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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

I think Samsung DeX is not half bad for your point #1.

The only real issue with it is that the current generation of their smartphones doesn't come with enough memory. Only 8GB (S22) or even 6 (S21FE). You need more for decent multitasking.

But I think generally it's pretty underrated. It had done really annoying issues in the beginning but right now I could imagine doing a working day on it. I don't because I am really a power user, but for someone with normal office use I could see it being viable.

I wish this feature would make it to mainstream AOSP because right now it's too obscure to really take off. They made a developer thing with Android 10 but didn't take it the whole way after that.

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> The only real issue with it is that the current generation of their smartphones doesn't come with enough memory. Only 8GB (S22) or even 6 (S21FE). You need more for decent multitasking.

Since we're fantasising about future computers I hope there won't be more than 8Gb necessary to multitask. I remember running Windows and Office in the 90s on 16Mb. Seems like the 1000-fold increase in memory was mostly negated by wasteful software engineering...

My personal laptop has 8GB of RAM running Windows. It has plenty of RAM to run multiple chat applications, SDR software, a mail client, several browser tabs, streaming music playback, several SSH sessions, a few RDP sessions, a few text editors open, all at the same time. That's kind of a common set of applications open at any given moment on the thing when its being used. I'd say that's decently multitasking.

I don't doubt some things swap (pagefile, windows after all), but whatever its putting in swap is not noticeable. I don't experience stalls.

Android is not really optimised for desktop usage, this is the problem. It doesn't have swap and it forces apps to reload instead, which is really annoying when doing work in multiple windows. Like I said below, go to an excel sheet to look something up, come back to the browser and it will refresh due to low memory. It's something that can be fixed but it's really inherent to Android's underlying design as a one-app-at-a-time OS.

Also remember using a VAX with 30 other people with 8 Megabytes of RAM.

I really like Dex, at least the idea of it. I've been trying to work off my phone for a few years now, my first attempt was with the Galaxy S6, some version of container linux, and a raspberry pi with X11 forwarding as screen. It was brilliant, though a little underpowered.

My main issue with Dex is the perennity of the system. Is Samsung going to keep pushing this, or will a native android version takeover? Or maybe at some point they'll say "well that didn't work out" and abandon it completely?

I want to believe!

Every year I get closer to being able to do my work completely off a phone. I also think 8GB of RAM is plenty. Most administrative tasks can be done on that, and for the heavy tasks, you could always leverage a remote server. Think of github codespaces, or modern virtual machines in the cloud. Sure, you need internet, but don't you always, for this kind of workload?

Yeah, yeah, I want to believe :)

> My main issue with Dex is the perennity of the system. Is Samsung going to keep pushing this, or will a native android version takeover? Or maybe at some point they'll say "well that didn't work out" and abandon it completely?

Agreed, this is also a worry of mine. In fact they did exactly this with Linux on DeX.

> Every year I get closer to being able to do my work completely off a phone. I also think 8GB of RAM is plenty.

Remember that Android devices don't do swap. What I see with DeX is a LOT of tab refreshing when it starts running out of memory. Which is really annoying when you're trying to do actual work (e.g. going to an Excel sheet to look up something, but then going back to the browser to continue filling in a form, but in the mean time this has reset due to a forced page reload).

Ah yes, linux on Dex was looking sweet!

Right now I'm using termux, which is working really really well. I'm amazed! I have this big PHP app wich runs perfectly fine on it, with dependencies and all, I honestly expected trouble, but it just worked.

As for the swap: yeah that sounds annoying :(

Yes Termux is great. It can even do SSH key authentication on a Yubikey with OKCagent, with key forwarding which other options e.g. Termbot can't do.

Unfortunately the restrictions in later Android versions make it more and more difficult for Fredrick to continue supporting it. I'm currently using the F-Droid version which targets an older Android version but eventually that will become impossible too because newer android versions will eventually drop the older APIs altogether.

In particular in later Android API versions it's no longer allowed for an APK to load binaries from other sources and execute them there. Which makes the apt repository impossible. So what should it do? Include all binaries in the APK? Or distributute each app inside termux as a separate APK? Neither option sounds very appealing.

Well that's a shame. Termux is fantastically useful and a great addition to the android's ecosystem, at least for us techies. It would be sad to see it go.

On the hardware side, it's getting close. iPad Pro and MacBooks are basically the same hardware. If only iPadOS wasn't like wearing mittens…

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