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Comment by smhost | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I just want it for completeness. With phone hardware getting powerful enough to run mid-to-high end games, I want to be able to carry around a phone that I can hook up peripherals to and use it just like I would use a desktop. The Android ecosystem is pretty good in its own way, but it's qualitatively different compared to the Linux ecosystem for my use case.

Windows and several popular Linux distros are moving to ARM anyway, so I feel like this is the ideal time to attempt carving out a space for people like myself.

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Exactly, I would love a smartphone-size universal computing device, to use on the go or plug into desktop/laptop docking devices when needed.

The individual parts are all there. Phones are powerful enough, we have USB-C with displayport for docking, KDE/qt has (or used to have?) an alternate small/touch GUI setup, phones can throttle their CPUs up when placed in a dock with active cooling, every individual part of the puzzle is available today in some form.

Microsoft tried it and Samsung tried it, but both were too tied to their own proprietary ecosystems. I think it could work with a det of open and freely available standards.

> Microsoft tried it and Samsung tried it, but both were too tied to their own proprietary ecosystems. I think it could work with a det of open and freely available standards.

Sorry, but in what world has a new UI paradigm or physical form factor reached mass adoption via an open source project? Not knocking open source in general, it’s just that these are not the open source communities’ strengths in general. Meanwhile, single platform monolithic companies with end-to-end control and lots of financial resources tend to do much better here. Added to the fact that this was the basic thrust of the Ubuntu phone and (iirc) the Mozilla phone projects as well, and I just don’t see it. Maybe Apple will popularize the idea with an M1 (or M2, M3, etc) based iPhone (15?) that is truly powerful enough to pull it off and can run iOS and Mac OS side by side.

The problem with Microsoft's and Samsung's approaches is that they were too closed off, you didn't have the ability to install any software you wanted, unlike on a PC.

If you want to unseat laptops, you have to provide what laptops do, a universal platform for software, not a walled garden.

> I would love a smartphone-size universal computing device, to use on the go or plug into desktop/laptop docking devices when needed.

Are you aware that it's a thing already? https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

I know, however it also costs $800 for middling performance at best and is backordered probably until early 2022.

It's close and getting closer, though.

> for middling performance at best

I am curious, what do you need in terms of performance? It can play 3D games and show videos on a big screen.

> backordered probably until early 2022

This is indeed a problem. Pinephone (with a worse performance) also has convergence and should be more available.

> "I am curious, what do you need in terms of performance? It can play 3D games and show videos on a big screen."

Better real-world performance than my X220i, so at least able to play some games from my Steam library, play 1080p60 videos, multitasking, that sort of thing. I assume the Librem 5 can probably do all of this, although I'm highly skeptical of running the desktop version of Firefox on just 3GB RAM. As a do-it-all mobile device, I would also need better battery life than my current smartphone, so 1-2 days of normal usage.

As an aside, that X220i cost me ~$370 in 2018 and is a 2012 vintage machine, so not even close to current laptop performance. I appreciate what Purism are trying to do, but you'll certainly pay a price for being an early adopter.

One plus 6 support is looking pretty good. Give a few months and it may be a viable choice with decent specs.

>Personally, I just want it for completeness.

You know, that's an interesting point. There's a lot to be said for using one as a desktop. I've got a Motorola Droid laptop thingie around here somewhere that turned a phone into a pc-like device and it was actually pretty cool. A few generations of speed improvements and it would be fine for most uses. It's nice to have a single non-cloud state for your stuff.

My main need is for a phone to do the following: be as private as possible, make calls, send messages, occasional browser use, hotspot. I'm tired of being dragged along with everyone else in terms of complexity.

That might be a generational thing. I can't remember the last time I ever used my phone as a phone.

Also, what you're calling complexity, I see as simplicity. In my ideal world, I wouldn't need to install three different versions of a web browser across three devices in order to get through my day.

> That might be a generational thing.

I'm sure you're right. I pre-date cell phones and video games and never got interested in either one aside from the technology. A phone seems like a poor substitute to a fast workstation with multiple screens and a keyboard (to me), but I can see the cost in mobile connectivity. Luckily, we can all choose our poison, although my own old man phone needs are not as well supported.

The interesting thing is to consider how your personal technology stack reprograms your thinking.

Out of curiosity, if you could set up Android so that it launches Linux in a virtual machine when a monitor / keyboard is plugged in, would that meet your use case? Or are you looking for greater integration between mobile and the desktop?

Potentially, but you'd have to convince me that the performance hit and the added instability was worth it.

I actually use the opposite setup at the moment (virtualized Android apps on a Linux desktop). So I think Android would have to convince me that it's a worthy general purpose computing environment that I can supplement using the Linux ecosystem, but for the moment it's looking like the opposite is the case.

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