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by fsflover 1210 days ago
It's the minority, because people didn't realize yet how convenient and logical it is. There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size. You don't need to develop independent apps. You don't need to learn independent tools.

I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....
2 comments
Nextgrid 1209 days ago
> You don't need to develop independent apps

That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free. They'd save an insane amount of time and actually deliver a product competitive with mainstream phones right now, which would give them funding & marketshare to continue refining it down the line (potentially replacing it with non-Android components one at a time).

> There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size

And the input method, which is a massive difference - touch and mouse are completely different, and so are the contexts in which phone vs desktop apps are used. If you try to merge the two, you'd look like the idiots who gave us Windows 8. So there's still effort in making specific UIs for different mediums.

> I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop

I'm not sure there's an actual need for it? This has even been tried by large companies such as Samsung and Microsoft and didn't go anywhere - in practice this isn't a problem the vast majority of people has and seems like an absurd thing to start with for a resource-constrained company in a very competitive market.

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fsflover 1205 days ago
> That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free.

This is not true. They are stuck with hardware-specific things like power management, camera, and LTE calls. "Calls" application itself was developed very quickly, for example.

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Nextgrid 1204 days ago
I think my point still stands if you replace "apps" with "functionality" - they're still reimplementing from scratch and without much resources nor expertise something that Android has a (correct me if I'm wrong) permissively-licensed, mature & battle-tested implementation of they could just use.

I don't think using permissively-licensed Android components wouldn't compromise user freedom and would actually increase it because it would put a non-user-hostile, freedom-respecting, usable phone in the market right now. You can just patch out or choose to not include the user-hostile bits (though most of those wouldn't be part of the open-source release in the first place).

Of course, this only applies if the objective is to deliver a usable, competitive product rather than practice effectively useless ideological bikeshedding similar to the war on systemd and refuse the admit that the typical GNU/Linux userspace is at this point prehistoric and significantly lacking compared to other alternatives (whether proprietary or open-source such as Android).

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astrange 1209 days ago
Your desktop has active cooling and storage rated for enough daily writes that it can have swappable VM. Your phone has neither.
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