In 2014 I spent a week with my Samsung Galaxy S4 as my only computer. (My laptop was damaged and it took a while to repair. IT asked if I wanted a loaner and I said I'd get back to them if the phone proved inadequate.)
I was testing embedded hardware, so my main tasks involved a UART port into a dev board. One Bluetooth serial interface later, I was in business; there were some Arduino IDE ports or something similar that had a respectable serial terminal, and that's all I needed to see log messages.
Monitor plugged in over Samsung's weird MHL-HDMI thing; knockoff cable was only a few bucks. It had a power passthrough, so I used the otherwise-useless Cisco VoIP phone on my desk (I was a contractor and the phone wasn't active) as a USB power source to charge the S4.
Bluetooth keyboard, Alt-Tab works for switching apps, and having real keys makes composing email a breeze. Bluetooth mouse, pops up a cursor on the screen and works just like touch with better ergonomics. Bluetooth headphones, for taking conference calls and listening to music.
I wanted for nothing, and the whole mess fit into my coat pockets, I didn't bother carrying a backpack that week.
It's a decade later and this is still a fringe activity?
Depends, it works pretty well with tablets and bluethooth devices, to the point that it killed the netbook market.
Nowadays any 14 laptop that is as useful as those Asus used to be, including technical specifications, are no longer 300 euros, rather more like 1000 euros, as the 300 euros crowd is rather happy with tablet + keyboard cover combo.
I own a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 smartphone that I don't use anymore because the tactile functionnality gets unresponsive every few minutes and can stay so for a few seconds up to hours.
The screen is working because it reacts to power and volume up/down buttons.
I realized recently that the mounting a usb-c to female usb-a adapter I could use the wireless dongle of my Microsoft wireless all in one keyboard/trackpad and control the smartphone that way. Sadly its usb-c port doesn't support external monitors so I haven't found any practical use for it. I guess I should look for a miracast dongle if such thing exists but that would limit the usage to home wlan I guess and not be as portable as I think it could.
It's wild there are plenty of AR headset's arriving such as Visor, that can't just plug into your phone and spawn a full desktop. Instead they want you to plug into a Windows or Apple laptop, or battery kit.
Android fully understands the idea of running multiple apps, at different resolutions, simultaneously and yet, no product in this space due to I assume restrictive APIs.
It has its own apps and it's own browser. I tried opening a couple epub readers but trying to open a file didn't bring up any file open dialog from the browser.
I felt pretty bad for the headset makers. Quite clear they were entirely beholden to an Android where most apps have extremely limited capability sets, where they have to really reinvent the universe afresh for their headset.
I've been dreaming of a good "convergence" device that I can use as a phone but also dock and use as a PC for probably a decade at this point. I've kind of lost hope, it might happen some day but I doubt any time soon.
Not exactly the same but I use my Steamdeck for this while I'm traveling. It's honestly pretty nice. Although carrying around an old M1 mac with Asahi Linux on it isn't that much of a hassle either.
I do the same with my Steamdeck! It's really a remarkable device. I'm incredibly appreciative to Valve for making it open and Linux-based.
Desktop mode is pretty good, and it works with most hardware. It's plenty powerful enough to be a portable laptop, plus after the work is done you can pretty easily grab a few hours on a game :-D
I thought Microsoft would pull this off with Windows Phone. A real desktop OS in my pocket when I plug it into a dock! Alas. I'm impressed you made Dex work as a daily driver.
Microsoft lost the oem control game to google. neither can survive pumping their own hardware, and google used ms own playbook to capture phone OEMs. ms will never have any chance at all on mobile.
GNOME could be great for this usecase. I've never liked GNOME too much since version 2. But the latest iteration, after so many years of churn, looks fantastic both on desktop and mobile.
Small Linux tablets, such as Surface Go or Starlabs do touch and desktop pretty well on GNOME. Sadly, I don't think there is a good mobile equivalent to the S8 you used to use.
I'm using Phosh, GNOME based, on my Pinephone and its fairly good (this comment was written with a tweaked desktop Firefox install on said Pinephone). The lack of powerful, efficent, mobile(read: smartphone), linuix friendly hardware is becoming the bigger issue these days!
How did you manage with the web inspector? There's no built-in web inspector on any mainstream mobile browser that I'm aware of and the only way to do it would be to use firebug.js like the good old days.
Not the OP, but if they mentioned they did it from Termux you can install an X server and a full desktop browser like Firefox either directly or via a chroot/proot "container" via for example proot-distro [0].
There's also an app called userland which seems to spin up some kind of VM. I don't know if android supports KVMs or if it's a real userspace chroot type of deal.
I toyed with it briefly, the performance is about what I expected given the hardware I was using. Which is to say, not a terrible amount of overhead
I had to do a bunch of ARM32/ARM64 development the other day and it was frustrating to be in a situation where my only choices were an ARM VM in the cloud or to buy a mac. I have this fantastic ARM-based smartphone on my desk, why can't I plug it in to a keyboard and monitor and use it as a real computer? Maybe one day.
> I have this fantastic ARM-based smartphone on my desk, why can't I plug it in to a keyboard and monitor and use it as a real computer?
The monitor requires hardware support that's semi-rare, but the rest should work? It's been a long time since I saw a phone that didn't support USB host mode so you can in fact just plug in a keyboard and mouse if you have an adaptor/dock. Beyond that, you're just limited by software availability, but on Android you can use F-Droid to get Termux. Not sure about iOS; maybe iSH?
I keep a Raspberry Pi for when I need to do some ARM64 stuff, but yes I agree it's a bit frustrating. Though, I'd love to skip ARM altogether and go to RISC-V
The fact that newer iPads use the exact same silicon as MacBooks is just insult to injury. There's a grown-up computer hidden inside but you're not allowed to use it.
If they let you use it, they'd have to triple the price or everyone would connect a keyboard and mouse and use it like a desktop PC, decimating macbook sales.
I think the limitations are entirely for business strategy reasons, not because they believe there is no demand.
Reminds me of how Microsoft require paid Office subscriptions for screens larger than 10.1 inches, but the entry level iPad For students just so happens to start at 10.2 inches…
I've been using a Bluetooth mouse and a keyboard with my old 2018 iPad Pro for at least 5 years. It's basically our travel computer when we're on vacation.
In older versions of iPadOS (it might even have just been iOS back then) you had to enable the mouse under Accessibility to make it work, but in current OS versions it "just works"..
You can even cmd-tab between apps and a lot of the keyboard shortcuts you know and love work in most apps.
Not even that, the newest pro has the best single thread CPU out there because it's the only device on M4 (or at least it had until AMD's Zen 5 not sure how it compares now)
Talking off the cuff, it feels to me like Apple is trying/tried to hail back to the early days of the Mac where there is no hierarchical file system and "files" concept is minimized in favor of apps that correspond 1:1 with a file to edit or view.
I'd say past 40 years proves this model is not what people want, but they are so persistent about not doing a normal file-focused UI that it feels intentional. Like some directive from Steve before he passed.
I love the iPod as a physical object, but it always hurt not being able to just put files on it. (Not to even mention the "you have to sync and wipe your entire iPod library" situation.)
I ended up putting Rockbox on my iPod Classic, which makes it be what it actually is: an MP3 player! (Alas the UI is not as pleasant, and battery life is worse...)
Similarly I've been so confused about files on my iPhone, whereas on Android I never had any confusion (except on some newer versions where there's both a Documents folder and a Documents "smart view" which are indistinguishable except when you realize nothing makes any sense and you ended up in the screen that's trying to give you an Apple-like files experience for some reason, and then you navigate back to the actual file system and are actually able to find your files...)
I actually disagree, I think the success of the iPhone has proven Apple correct that people don't want to deal with "files." Personally I despise it, but as iPhones have become nearly ubiquitous in the US, I can't help but feel the sting of being in a minority group that actually wants a general purpose computer rather than an "appliance"
You can't really evoke revealed preference here; there's a lot of incentive for platform builders to lean away from general-purpose use and towards appliance-ification, and there's no real option on the market for consumers to flock to if they want a capable general-purpose pocket computer.
I hope you are correct, but I'm skeptical. May I ask what demographic? Among the youth, nearly 90% or more have iPhones, seemingly regardless of socioeconomics situations.
Don't read too much into it, it's not about the principle insomuch as its about the efficiency of killing off Chrome OS to merge it into Android, and a continual game of whac-a-mole to woo Samsung execs so they don't put too much investment into software. It'll work about as well as the years of efforts to get devs to do apps the Google way in time for the Pixel Tablet launch.
Your wording makes it sound like you think Google out of its way to break termux. What makes you believe that? Its execution model is at odds with the security model Android pushes for so of course it'll come with some challenges. It tries to provide an environment suitable for a legacy application model that doesn't really take security as seriously. The only real way to win here is by using a VM which is what ChromeOS did. That allows sufficient isolation such that it need not try to force something to work in an environment not built for it.
On the one hand, no, I don't think there's some whiteboard inside Google titled "master plan to make Termux stop working". On the other hand... so you know how on iOS, Apple has a policy of disallowing apps to have their own JIT? It probably does make the system more secure (JIT engines are historically a good place to find vulnerabilities), but it does so by prohibiting valid behavior and preventing entire classes of apps from existing. I'm on Android specifically because I don't think that's reasonable, so no, I'm not really cool with Google trying to rule out running Linux programs on a Linux distro (Android is a weird Linux distro, but it still is one). And a VM does help with security, but it also isn't a general solution; there are perfectly valid usecases that termux can do that a VM would either make needlessly difficult (little things like "open files" or "listen on a port") or impossible (get a root shell and invoke /system/bin/input for automation).
> Squeeze extra performance out of a device to achieve low latency or run computationally intensive applications, such as games or physics simulations.
> Reuse your own or other developers' C or C++ libraries.
Google seems to have fully bought into the philosophy that the user is a security threat. The devices are no longer about protecting the user from other threats, but also about protecting the device from the user. Termux is the type of application that enables the user to do stuff that the Google designers don't think is safe (like send SMS messages programmatically!) so maintaining the APIs it depends on is not a priority.
I doubt anyone at Google is trying to break Termux, but they don't care about power users and they think Android should function like their iPhone and treat users accordingly.
That's not the reason. The host android has full access to the child VMs; the VM can't hide anything from the hypervisor. It's about isolation. The child VM can't leak your photos or contact list if it doesn't have it in the first place, and sticking things into their own VM provides an additional layer of isolation beyond what exists currently.
...right... which is why I said it would be nice for Google to officially bless the thing that already works so that it is official.
(And can we just pretend that I replied the same thing to the other places in the thread you posted the exact same response? No point in duplicating threads)
My spouse and I recently got identical Lenovo tablets. I got mine for reading sheet music, but of course can't pass up the chance to see how close it gets to being a laptop replacement. It's the first device that was close enough to leave my laptop at home on a recent trip... and travel 2 pounds lighter.
Don't know if it's unique to Lenovo or part of Android in general, but these tablets do support the windowing feature. It's Android 13.
I did the same thing - replaced my laptop with a tablet for a trip. Lenovo P12. It I thought the windowing was great.
The whole experience would have been great, except for one thing which made it unusable for my purposes. Android has that clipboard editor popup that can't be disabled. When using Emacs within Termux, every time I hit ctrl-k, I got that damn popup which blocked a significant amount of the screen for ~10 seconds.
> Don't know if it's unique to Lenovo or part of Android in general
So-called Productivity Mode is a Lenovo thing and I agree it's actually decent. I know that Android has some windowing support built-in but it's basically unusable (hence why this announcement is good news).
It's Android, and it was 200 bucks from Lenovo, including a pen.
Part of my reason for being cheap is that I've seen more than one tablet get destroyed, while playing music. One got blown over by the wind at an outdoor gig, the other somehow got knocked around in my instrument case and the screen cracked in half.
Ours are 11 inch. To make matters worse, the aspect ratio is 5:3, meaning that typical sheet music (based on 8.5x11 paper) uses only part of the screen.
I'm a jazz bassist, so I'm mostly reading chord symbols when not just playing from memory. Having the sheets on stage lets me consult rehearsal markings and jog my memory as needed. Sometimes it stays in my bag, or at the edge of the stage, until I need it.
The one band I play in that has more complicated charts is entirely paper based, and will be for the foreseeable future. My kids both play classical, and they have 13" iPads -- there's pretty much no avoiding it nowadays. But after shelling out for them, I decided that I didn't need that much technology.
Lenovo tablets have split screen, floating windows over fullscreen applications, and the option to put all applications into windows kind of like in the post.
Though admittedly split screen is the most useful of those
The fact that Dex has not made a bigger splash is entirely on Samsung's marketing department. I agree it's not -fully- there as a replacement for computers, but I remember owning an s20 for over a year before even knowing it was a thing. When I tried it I thought "finally."
We carry these things with us everywhere and they are more than capable (hardware wise) for what 99% of time spent on desktops/laptops can do, especially in the corporate world. The limitation is the form factor. I'm really just floored that there hasn't been a bigger push to turn our smartphones into our computers.
Now if DeX would actually be performant... unfortunately Samsung just loves putting dogshit SoCs and flash into anything that is not the Galaxy Phone lineup, not to mention their own pre-installed bloatware and general Android bloatification causing further performance issues.
Well, that all depends on what you were expecting. It works about as well as I figured it would (including the pre-installed bloatware), so in my eyes, it’s performant.
> unfortunately Samsung just loves putting dogshit SoCs and flash into anything that is not the Galaxy Phone lineup
But DeX is only available on the highest performing devices in the Galaxy lineup :)
I don't have any performance complaints on my S23 with Snapdragon chip. But they are too frugal with memory. Tabs and apps often have to reload in DeX.
I tried out Apple's implementation of desktop windowing on tablets called Stage Manager with a borrowed iPad. It's still not a real replacement for actual laptops. Sure you get multiple windows, but switching between them it still inconvenient: you don't have Command-Tab or Command-` like on a Mac. All window manipulations have to be done with fingers touching the screen. I end up believing a real desktop windowing system is still superior.
Other weaknesses of Stage Manager aside, iPad has command-tab and other keyboard shortcuts. You do actually need a keyboard attached though -- otherwise, well duh, of course all manipulation has to be done with fingers.
Stage Manager is disappointingly over-engineered. Managing the workspaces is much more mentally taxing than having windows just fade into the background, every new app somehow always seems to open up at the wrong size and then annoyingly takes everything else off-screen with it. I am a heavy iPad user but Stage Manager is rarely useful for me.
I'm a full desktop OS kind of person, but even just enabling windowing on a tablet OS makes it feel like so much more of a full OS. The idea of having your browser and a notes app in a configuration that isn't a forced hard split is a massive win.
There is quite simply an incredible amount of productivity that can be extracted from a speedy, full sized laptop or desktop that smaller screen devices are not likely to reach no matter what fancy features they come up with.
What I can do in seconds on a fast, responsive, non-bogged down modern laptop can take orders of magnitude longer to accomplish on a tablet. Tablets surely have their uses, but high paced productivity is not one of them.
I would assume that I'd agree, but I've never attempted to use something like a Surface with a keyboard. For me, a desktop OS and a full size laptop keyboard are just two non-negotiables if I'm working on pretty much anything.
They missed the opportunity to copy Samsung DeXes best party trick, getting a desktop interface on a phone by connecting an external monitor. Maybe next year.
That feature is available, albeit clunky. The latest Pixel phones have a developer option "Force Desktop Mode" which gives you Desktop-esque Windowing on an external monitor.
I tend to have another level of nested windows inside applications, also mostly full- or half-screen. It's at that level that sometimes other shapes become interesting, for example for a time slider (long and horizontal), or a list of files (narrow and vertical).
If only the world had evolved into one where operating systems could interact with applications in a way that would allow persistence of window layouts, scripting of user interface elements, and allowing a user to modify application layouts to their own preferences.
I only maximise windows frequently when I work on a single small monitor (and sometimes I'll use window transparency to be able to see multiple windows simultaneously.) With 2 or 3 large monitors, there's rarely any need to have windows maximised.
I recently acquired an Android tablet (Lenovo M10 — a bit too cheap, but gets the job done).
I also got a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
The only thing that works properly is web apps. All the native apps have terrible keyboard and mouse support. It made me wonder if I'm the only person using it this way.
On that note the only GUI text editor (yes I'm learning Vim in Termux, no it's not a replacement for Sublime!) that's tolerable is VSCode running in the browser.
Surprisingly comfy in fullscreen, but the fact that's it's even necessary is just a testament to what a joke the whole ecosystem is.
I'm using Helix (https://helix-editor.com/) on Termux on my 12.2" Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+. It's absolutely flying and less hassle to get LSP's to your favorite language setup. It could also be easier to learn than Vim if you're just getting into Vim. It's definitely not difficult for a Vim user* either. Helix is available on Termux repo's:
pkg install helix helix-grammars
*) Last year WebStorm started getting painfully slow with some TypeScript codebases I worked with. It got the point I thought to give NeoVim a try. I knew my 10y old Vim config just wouldn't cut it to replace WebStorm for me, so I spent some 3 months on and off fiddling to get LSP support properly working. I then ran across Helix around last December, and ended up as a happy Helix user instead.
Edit: Fixed formatting (my fourth comment on HN...)
To be clear the tablet is crap (just one comical example: the Battery Saver mode enables dark mode, but the screen is an LCD! Wat!) but I'm pretty sure my keyboard/mouse issues aren't specific to the model, but due to the fact that most Android devs don't even consider that use case.
Probably over 90% of what I use my personal laptop for is browsing the web, watching videos, listening to music, and writing notes. In a general purpose OS, I value security above all else. Privacy is a close second, and of course stability, ease of use, resource lightness, and application support are also important factors.
I haven't found a desktop operating system that ticks most of the boxes, especially security and privacy. The only OS that ticks all the boxes is GrapheneOS, but it's not really a desktop OS. That's why I'm so excited about these updates, and why I wish there was either a good keyboard/trackpad case for the Google Pixel Tablet running GrapheneOS, or someone would make a laptop that had the necessary requirements to support GrapheneOS.
I code on my work laptop, and if I really wanted to, I could probably SSH or VNC into a Linux box to code on GrapheneOS. There is also pKVM, which will probably make it easy to run Linux VMs on GrapheneOS at some point in the future.
> I haven't found a desktop operating system that ticks most of the boxes, especially security and privacy...That's why I'm so excited about these updates
Android and privacy are not two things that go together.
What's it like to quip something useless and meainglessless like that and feel smug? Is it nice? It seems nice!
Boy I'll tell you what, when I advocate for matters of privacy, I DO FUCKING PROPER ADVOCACY. I actually know what I'm talking about instead of vapid high-level bullshit that we think will pop-off with our base that already agreess with us.
As someone who ACTAULLY cares about privacy, fuck you, and fuck everyone voting in that alignment.
Change my view: open source operating systems are bad in practice since good actors rarely audit them but bad actors not only have the usual exploits but also have the keys to the castle.
Edit: guess we’re not having a fruitful discussion about this then. Shame.
This is the classic "security through obscurity" argument. Yes it makes it harder to find vulns and develop exploits when the source isn't available, but once there are enough users to make it worth it, people are gonna fuzz the shit out of it regardless whether it's open or not.
At least with open source, you have white hats (and gray hats to some extent) using the available source to get hints. These end up getting reported a lot more than for closed OSes. There may seem like more CVEs for Linux than Macos for example, but that isn't proportional to the number of vulns, researchers, or exploits out there.
That said though, even if open were less secure (which I don't think it is), it is still a better and more ethical model for software and would be worth the security risk. Luckily for the world, open is more secure (or at least equally secure).
> Isn't it more the case that all actors audit all software? Open source just has potentially more "auditors" than closed source?
Perhaps bad actors don’t audit more than good actors, but this doesn’t address whether there are more good or bad actors doing the auditing. I think this is a more valuable comparison if we’re talking about risk mitigation and the safety of open-source software. Do you know that there are more good-faith auditors than bad?
Very much related — we should probably acknowledge the disparity between the two groups in terms of motivation, sustainability of said motivation, financial resources, and time.
The idea of burnout among open-source maintainers is long-known and endlessly discussed. They often/mostly volunteer their time — to some thanks, but also to a deluge of “doesn’t work” tickets with no repro, as someone pointed out on this recent post:
Bad-faith actors tend to be highly motivated, with ideological or financial goals. They have more and perhaps better resources, more so if state-funded, and more time to commit.
This doesn’t mean there’s a constant and unmanageable risk to open-source software, and I certainly don’t agree that open-source OSes are a bad idea. But it’s not as simple as having actors auditing on each side or the difference in numbers between closed and open-source.
Usual exploits = using the normal tools to look for buffer overflows and such by attacking the running system and compiled binaries.
Keys to the castle = the ability to also look in the source code for vulnerabilities, run static analysis, fuzzing but also architectural flaws. Basically use extra methods that you can’t do on the running system or binaries. You would expect some tools to be run already by the authors but some tools will find things that others don’t.
Bad actors have an incentive to audit the code (find vulnerabilities) since they were in the process of attacking the system anyway, so why not look at the source? You also have state level attackers who are getting paid to find these sort of things, and others looking to sell 0-days.
Who are good actors? Who is willing to spend their time finding and fixing bugs? There are definitely people doing it out of the kindness of their heart, and others might be researchers and so on, maybe some companies that use the software - but you are relying on these outnumbering the bad actors.
I think there will always be bad actors, and assuming that there is an army of good actors watching your back might not always be correct. But happy to hear other angles, which is why I opened (and accidentally closed) the conversation.
Good actors do it mostly for money and fame, bad actors do it mostly for money. Both actors do it for open source and closed source software.
Isn't it a good thing that anyone can effectively use tools to check for potential vulnerabilities?
This is just speculation, but I think open source projects may mature faster in terms of security because the low-hanging fruit is maybe found faster than in closed source projects?
Another interesting case I think about a lot is the classic AOSP vs. iOS. Apple tried to sue Corellium for making it easier to research iOS. Then Apple started the Apple Security Research Device program to make it easier for researchers to do iOS research. These two things seem to me to be a kind of involuntary open-sourcing of iOS. Why did Apple see Corellium as a threat and why did they provide researchers with these special devices?
Edit: guess we’re not having a fruitful discussion about this then. Shame.
When you started with the low-grade trope "Change my view" you already indicated you weren't interested in a discussion, just arguing for the sake of arguing on the internet.
I actually wasn’t, I was looking for other opinions. I think my view holds merit, but clearly smarter people than me think differently and I wanted to hear their angle.
Thanks for explaining though, I was genuinely confused at the downvotes. Maybe that meme doesn’t mean what I thought it did.
> Maybe that meme doesn’t mean what I thought it did.
It doesn't. The general implication of that meme is not that someone actually wants to seriously consider alternative views; the implication is "I want to assert my position, which I think is unassailable, using the veneer of an argument".
I think you've been gotten by the Reddit-ification of everything. Essentially, many people assume sinister motives on everyone else's part. If you're saying/asking something like you did, it must be because you have an agenda.
Fortunately with a bit of time it will even out and probably go positive. It's the early voters on comments that are the most negative and quick to judgment.
I've used Android devices for over a decade now, including two tablets which were largely daily drivers.
Android makes a lousy desktop, and the issues go far deeper than windowing.
The single application which Does Not Precisely Suck on Android is Termux. It, the wealth of directly-packaged software, and the wider universe available through other packaging tools (e.g., pip, npn, rpm, ppm, etc.), scripting and programming tools, etc., are what turns Android from a toy to a Real Operating System.
But even Termux is horribly handicapped by Android:
- Filesystem permissions are generally not available, nor is most of the filesystem.
- Keyboard support within and between apps is horrible and inconsistent. Three specific examples: 1) Firefox/Android (a/k/a Fennic Fox) lacks the keyboard shortcuts of desktop Firefox, a longstanding bug Mozilla seem to have no interest in addressing. 2) In Readability, when editing tags, the backspace/delete key does not work, rather one must select and replace text to correct misspellings. 3) In Neoreader (the Onyx BOOX ebook reader) typing text into the search dialogue is wonky in ways I don't specifically recall though it simply shouldn't break that way.
- Android memory management (courtesy the JVM AFAIU) will reap apps without warning. Some manage this reasonably well, many do not.
- There's absolutely abysmal inter-app exchange through copy/paste.
Free-form windowing is good and fine so far as it goes, but Android needs one hell of a lot more done to it before it's a reasonable desktop / laptop replacement.
I still see tablets as most useful for reading text (and perhaps watching videos), and best suited at little else. I'd still recommend a full-featured laptop or notebook for Real Work.
> If you don’t have a Pixel Tablet handy, access the Pixel Tablet emulator in Android Studio Preview, and select the Android 15.0 (Google APIs Tablet) target. Once your device is set up, select Enable freeform windows option in Developer options to explore the capabilities of desktop windowing and how your app behaves within this new environment.
I noticed this last year on Android 13, and I found it a bit unusable on an 8.4'' tablet and useless on a phone. But i think it has less features in Android 13/14, as the management (maximize/restore) looks a bit different on 15.
It still looks like it doesn't have a minimize icon (also not when maximized), which for me is essential in a desktop environment.
Pixel Tablet is the biggest let down I have ever had from a product (SW + HW combination) mine has so many bugs, so many unnecessary changes from previous versions. I don't understand how a company can release such a bad product after so many iterations.
What bugs? I have mine for like 3 month and its probably the best expierence I had on any android device over the last dekade. Everything works so well and smooth.
The only thing i critize is that the dock is not USB-C powered (so I could relocate it in the kitchen to watch stuff while cooking).
Even today, The 'Hey Google' stopped working. Restart didn't help. The microphone works (I did a video call) but 'Hey Google' stopped working.
I used to have the Lenovo Smart Screen 10, which was great. But it didn't support Netflix or Disney+ so I thought that the Pixel Tablet would be an upgrade. There so many things that don't work any more. For example after starting a timer, the Lenovo know the command "re-start" while The pixel for the same command starts a new timer. I have many more examples, but it just make me sad to think of it.
I do know similar window managers for Android existed in the past and Samsung still got their Dex but making it official emphasizing the responsiveness reminded me a lot of stage manager which Apple decided to make available only for the expensive iPads.
the blackberry-licensed android phones (priv, key, key2... i think since 2016) had a os level hack that made EVERY app windowed.
you could split the window and use two apps. for everything! only annoyance is that some apps reload when you did that, which was annoying the first time only.
i still think HN crowd slept on those phones. a lot.
What a disappointment. They had freeform mode as a dev option for years, but avoided pushing it as a supported feature. I assumed this was because it fucking sucked. I've tried it. Freeform, desktop-like windows on an 11 inch tablet are simply terrible for multitasking. But no, here they are, releasing the feature with no meaningful changes. The state of tablet multitasking is a travesty, but neither Google nor Apple seem interested in fixing it in any way other than a shitty reproduction of clunky desktop windowing. How about letting us tile more than two windows together? How about letting us stack apps into tabbed panes? How about a sliding environment like PaperWM? Just off the top of my head, any one of those is more likely to increase tablet productivity than "here's a bunch of rectangles; you wrangle them!"
Even in that case it's pretty weak. It lacks workspaces/spaces that desktop OSes have these days, and isn't extensible the way Win/Mac/Linux desktops are.
I guess I'm not really understanding what you're complaining about. Why not use a desktop OS then in the first place? MS Surface Go 11 tablets have been selling for like ten years now, and so have "convertibles"/2-in-1's.
Can confirm that it does, at least on the pixel 9 pro fold, after enabling it in developer options.
However, I don't see the top window handle they show in the animation. I have to long press the app icon in the running apps view, then I get a free form option. At that point, I get the floating windows with controls. You can tap and drag the sides and corners of apps to resize windows, seems intuitive enough.
The whole "relaunch the app when the window size changes" design from Android 1.0 was such an enormous mistake. They're really going to pay for it now.
Entirely tangential, but I've been feeling serious nostalgia recently for a couple of small computers I've owned, specifically the tiny 2012 MBA, and the first-edition Asus eee. In both cases, they felt very solid, while also being very light. Does anyone have recommendations for more recent ones that are Linux based, and that I could get a small amount of work done on in an emergency? I worry the market has been completely taken over by Chromebooks that seem to be made out of cardboard
In 2018 I spent 1 year with my Samsung Galaxy S8 as my only computer. Developed a big national website and a new programming language from Termux.
Going to work with only my computer in my pocket was awesome. No sync between devices anymore.
Forced me to use monitors at work and home which is good for the neck. Had a 15 inch monitor when I was on the move, then a lapdock.
Sadly, I was quite alone and Samsung Dex being not open source nor well funded, some bugs where quite irritating in the long term.
I dream of a linux smartphone powerhouse. Linux smartphones have mediocre processors.
Give me a linux smartphone with an apple silicon processor !
In 2014 I spent a week with my Samsung Galaxy S4 as my only computer. (My laptop was damaged and it took a while to repair. IT asked if I wanted a loaner and I said I'd get back to them if the phone proved inadequate.)
I was testing embedded hardware, so my main tasks involved a UART port into a dev board. One Bluetooth serial interface later, I was in business; there were some Arduino IDE ports or something similar that had a respectable serial terminal, and that's all I needed to see log messages.
Monitor plugged in over Samsung's weird MHL-HDMI thing; knockoff cable was only a few bucks. It had a power passthrough, so I used the otherwise-useless Cisco VoIP phone on my desk (I was a contractor and the phone wasn't active) as a USB power source to charge the S4.
Bluetooth keyboard, Alt-Tab works for switching apps, and having real keys makes composing email a breeze. Bluetooth mouse, pops up a cursor on the screen and works just like touch with better ergonomics. Bluetooth headphones, for taking conference calls and listening to music.
I wanted for nothing, and the whole mess fit into my coat pockets, I didn't bother carrying a backpack that week.
It's a decade later and this is still a fringe activity?
> It's a decade later and this is still a fringe activity?
Manufacturers don't have much incentives for convergence. They sell less devices and less applications.
It encourages local-first, instead of cloud-first. It requires more thought on UI.
Samsung has great hardware, they could do it if they wanted. But their software seems to have no direction.
Not only that, it centralizes even more of your daily life into one device, slowly inching towards bus factor 1.
15 years from now when passports and driving licenses have gone digital, imagine dropping your phone and it smashes.
Your identification, debit/credit card, drivers license, car key, transit card.. all temporarily inaccessible.
Now imagine that you also just lost access to your only device you can do work on.
Hell no.
Depends, it works pretty well with tablets and bluethooth devices, to the point that it killed the netbook market.
Nowadays any 14 laptop that is as useful as those Asus used to be, including technical specifications, are no longer 300 euros, rather more like 1000 euros, as the 300 euros crowd is rather happy with tablet + keyboard cover combo.
I own a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 smartphone that I don't use anymore because the tactile functionnality gets unresponsive every few minutes and can stay so for a few seconds up to hours.
The screen is working because it reacts to power and volume up/down buttons.
I realized recently that the mounting a usb-c to female usb-a adapter I could use the wireless dongle of my Microsoft wireless all in one keyboard/trackpad and control the smartphone that way. Sadly its usb-c port doesn't support external monitors so I haven't found any practical use for it. I guess I should look for a miracast dongle if such thing exists but that would limit the usage to home wlan I guess and not be as portable as I think it could.
It's wild there are plenty of AR headset's arriving such as Visor, that can't just plug into your phone and spawn a full desktop. Instead they want you to plug into a Windows or Apple laptop, or battery kit.
Android fully understands the idea of running multiple apps, at different resolutions, simultaneously and yet, no product in this space due to I assume restrictive APIs.
You can just run Android apps on the Quest directly.
The nReal glasses will act as a monitor for your phone.
It's not as easy as you think though. Streaming video at acceptable VR resolution and framerate isn't trivial.
I guess you could get a headset to act like a car and get Carplay running, but full RDP of an iPhone...does anything do that?
> full RDP of an iPhone
Like iPhone mirroring?
I have left the Apple eco system for the most part, but I remember 10 years ago demoing on my Mac what was happening on my iPhone.
Well you need input so no, not just mirroring.
Do they not have direct video output over cables?
Victure has its own 3d desktop.
It has its own apps and it's own browser. I tried opening a couple epub readers but trying to open a file didn't bring up any file open dialog from the browser.
I felt pretty bad for the headset makers. Quite clear they were entirely beholden to an Android where most apps have extremely limited capability sets, where they have to really reinvent the universe afresh for their headset.
I've been dreaming of a good "convergence" device that I can use as a phone but also dock and use as a PC for probably a decade at this point. I've kind of lost hope, it might happen some day but I doubt any time soon.
Not exactly the same but I use my Steamdeck for this while I'm traveling. It's honestly pretty nice. Although carrying around an old M1 mac with Asahi Linux on it isn't that much of a hassle either.
I do the same with my Steamdeck! It's really a remarkable device. I'm incredibly appreciative to Valve for making it open and Linux-based.
Desktop mode is pretty good, and it works with most hardware. It's plenty powerful enough to be a portable laptop, plus after the work is done you can pretty easily grab a few hours on a game :-D
Librem 5 phone runs a desktop OS without any artificial restrictions. It's CPU is relatively slow though as the OP mentioned.
I thought Microsoft would pull this off with Windows Phone. A real desktop OS in my pocket when I plug it into a dock! Alas. I'm impressed you made Dex work as a daily driver.
Microsoft lost the oem control game to google. neither can survive pumping their own hardware, and google used ms own playbook to capture phone OEMs. ms will never have any chance at all on mobile.
GNOME could be great for this usecase. I've never liked GNOME too much since version 2. But the latest iteration, after so many years of churn, looks fantastic both on desktop and mobile.
Small Linux tablets, such as Surface Go or Starlabs do touch and desktop pretty well on GNOME. Sadly, I don't think there is a good mobile equivalent to the S8 you used to use.
I'm using Phosh, GNOME based, on my Pinephone and its fairly good (this comment was written with a tweaked desktop Firefox install on said Pinephone). The lack of powerful, efficent, mobile(read: smartphone), linuix friendly hardware is becoming the bigger issue these days!
How did you manage with the web inspector? There's no built-in web inspector on any mainstream mobile browser that I'm aware of and the only way to do it would be to use firebug.js like the good old days.
Not the OP, but if they mentioned they did it from Termux you can install an X server and a full desktop browser like Firefox either directly or via a chroot/proot "container" via for example proot-distro [0].
[0] https://github.com/termux/proot-distro
There's also an app called userland which seems to spin up some kind of VM. I don't know if android supports KVMs or if it's a real userspace chroot type of deal.
I toyed with it briefly, the performance is about what I expected given the hardware I was using. Which is to say, not a terrible amount of overhead
You can yeah but it's super slow even with my high end phone
Kiwi browser has one!
Thanks a lot for that mention, I never heard of it and its inspector seems to work fine.
I just found it, myself. Great so far.
I think there are hacks to load up devtools in a new tab and connect it to another tab of the same browser.
devtools is just a set of html and javascript after all, and talks to the page its debugging via a websocket with special powers.
When I had Dex I could run Ubuntu on it. I just used Firefox.
Yeah but it was only ever available for the S9 and only for a year or so before they killed it again :(
Yeah, I had Note9 at the time. It was glorious.
I had to do a bunch of ARM32/ARM64 development the other day and it was frustrating to be in a situation where my only choices were an ARM VM in the cloud or to buy a mac. I have this fantastic ARM-based smartphone on my desk, why can't I plug it in to a keyboard and monitor and use it as a real computer? Maybe one day.
> I have this fantastic ARM-based smartphone on my desk, why can't I plug it in to a keyboard and monitor and use it as a real computer?
The monitor requires hardware support that's semi-rare, but the rest should work? It's been a long time since I saw a phone that didn't support USB host mode so you can in fact just plug in a keyboard and mouse if you have an adaptor/dock. Beyond that, you're just limited by software availability, but on Android you can use F-Droid to get Termux. Not sure about iOS; maybe iSH?
I keep a Raspberry Pi for when I need to do some ARM64 stuff, but yes I agree it's a bit frustrating. Though, I'd love to skip ARM altogether and go to RISC-V
Yeah the shift-space issue was really really annoying. It was eventually fixed but due to the short support duration the S8 never got that update.
The S8 was also a bit too memory constrained for DeX. Even my S23 is now. I love DeX but Samsung shouldn't be so frugal with memory.
Have you tried using Termux? You can install Linux distros using it.
Would like to hear more about this if you wanted to write a rambling blog post or gasp Twitter thread
Google in 2057:
"We're excited to announce that Android Tablets now have a terminal, with full support of terminal applications like 'ed' and 'grep'!"
At least they're trying to view the tablet as a multipurpose PC, as opposed to Apple who believe such things are abhorrent.
The fact that newer iPads use the exact same silicon as MacBooks is just insult to injury. There's a grown-up computer hidden inside but you're not allowed to use it.
If they let you use it, they'd have to triple the price or everyone would connect a keyboard and mouse and use it like a desktop PC, decimating macbook sales.
I think the limitations are entirely for business strategy reasons, not because they believe there is no demand.
Reminds me of how Microsoft require paid Office subscriptions for screens larger than 10.1 inches, but the entry level iPad For students just so happens to start at 10.2 inches…
I've been using a Bluetooth mouse and a keyboard with my old 2018 iPad Pro for at least 5 years. It's basically our travel computer when we're on vacation.
In older versions of iPadOS (it might even have just been iOS back then) you had to enable the mouse under Accessibility to make it work, but in current OS versions it "just works"..
You can even cmd-tab between apps and a lot of the keyboard shortcuts you know and love work in most apps.
Not even that, the newest pro has the best single thread CPU out there because it's the only device on M4 (or at least it had until AMD's Zen 5 not sure how it compares now)
A smartphone / tablet is just a computer that's deeply ashamed of its true nature, and going to supreme lengths to hide it.
Talking off the cuff, it feels to me like Apple is trying/tried to hail back to the early days of the Mac where there is no hierarchical file system and "files" concept is minimized in favor of apps that correspond 1:1 with a file to edit or view.
I'd say past 40 years proves this model is not what people want, but they are so persistent about not doing a normal file-focused UI that it feels intentional. Like some directive from Steve before he passed.
I love the iPod as a physical object, but it always hurt not being able to just put files on it. (Not to even mention the "you have to sync and wipe your entire iPod library" situation.)
I ended up putting Rockbox on my iPod Classic, which makes it be what it actually is: an MP3 player! (Alas the UI is not as pleasant, and battery life is worse...)
Similarly I've been so confused about files on my iPhone, whereas on Android I never had any confusion (except on some newer versions where there's both a Documents folder and a Documents "smart view" which are indistinguishable except when you realize nothing makes any sense and you ended up in the screen that's trying to give you an Apple-like files experience for some reason, and then you navigate back to the actual file system and are actually able to find your files...)
I actually disagree, I think the success of the iPhone has proven Apple correct that people don't want to deal with "files." Personally I despise it, but as iPhones have become nearly ubiquitous in the US, I can't help but feel the sting of being in a minority group that actually wants a general purpose computer rather than an "appliance"
You can't really evoke revealed preference here; there's a lot of incentive for platform builders to lean away from general-purpose use and towards appliance-ification, and there's no real option on the market for consumers to flock to if they want a capable general-purpose pocket computer.
I'm curious how Android isn't that? What's missing that would classify most Android phones as general-purpose computers?
Sure, there's android. Android has a file browser.
A dumbed down file browser.
Just like iOS!
Yeah that's fair. Man, I hope that changes though. I would buy the hell out of a general purpose pocket computer.
iPhones are definitely not nearly ubiquitous.
I hope you are correct, but I'm skeptical. May I ask what demographic? Among the youth, nearly 90% or more have iPhones, seemingly regardless of socioeconomics situations.
Definitely not "regardless of socioeconomics situations". I don't know which bubble you are living in.
I think phones are a something different. Agreed you mostly consume on them and less need for "files". It's a phone appliance.
But WTH is an iPad for with the larger screen and all that power? Watching videos or maybe some games I guess?
I wonder how much of the total BOM on say an ipad pro the cpu really is
Imagine the iPad with an actual OS. Unfathomable.
We only have to wait for Apple to invent (and appropriately price) the technology for a Bootcamp 2. Until then, it simply cannot be done.
Nobody is asking for that or compatibility with texting Android phones. Just buy your mom an iPhone.
Don't read too much into it, it's not about the principle insomuch as its about the efficiency of killing off Chrome OS to merge it into Android, and a continual game of whac-a-mole to woo Samsung execs so they don't put too much investment into software. It'll work about as well as the years of efforts to get devs to do apps the Google way in time for the Pixel Tablet launch.
I mean, termux is a thing. Although, having it officially supported instead of Google constantly trying to break it would be great.
Your wording makes it sound like you think Google out of its way to break termux. What makes you believe that? Its execution model is at odds with the security model Android pushes for so of course it'll come with some challenges. It tries to provide an environment suitable for a legacy application model that doesn't really take security as seriously. The only real way to win here is by using a VM which is what ChromeOS did. That allows sufficient isolation such that it need not try to force something to work in an environment not built for it.
On the one hand, no, I don't think there's some whiteboard inside Google titled "master plan to make Termux stop working". On the other hand... so you know how on iOS, Apple has a policy of disallowing apps to have their own JIT? It probably does make the system more secure (JIT engines are historically a good place to find vulnerabilities), but it does so by prohibiting valid behavior and preventing entire classes of apps from existing. I'm on Android specifically because I don't think that's reasonable, so no, I'm not really cool with Google trying to rule out running Linux programs on a Linux distro (Android is a weird Linux distro, but it still is one). And a VM does help with security, but it also isn't a general solution; there are perfectly valid usecases that termux can do that a VM would either make needlessly difficult (little things like "open files" or "listen on a port") or impossible (get a root shell and invoke /system/bin/input for automation).
It says rigth there on the NDK page,
> Squeeze extra performance out of a device to achieve low latency or run computationally intensive applications, such as games or physics simulations.
> Reuse your own or other developers' C or C++ libraries.
Followed by https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
It is not on that list, it isn't supported.
Google seems to have fully bought into the philosophy that the user is a security threat. The devices are no longer about protecting the user from other threats, but also about protecting the device from the user. Termux is the type of application that enables the user to do stuff that the Google designers don't think is safe (like send SMS messages programmatically!) so maintaining the APIs it depends on is not a priority.
I doubt anyone at Google is trying to break Termux, but they don't care about power users and they think Android should function like their iPhone and treat users accordingly.
This is the only thing that is officially supported on the NDK, https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
If it isn't on that list, it works by luck and can be broken on any device or Android update.
So you agree? Overly limited list to keep the user out of "trouble"?
If that's not what you mean, I'm not sure how your link works as a reply to a comment on Google's motivation.
> Your wording makes it sound like you think Google out of its way to break termux. What makes you believe that?
They sure as hell don’t go out of their way to help keep it running.
> It tries to provide an environment suitable for a legacy application model that doesn't really take security as seriously.
Erm... what?
> The only real way to win here is by using a VM which is what ChromeOS did.
What advantage would the VM provide, other than the host OS having even less insight into what the application is doing?
(Which is, by the way, exactly the only reason Android is introducing VMs: hiding stuff from the host Android)
That's not the reason. The host android has full access to the child VMs; the VM can't hide anything from the hypervisor. It's about isolation. The child VM can't leak your photos or contact list if it doesn't have it in the first place, and sticking things into their own VM provides an additional layer of isolation beyond what exists currently.
I don't think that's true; my recollection, which appears to match https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architec... , is that Android uses hardware support to run VMs that even the host kernel can't actually see into.
fascinating link, thank you!
The host android won't have access to the guest VMs but the hypervisor still does.
People haven't yet got the memo that Linux syscalls aren't official APIs on NDK, and the Google way is to use Java/Kotlin userspace.
So naturally Google breaks "private" APIs whenever they feel like.
...right... which is why I said it would be nice for Google to officially bless the thing that already works so that it is official.
(And can we just pretend that I replied the same thing to the other places in the thread you posted the exact same response? No point in duplicating threads)
Even so, it would be a userspace written in Java/Kotlin.
Doubt it will ever happen. Not when Android is moving more and more towards Apple model.
"And select models of Android tablet now ship with a built in hardware keyboard that is an integral part of the tablet body."
That is called a 2in1 laptop?
My spouse and I recently got identical Lenovo tablets. I got mine for reading sheet music, but of course can't pass up the chance to see how close it gets to being a laptop replacement. It's the first device that was close enough to leave my laptop at home on a recent trip... and travel 2 pounds lighter.
Don't know if it's unique to Lenovo or part of Android in general, but these tablets do support the windowing feature. It's Android 13.
I did the same thing - replaced my laptop with a tablet for a trip. Lenovo P12. It I thought the windowing was great.
The whole experience would have been great, except for one thing which made it unusable for my purposes. Android has that clipboard editor popup that can't be disabled. When using Emacs within Termux, every time I hit ctrl-k, I got that damn popup which blocked a significant amount of the screen for ~10 seconds.
Can the Lenovo tablet run a customizable Android variant?
> Don't know if it's unique to Lenovo or part of Android in general
So-called Productivity Mode is a Lenovo thing and I agree it's actually decent. I know that Android has some windowing support built-in but it's basically unusable (hence why this announcement is good news).
Is it one of the Lenovo Chromebook tablets? I encountered one the other day. It was pretty damn nice actually, I may end up buying one for myself.
It's Android, and it was 200 bucks from Lenovo, including a pen.
Part of my reason for being cheap is that I've seen more than one tablet get destroyed, while playing music. One got blown over by the wind at an outdoor gig, the other somehow got knocked around in my instrument case and the screen cracked in half.
How big are the tablets? For me only the 13” iPad works because it’s my only option for full size. But my eyesight is defective.
Ours are 11 inch. To make matters worse, the aspect ratio is 5:3, meaning that typical sheet music (based on 8.5x11 paper) uses only part of the screen.
I'm a jazz bassist, so I'm mostly reading chord symbols when not just playing from memory. Having the sheets on stage lets me consult rehearsal markings and jog my memory as needed. Sometimes it stays in my bag, or at the edge of the stage, until I need it.
The one band I play in that has more complicated charts is entirely paper based, and will be for the foreseeable future. My kids both play classical, and they have 13" iPads -- there's pretty much no avoiding it nowadays. But after shelling out for them, I decided that I didn't need that much technology.
Thanks for the reply.
I don’t understand the downvotes. I am always baffled when statements are downvoted.
Probably for being a jazz bassist. I'll just threaten to play a solo if they downvote me again. ;-)
* statements of fact
You've always been able to do split screen (i.e. 50/50, 25/75 etc but not floating windows) even on phones, FWIW.
Lenovo tablets have split screen, floating windows over fullscreen applications, and the option to put all applications into windows kind of like in the post.
Though admittedly split screen is the most useful of those
Always is a bit of a stretch. The split screen feature came with Android 7 in 2016.
Wait until you try Samsung's Dex. It could replace my Linux laptop, with my tmux/vim dot files environment
The fact that Dex has not made a bigger splash is entirely on Samsung's marketing department. I agree it's not -fully- there as a replacement for computers, but I remember owning an s20 for over a year before even knowing it was a thing. When I tried it I thought "finally."
We carry these things with us everywhere and they are more than capable (hardware wise) for what 99% of time spent on desktops/laptops can do, especially in the corporate world. The limitation is the form factor. I'm really just floored that there hasn't been a bigger push to turn our smartphones into our computers.
Now if DeX would actually be performant... unfortunately Samsung just loves putting dogshit SoCs and flash into anything that is not the Galaxy Phone lineup, not to mention their own pre-installed bloatware and general Android bloatification causing further performance issues.
> Now if DeX would actually be performant
Well, that all depends on what you were expecting. It works about as well as I figured it would (including the pre-installed bloatware), so in my eyes, it’s performant.
> unfortunately Samsung just loves putting dogshit SoCs and flash into anything that is not the Galaxy Phone lineup
But DeX is only available on the highest performing devices in the Galaxy lineup :)
I don't have any performance complaints on my S23 with Snapdragon chip. But they are too frugal with memory. Tabs and apps often have to reload in DeX.
I tried out Apple's implementation of desktop windowing on tablets called Stage Manager with a borrowed iPad. It's still not a real replacement for actual laptops. Sure you get multiple windows, but switching between them it still inconvenient: you don't have Command-Tab or Command-` like on a Mac. All window manipulations have to be done with fingers touching the screen. I end up believing a real desktop windowing system is still superior.
Other weaknesses of Stage Manager aside, iPad has command-tab and other keyboard shortcuts. You do actually need a keyboard attached though -- otherwise, well duh, of course all manipulation has to be done with fingers.
Stage Manager is disappointingly over-engineered. Managing the workspaces is much more mentally taxing than having windows just fade into the background, every new app somehow always seems to open up at the wrong size and then annoyingly takes everything else off-screen with it. I am a heavy iPad user but Stage Manager is rarely useful for me.
> you don't have Command-Tab
Yes, you do. There's a pretty extensive set of keyboard shortcuts, actually.
The person who lent me the iPad didn't have a keyboard. I'll note that though.
Magic keyboard:
I was very disappointed with it as well. doesn't work as well as a windows 95 computer window management.
I'm a full desktop OS kind of person, but even just enabling windowing on a tablet OS makes it feel like so much more of a full OS. The idea of having your browser and a notes app in a configuration that isn't a forced hard split is a massive win.
There is quite simply an incredible amount of productivity that can be extracted from a speedy, full sized laptop or desktop that smaller screen devices are not likely to reach no matter what fancy features they come up with.
What I can do in seconds on a fast, responsive, non-bogged down modern laptop can take orders of magnitude longer to accomplish on a tablet. Tablets surely have their uses, but high paced productivity is not one of them.
I would assume that I'd agree, but I've never attempted to use something like a Surface with a keyboard. For me, a desktop OS and a full size laptop keyboard are just two non-negotiables if I'm working on pretty much anything.
They missed the opportunity to copy Samsung DeXes best party trick, getting a desktop interface on a phone by connecting an external monitor. Maybe next year.
That feature is available, albeit clunky. The latest Pixel phones have a developer option "Force Desktop Mode" which gives you Desktop-esque Windowing on an external monitor.
It's funny... all of the windows on my desktop are fullscreen or halfscreen. The only floating windows are transient dialogs.
I tend to have another level of nested windows inside applications, also mostly full- or half-screen. It's at that level that sometimes other shapes become interesting, for example for a time slider (long and horizontal), or a list of files (narrow and vertical).
If only the world had evolved into one where operating systems could interact with applications in a way that would allow persistence of window layouts, scripting of user interface elements, and allowing a user to modify application layouts to their own preferences.
Emacs in its final form? Sadly, for those of us not versed in Elisp, such power remains a pipe dream.
How big is/are your monitor(s?)?
I only maximise windows frequently when I work on a single small monitor (and sometimes I'll use window transparency to be able to see multiple windows simultaneously.) With 2 or 3 large monitors, there's rarely any need to have windows maximised.
It's rather amusing to see them so "excited" about introducing features and concepts have been around since Windows 95.
Even the titlebar buttons look like Windows' with the obvious exception of a missing minimise.
On the other hand, maybe they're finally realising the fact that "mobile UI" has been dumbed-down for too long.
I recently acquired an Android tablet (Lenovo M10 — a bit too cheap, but gets the job done).
I also got a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
The only thing that works properly is web apps. All the native apps have terrible keyboard and mouse support. It made me wonder if I'm the only person using it this way.
On that note the only GUI text editor (yes I'm learning Vim in Termux, no it's not a replacement for Sublime!) that's tolerable is VSCode running in the browser.
Surprisingly comfy in fullscreen, but the fact that's it's even necessary is just a testament to what a joke the whole ecosystem is.
I'm using Helix (https://helix-editor.com/) on Termux on my 12.2" Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+. It's absolutely flying and less hassle to get LSP's to your favorite language setup. It could also be easier to learn than Vim if you're just getting into Vim. It's definitely not difficult for a Vim user* either. Helix is available on Termux repo's:
*) Last year WebStorm started getting painfully slow with some TypeScript codebases I worked with. It got the point I thought to give NeoVim a try. I knew my 10y old Vim config just wouldn't cut it to replace WebStorm for me, so I spent some 3 months on and off fiddling to get LSP support properly working. I then ran across Helix around last December, and ended up as a happy Helix user instead.Edit: Fixed formatting (my fourth comment on HN...)
nope, horrible Lenovo experience here as well. battery life is a joke
To be clear the tablet is crap (just one comical example: the Battery Saver mode enables dark mode, but the screen is an LCD! Wat!) but I'm pretty sure my keyboard/mouse issues aren't specific to the model, but due to the fact that most Android devs don't even consider that use case.
I think a tiling window manager makes more sense for mobile devices, but maybe that's the next step.
I also saw an article a while back that Android might get a task bar for phones as well, that actually seems quite handy.
https://9to5google.com/2024/08/06/android-phones-taskbar-tes...
Probably over 90% of what I use my personal laptop for is browsing the web, watching videos, listening to music, and writing notes. In a general purpose OS, I value security above all else. Privacy is a close second, and of course stability, ease of use, resource lightness, and application support are also important factors.
I haven't found a desktop operating system that ticks most of the boxes, especially security and privacy. The only OS that ticks all the boxes is GrapheneOS, but it's not really a desktop OS. That's why I'm so excited about these updates, and why I wish there was either a good keyboard/trackpad case for the Google Pixel Tablet running GrapheneOS, or someone would make a laptop that had the necessary requirements to support GrapheneOS.
I code on my work laptop, and if I really wanted to, I could probably SSH or VNC into a Linux box to code on GrapheneOS. There is also pKVM, which will probably make it easy to run Linux VMs on GrapheneOS at some point in the future.
> I haven't found a desktop operating system that ticks most of the boxes, especially security and privacy...That's why I'm so excited about these updates
Android and privacy are not two things that go together.
I am not talking about Google's Android. I am talking about GrapheneOS and in Google's blog post they mention that this is coming to AOSP.
Go on! Substantiate that. From a platform level. Please, I'm very curious.
If I had my way every person that downvotes this kind of comment without replying would just be banned.
There's no replies becuase it's utter cargoculted ignorant bullshit.
The vast majority of Android devices run Google Services. The End.
What's it like to quip something useless and meainglessless like that and feel smug? Is it nice? It seems nice!
Boy I'll tell you what, when I advocate for matters of privacy, I DO FUCKING PROPER ADVOCACY. I actually know what I'm talking about instead of vapid high-level bullshit that we think will pop-off with our base that already agreess with us.
As someone who ACTAULLY cares about privacy, fuck you, and fuck everyone voting in that alignment.
The vast majority of Linux desktops run ChromeOS. So you think Linux and privacy don't go together?
Change my view: open source operating systems are bad in practice since good actors rarely audit them but bad actors not only have the usual exploits but also have the keys to the castle.
Edit: guess we’re not having a fruitful discussion about this then. Shame.
This is the classic "security through obscurity" argument. Yes it makes it harder to find vulns and develop exploits when the source isn't available, but once there are enough users to make it worth it, people are gonna fuzz the shit out of it regardless whether it's open or not.
At least with open source, you have white hats (and gray hats to some extent) using the available source to get hints. These end up getting reported a lot more than for closed OSes. There may seem like more CVEs for Linux than Macos for example, but that isn't proportional to the number of vulns, researchers, or exploits out there.
That said though, even if open were less secure (which I don't think it is), it is still a better and more ethical model for software and would be worth the security risk. Luckily for the world, open is more secure (or at least equally secure).
Why do you think bad actors "audit" open source more than good actors?
Isn't it more the case that all actors audit all software? Open source just has potentially more "auditors" than closed source?
(I don't understand what you mean by "usual exploits" and "keys to the castle")
> Isn't it more the case that all actors audit all software? Open source just has potentially more "auditors" than closed source?
Perhaps bad actors don’t audit more than good actors, but this doesn’t address whether there are more good or bad actors doing the auditing. I think this is a more valuable comparison if we’re talking about risk mitigation and the safety of open-source software. Do you know that there are more good-faith auditors than bad?
Very much related — we should probably acknowledge the disparity between the two groups in terms of motivation, sustainability of said motivation, financial resources, and time.
The idea of burnout among open-source maintainers is long-known and endlessly discussed. They often/mostly volunteer their time — to some thanks, but also to a deluge of “doesn’t work” tickets with no repro, as someone pointed out on this recent post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41579591
Bad-faith actors tend to be highly motivated, with ideological or financial goals. They have more and perhaps better resources, more so if state-funded, and more time to commit.
This doesn’t mean there’s a constant and unmanageable risk to open-source software, and I certainly don’t agree that open-source OSes are a bad idea. But it’s not as simple as having actors auditing on each side or the difference in numbers between closed and open-source.
Usual exploits = using the normal tools to look for buffer overflows and such by attacking the running system and compiled binaries.
Keys to the castle = the ability to also look in the source code for vulnerabilities, run static analysis, fuzzing but also architectural flaws. Basically use extra methods that you can’t do on the running system or binaries. You would expect some tools to be run already by the authors but some tools will find things that others don’t.
Bad actors have an incentive to audit the code (find vulnerabilities) since they were in the process of attacking the system anyway, so why not look at the source? You also have state level attackers who are getting paid to find these sort of things, and others looking to sell 0-days.
Who are good actors? Who is willing to spend their time finding and fixing bugs? There are definitely people doing it out of the kindness of their heart, and others might be researchers and so on, maybe some companies that use the software - but you are relying on these outnumbering the bad actors.
I think there will always be bad actors, and assuming that there is an army of good actors watching your back might not always be correct. But happy to hear other angles, which is why I opened (and accidentally closed) the conversation.
Good actors do it mostly for money and fame, bad actors do it mostly for money. Both actors do it for open source and closed source software.
Isn't it a good thing that anyone can effectively use tools to check for potential vulnerabilities?
This is just speculation, but I think open source projects may mature faster in terms of security because the low-hanging fruit is maybe found faster than in closed source projects?
Another interesting case I think about a lot is the classic AOSP vs. iOS. Apple tried to sue Corellium for making it easier to research iOS. Then Apple started the Apple Security Research Device program to make it easier for researchers to do iOS research. These two things seem to me to be a kind of involuntary open-sourcing of iOS. Why did Apple see Corellium as a threat and why did they provide researchers with these special devices?
Why don't you think they get audited by "good" actors.
Edit: guess we’re not having a fruitful discussion about this then. Shame.
When you started with the low-grade trope "Change my view" you already indicated you weren't interested in a discussion, just arguing for the sake of arguing on the internet.
I actually wasn’t, I was looking for other opinions. I think my view holds merit, but clearly smarter people than me think differently and I wanted to hear their angle.
Thanks for explaining though, I was genuinely confused at the downvotes. Maybe that meme doesn’t mean what I thought it did.
> Maybe that meme doesn’t mean what I thought it did.
It doesn't. The general implication of that meme is not that someone actually wants to seriously consider alternative views; the implication is "I want to assert my position, which I think is unassailable, using the veneer of an argument".
I think you've been gotten by the Reddit-ification of everything. Essentially, many people assume sinister motives on everyone else's part. If you're saying/asking something like you did, it must be because you have an agenda.
Fortunately with a bit of time it will even out and probably go positive. It's the early voters on comments that are the most negative and quick to judgment.
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Handling configuration changes for every resize event is horrible. I really dislike Android's design around startup/pause/resume etc of the app.
I've used Android devices for over a decade now, including two tablets which were largely daily drivers.
Android makes a lousy desktop, and the issues go far deeper than windowing.
The single application which Does Not Precisely Suck on Android is Termux. It, the wealth of directly-packaged software, and the wider universe available through other packaging tools (e.g., pip, npn, rpm, ppm, etc.), scripting and programming tools, etc., are what turns Android from a toy to a Real Operating System.
But even Termux is horribly handicapped by Android:
- Filesystem permissions are generally not available, nor is most of the filesystem.
- Keyboard support within and between apps is horrible and inconsistent. Three specific examples: 1) Firefox/Android (a/k/a Fennic Fox) lacks the keyboard shortcuts of desktop Firefox, a longstanding bug Mozilla seem to have no interest in addressing. 2) In Readability, when editing tags, the backspace/delete key does not work, rather one must select and replace text to correct misspellings. 3) In Neoreader (the Onyx BOOX ebook reader) typing text into the search dialogue is wonky in ways I don't specifically recall though it simply shouldn't break that way.
- Android memory management (courtesy the JVM AFAIU) will reap apps without warning. Some manage this reasonably well, many do not.
- There's absolutely abysmal inter-app exchange through copy/paste.
Free-form windowing is good and fine so far as it goes, but Android needs one hell of a lot more done to it before it's a reasonable desktop / laptop replacement.
I still see tablets as most useful for reading text (and perhaps watching videos), and best suited at little else. I'd still recommend a full-featured laptop or notebook for Real Work.
So of course the next question is the long play to replace ChromeOS with this?
Ah, so basically mobile devices have almost caught up to the Xerox Star?
> If you don’t have a Pixel Tablet handy, access the Pixel Tablet emulator in Android Studio Preview, and select the Android 15.0 (Google APIs Tablet) target. Once your device is set up, select Enable freeform windows option in Developer options to explore the capabilities of desktop windowing and how your app behaves within this new environment.
I noticed this last year on Android 13, and I found it a bit unusable on an 8.4'' tablet and useless on a phone. But i think it has less features in Android 13/14, as the management (maximize/restore) looks a bit different on 15.
It still looks like it doesn't have a minimize icon (also not when maximized), which for me is essential in a desktop environment.
Pixel Tablet is the biggest let down I have ever had from a product (SW + HW combination) mine has so many bugs, so many unnecessary changes from previous versions. I don't understand how a company can release such a bad product after so many iterations.
> mine has so many bugs
What bugs? I have mine for like 3 month and its probably the best expierence I had on any android device over the last dekade. Everything works so well and smooth.
The only thing i critize is that the dock is not USB-C powered (so I could relocate it in the kitchen to watch stuff while cooking).
Even today, The 'Hey Google' stopped working. Restart didn't help. The microphone works (I did a video call) but 'Hey Google' stopped working.
I used to have the Lenovo Smart Screen 10, which was great. But it didn't support Netflix or Disney+ so I thought that the Pixel Tablet would be an upgrade. There so many things that don't work any more. For example after starting a timer, the Lenovo know the command "re-start" while The pixel for the same command starts a new timer. I have many more examples, but it just make me sad to think of it.
Android Stage Manager…
I do know similar window managers for Android existed in the past and Samsung still got their Dex but making it official emphasizing the responsiveness reminded me a lot of stage manager which Apple decided to make available only for the expensive iPads.
Android is inching closer to resolving the ChromeOS / Android split in Android's favor.
Probably a really good thing to not have two OSes when they really could be one. I just with Fuchsia were powering it.
Android already won, Google all but gave up on improving ChromeOS https://9to5google.com/2024/07/12/chromeos-lacros-ending/
Didn't they gut the Fucshia dev team?
Best usage of tablets I've been able to find is playing Fruit Ninjas. I love my mouse and keyboard
the blackberry-licensed android phones (priv, key, key2... i think since 2016) had a os level hack that made EVERY app windowed.
you could split the window and use two apps. for everything! only annoyance is that some apps reload when you did that, which was annoying the first time only.
i still think HN crowd slept on those phones. a lot.
Everything old is new again!
They are so excited to just have reinvented last decade desktop envs that were working well before fullscreen apps were imposed to us.
This is a good step forward, but I desperately want to be able to extend a display on Android rather than screen mirroring.
fun fact. this is happening because someone sold pixel tablets as a (cheaper than Chromebook) work platform for contractors at google
sounds about right -- nobody's buying the pixel tablets and google needs a channel to stuff them through, so they're having CorpEng bury the hatchets.
Think of this in the context of the previous announcement that ChromeOS will eventually be based on Android.
As a long time chromebook user, which runs Android apps - this is more than welcome!
What a disappointment. They had freeform mode as a dev option for years, but avoided pushing it as a supported feature. I assumed this was because it fucking sucked. I've tried it. Freeform, desktop-like windows on an 11 inch tablet are simply terrible for multitasking. But no, here they are, releasing the feature with no meaningful changes. The state of tablet multitasking is a travesty, but neither Google nor Apple seem interested in fixing it in any way other than a shitty reproduction of clunky desktop windowing. How about letting us tile more than two windows together? How about letting us stack apps into tabbed panes? How about a sliding environment like PaperWM? Just off the top of my head, any one of those is more likely to increase tablet productivity than "here's a bunch of rectangles; you wrangle them!"
Sure, but I'm one of the kooks who will plug a tablet into a monitor and use keyboard and mouse. Seems handy for that.
Even in that case it's pretty weak. It lacks workspaces/spaces that desktop OSes have these days, and isn't extensible the way Win/Mac/Linux desktops are.
I guess I'm not really understanding what you're complaining about. Why not use a desktop OS then in the first place? MS Surface Go 11 tablets have been selling for like ten years now, and so have "convertibles"/2-in-1's.
I hope that this works on foldable phones, as well.
Can confirm that it does, at least on the pixel 9 pro fold, after enabling it in developer options.
However, I don't see the top window handle they show in the animation. I have to long press the app icon in the running apps view, then I get a free form option. At that point, I get the floating windows with controls. You can tap and drag the sides and corners of apps to resize windows, seems intuitive enough.
Its phone hack
Android is going for the PC market.
At least currently they have a more consistent UI framework strategy than Microsoft.
Congratulations Android, you've successfully recapitulated the evolution to desktop windowing. Took you only 15 years!
The whole "relaunch the app when the window size changes" design from Android 1.0 was such an enormous mistake. They're really going to pay for it now.
Entirely tangential, but I've been feeling serious nostalgia recently for a couple of small computers I've owned, specifically the tiny 2012 MBA, and the first-edition Asus eee. In both cases, they felt very solid, while also being very light. Does anyone have recommendations for more recent ones that are Linux based, and that I could get a small amount of work done on in an emergency? I worry the market has been completely taken over by Chromebooks that seem to be made out of cardboard
Nice, way better than ipadOS stage manager.
Btw, Firefox Nightly on Android now has a tabbed interface like a desktop, making it better for tablets.
Depending on if I am just reading and watching youtube/music a good android tablet is enough.
Impressive work, they reinvented the Chromebook
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