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Comment by const_cast | Hacker News Reader

> But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.

Well no, the UI on a phone is severely dumbed down because it has to work with a smaller screen and touch input. You can do the same stuff, sometimes, but with more effort.

Like, I could program on my phone, if I wanted. But that would suck major ass. It has the same capabilities, but certainly nowhere near the convenience. Even just running two things at once. It's... possible... on an iPhone. But it's not a desktop with split screen. And, if it can do split screen, I really have to squint, right?

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Programming on a phone is actually pretty amazing if you can run a good overlapping window manager and an OS that won't randomly kill background tasks. I had a phone running Linux for a while and it was great I wrote a ton of unit tests for my side projects on it while taking the train. One time I was out and ran into some UI issue and fixed it right there on the bus. There's nothing like that now and everything that's available is so bad no one even understands what they're missing.

I'm sure, because phone have multiple problems. One is the software, usually it's fisher-price levels of dumbed down. Buttons are huge because people have fat fingers.

So we can fix the software, but we still have hardware limitations. The hardware is small. The screen is small. There's no keyboard, only buttons on said screen. I can open a document on my phone, yes. But I see 1/10th the content I would on a computer screen - just because the screen is very small. I mean, we have these super high resolution displays... running at 400% scaling. Meanwhile, I have 1440p running at 100% on my computer.

That's, like, a lot more stuff that can be on the screen.

Modern phone hardware is incredible. Often the most powerful computer people own these days is their smartphone because it's so good.

And I ran my phone with unit scaling. You don't need everything blown up to 400% especially with keyboard driven UIs.

I'll have to try Plasma Mobile sometime. I've been using KDE for 10 years now, and I love it. Very excited to see how Linux on smartphones progresses.

What do I need to see on my phone that I can’t when I am doing my taxes or even more so planning a trip - which I do a lot of?

I launch the Delta app as a Delta loyalist (Platinum Medallion) to book my flight. I then launch the Hilton app (I am Hilton Diamond) and compare prices/convenience with hotels with Hyatt (I am Hyatt Explorist).

The only exception was when we were looking for an AirBnb for an extended stay in Costa Rica next year.

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