their device the equivalent of what a root account can do, even if not especially conveniently. Like seeing what data apps are saving to their devices or spoofing data to prevent apps from gaining unauthorized information. Apps should not be protected from the user, and user should have recourse from apps doings things not in their interest.
If this allows one to still have (linux terminals?), then its (fine?) but Klaster_1 suggests that installing software would become hard without OS vendor blessing.
I mean, is this OS literally just android with a more desktop like UI?
Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Samsung+DeX&t=ffab&ia=images&iax=i...
What I would prefer is a linux device phone being more widespread than Android PC. Linux in PC is mostly pretty good.
We probably need some good linux phones. One of the biggest issues I find is that they are really price-y so even though I don't want much specs, I find it troubling to justify a 2x price increase in such sense.
> Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
Samsung Dex still exists and still sucks. It's probably the best desktop experience available on Android but it's nowhere near usable as a daily driver. It feels a like a lightweight window manager from the 2008 era.
It is good enough that a Samsung tablet has replaced my now dead netbook.
Yeah, it is acceptable.
Exciting .. I'm typing on that HP Dragonfly now :) Google - put me in the testing group pls - Paul H
Is this going to mean ChromeOS is going to eventually die or be merged with Android? Curious.
It appears ChromeOS is being killed and they're porting much of its feature set into Android. This may be marketed as "ChromeOS", with identical functionality, and consumers won't be none the wiser.
The Android system is such a pain to work with. I’m curious to see whether they actually fixed the fundamentals making it unappealing for general purpose computing or they just stuck Android onto Chromebooks (guessing the latter).
Is that tiling window management by default? Huh, finally the right choice to maximize small display area for laptop!
Been true on most chromeos devices for a while!
So I'm guessing ... no full adblockers allowed?
Android runs Firefox.
... for now. I mean all Google's decisions are going the same way, and let's face it: Firefox stands in the way of their destination.
No Firefox increases their chance of being broken up for monopolization.
What is it with everybody and the goddamn rounded corners?
It has windows, icons, taskbar and chrome. Seems like desktop to me!
I wonder what gogole's strategy with fuchsia is going to be.
What is currently is? As OS for home devices with a screen?
No thanks.
It looks really good.
I already have Samsung Dex. Is that the same as this?
Samsung made DeX at some point for the exact same purpose, but that's a Samsung special.
Google already has this in their Pixel phones (8+). Plug a Pixel into a standard laptop dock (may need to enter dev settings and tick the "force desktop mode" toggle) and you're welcomed by pretty much exactly this UI.
Yeah back in 2019
I don't want any kind of store on my PC.
What ever happened to fuscia? Wasn’t that supposed to be their long term OS for desktop?
Seemed potentially like a new kernel, rather than a new OS, and thus potentially a replacement for the Android kernel one day.
But that would mean all of the Android SDKs would need to be abstracted away from Linux, but it seems like they abandoned some of that effort and are mostly just emulating Android on Fuschia for now.
with win11, it's an opportunity to take the desktop market
My Huawei P20 Pro did this in 2018. It was fabulous, turned the OS into a mini-computer with a taskbar, desktop, icons, browser etc. It was still the best phone Ive ever owned (and I used to work at Google). It was no wonder Google killed with GSM. It was light years ahead even back then and they really hate competition.
ChromeOS is 14 years old, not really sure why they’re just now going this route.
Android laptops are nothing new, unless you don’t count the crappy low end ones that have no business running it.
I’m sure Google will make their flagship apps nicely tailored but regular phone centric apps has to be an awkward experience.
I like ChromeOS but really having two different operating systems is a liability.
Despite all the effort they've put into it, chromeOS is worse at running Android apps than android tablets except for support for having them in resizable windows.
All they need to do is improve the support for a laptop mode on android and make chrome on android in the laptop mode equivalent to chrome on ChromeOS and they can kill ChromeOS entirely.
It makes no sense to have to choose between two operating systems
You should be able to get a fully compatible android like experience in tablet mode and a chromebook like experience in laptop mode all in one os
And the ChromeOS like experience should be available on any android tablet if you use it with a keyboard
Windows keeps getting worse, but it's still not as bad as Android. It's like how an iPad with macOS would be great, but a MacBook with iOS would be terrible.
I've been using Fedora part-time and I'm quite happy with it. Although I access the Android ecosystem via Waydroid—which, I know, isn't a true 'Android desktop'—the reality is that few Android apps are actually designed for a desktop experience.
Android makes me feel like it wants to convince me that rooting is considered too dangerous even for advanced users—you have to be a developer to handle it, or you will kill yourself.
But it might be good news for the ARM platform. Given how fragmented ARM is, Windows on ARM has turned out to be an even bigger disaster, making a Linux-based approach a much more promising alternative.
Is this meant to replace ChromeOS or will it actually be open-source for real?
I wonder what does this mean for the attestation layer? If you can run banking apps on a desktop, this would be a massive game changer for many of us who only use normie OSes because of the need to use services that are mobile app only (or with functionally limited web apps). Means we would only need to keep a single phone rather than two
No thanks to SpyOS.
i prefer google to spy on my entire computer instead of microsoft.
Why on Earth would anyone wilingly use an OS where Google thinks they have the right to block or make it really hard to install non App Store apps? even if initially they allow you, they've shown their plan.
Lot of wasted space. The status bar and dock/switcher could easily be on one line.
Put it straight into Killed by Google.
The good part about this is they've invested in bringing extensions support to Chrome.. of course only those "desktop" builds, but the code is there and for now you can use this on normal Android - if you compile it for yourself or download the Chromium APK.
I wonder whether they'll keep pretending that extensions are not supported on Android, perhaps even intentionally breaking support on mobile.. or maybe they'll stop this madness and just support extensions officially..
It looks like Win 11 with notification bar at top. Good job Google. Trully a revolutionary design, just like Android 4. /s
so... gnome?
I don't even want Android on my phone. I cannot imagine a universe where I want it on my computer.
God this looks like a nightmare. Using Android on a desktop would be a fascist dystopia. Using it on phones is bad enough, computing while wearing a straight-jacket, but now they're going to have complete control of our computers and spy on everything we do on it? I can't imagine a worse outcome for the PC.