Now the question is if people will be stupid enough to replace all the freedoms their desktop OS still gives them with the vendor controlled shit show that is mobile OS.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Narrator: They did.
My guess is that people who would use DEX is also people who are satisfied with ChromeOS. Which is just as closed down.
Hopefully, when Android does this, they will be under same gatekeeper restrictions in the EU as Windows.
Dude I tired DEX once, I saw I couldn't rotate the monitor or even find some type of settings and I never tried it again.
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100% they will and want this. I’m a power user and even I see this as the future.
Have you worked in a non-tech field with people? Modern OSs and office apps are not intuitive to them. Hell, a lot have problems with just their phones as is.
Yeah.. I dont see this happening. Android has 99% shovelware crap. I dont see how any professional would be able to use Android instead of Windows, MacOS or Linux.
Android is garbage, and I'm saying this as an android user... The moment a serious Linux alternative is here for phones I'm gone (yes I'm aware Android is technically also "Linux").
Just a few examples: the file system is a mess, good luck trying to easily save on network drives. There is no decent office suite and again using the files system to save documents in Android is a shitshow. There are Adobe products but they're all watered down shitty versions of the desktop ones, the alternatives are even worse. Around every corner google tries to push it's shitty cloud subscriptions, the telemetry is insane even compared to windows.
No Android is definitely not the future chromebooks were a mess too. And knowing Google they'll just give up on anything they don't seem profitable enough so even if they tried on desktop they'll just pull the plug after 2 years.
If people complain about Linux being hard... give android a try as desktop OS it's probably 10x worse. At least Linux comes with a decent office suite and decent networking capabilities.
I suppose you mean the same effect I have noticed with our younger apprentices who know very little about the way computers work anymore since they grew up with phones only, they don't even know what a file system is any more.
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i‘m hyped for a graphene desktop mode. that wouldn’t be a replacement for my laptop/ desktop computers but still very much sick. and if i can run a terminal with neovim and tmux or ssh into other machines it would be a dope backup/ micro setup. probably not very useful, but fun i think
I have a dying laptop and am very much interested in replacing it with my phone + Nexdock (or similar)
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do you think I am masochist or what, better give me gnu/linux on mobile ;)
- postmarketOS for older mainstream phones
- Librem 5
- PinePhone and PinePhone Pro
- FuriLabs FLX1
- Liberux Nexx (upcoming)
Hopefully this means I can have a GraphineOS laptop (whenever google makes a new Pixel Laptop)
Didn’t canonical try this years ago?
I thought it was part of their justification for Mir like a decade ago.
Cool. Samsung did this a decade ago though.
Everyone is abandoning Android with a passion thanks to Google's bullshit.
But yeah. Fuck Google
Everyone is abandoning Android
What do you mean?
The Motorola Atrix 4G had a Desktop Mode (Webtop was its name and it was Ubuntu based) in 2011 before Samsung. They even released a cradle dock, that you could connect to a tv or monitor, and a laptop dock for it and the source code on Sourceforge (my guess is to be GPL compliant).
I got that phone specifically for the desktop mode. It had a full blown Firefox browser installed and you could run your apps along side it.
I was blown away and thought, "This is the future for computers" but I was incredibly wrong. After the short honeymoon period i found it to be sluggish and clunky when using an android app. The hardware although phenomenal for a phone couldn't provide an optimal experience for a desktop.
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Ubuntu did this a decade ago too
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If you want deskktop version of Firefox or Chromium on your phone, you can get them using Termux. But yeah they will be slow.
Microsoft tried the same idea about 10 years ago with Continuum, even including a hardware dongle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/continuum-phone
Canonical had something similar, too, back in the days with their Ubuntu Touch and named it Convergence: https://www.linux.com/news/first-ubuntu-touch-tablet-brings-convergence-last/
That's cool and everything, yet we have an itsy-bitsy tiny problem: iirc, there are like 3.5 vendors that have opted into dp alt mode support, and each one I know of kinda sucks. I suppose it might be possible to simply enable it in software by changing the devicetree on usb3 devices or something if the port the vendor decided to route is the one multiplexed with dp, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Fairphones support it :) I actually tested this out earlier (the initial screen mirroring implementation that was added in android 15) and it worked well. USB hub functionality works too with mouse and keyboard being plugged into the screen.
That's because there's not really any reason for them to implement it. This will give them a reason.
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And they chose to highlight as a feature making it like a pC, “you also get Windows PC–like abilities such as snapping windows to the left and right of the screen.”
Reminds me of just a few months ago when they sold the Samsung Galaxy S20-something using all the features that come with either Google Gemini 1.5-2.0 or Android 15. All features that my phone has. Nothing unique but the homegrown app store nobody likes