Most likely your phone is more powerful than those old computers. Why not just hook it into an external monitor and use it?
But, meanwhile, my Macbook Pro can drive two external displays, as well as having a good size internal display of its own that will still be useful. It's got 2 standard USB ports, for connecting keyboard and mouse. Add USB hub, and you have even more options. It has fans inside, so it can run at full tilt for quite a while before hitting any thermal throttling. 16 GB RAM means it's feasible to run a VM - and, since it's an x64 system, it can be persuaded to run many x64 OSs natively. One example would be Microsoft Windows, which you may have heard of, and which has been ported to x64.
The UX without any extra devices is fine as well. As well as the nice built-in display (which is a good size, and >200 dpi), it also has a solid inbuilt keyboard and a very useable trackpad. For all that I do much prefer a proper setup on a desk with a full-size keyboard and a mouse and a nice set of displays, the UX for general use without any peripherals is quite reasonable.
Also, it has a headphone jack.
You don't need USB monitors, there are plenty of cheap USB-C to DMI/DP dongles and adapters. If you already have a USB-C dock for your laptop, then the same one can be used for the DEX. The reason it's not more wildly used it's poor marketing and low consumer interest as the PC usage has been on the steady decline.
I think the general consumer just isn't aware that this is an option. Perhaps Samsung should offer free dongles with their flagship phones to build a market, because it's a real shame people don't know about DeX.
Most casual average people at home don't even have PCs with monitors anymore these days. Most people who aren't on their computer all day, just have a solo laptop with no other peripherals making DEX pretty useless to the average joe
Phones are content consumption devices. Maybe he wants to do something beyond watching tiktok.
It's unfortunate that Samsung abandoned its tests running a fully fledged Ubuntu when hooked upmto a monitor.
Yeah, sadly there are entry level laptops cheaper than a phone or said monitor plus a keyboard and mouse. I said "or" not "and".
Plus you know, people cursing Apple for making Mac OS look more like iOS. I don't think the great convergence will happen any time soon.
> browser based debugging only, but there are cloud based versions of VS Code you can use
So nothing works offline.
Many people already have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard lying around. They'll also have a phone already. Plus, there are very cheap docks where you can just slide your phone into a laptop shell, priced similarly to the worst and most awful Chromebooks imaginable.
> So nothing works offline.
You can run a vscode server on your phone (https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server/releases). What's lacking is the VSCode GUI, so pointing a browser at http://[::1]:8080/ will work just fine.