Samsung debuted DeX last year to make your phone behave a bit more like a computer when plugged into a monitor. This year, DeX functionality has improved so you don’t need to expensive custom dock, just a video cable. At Samsung’s developer conference last week, it announced DeX would also get full Linux support. It’s only officially available to those in the beta program, but we’ve got the APK.
I remain convinced that this is eventually what all our phones will be able to do – adapt to whatever input method and/or display you hook up to it. We’re in the early stages today, with lots of rough edges, performance hiccups, and other issues, but eventually, we won’t bat an eye at walking into our homes and without us doing anything, our phone wirelessly hooks up to all displays in our house. Want to work on that presentation for tomorrow? Walk into your office, sit down, and your phone automatically wirelessly connects to the mouse, keyboard, and display on your desk. Want to watch Netflix? Just yell a command at your TV, and your phone plays season 7 of Game of Thrones: The Next Generation on your TV. And so on.
This is still a long way off, and it requires serious advances in wireless transmission and latency, but this is the future I want.
Wired docks will still be critical too. Display adapter + USB 2 hub for peripherals + 1GbE fits nicely in a single USB 3.1 port’s bandwidth, and will let you use your phone as your single “home PC” for most things assuming the software permits. There are already iOS and Android apps for RDP, SPICE, and PCoIP / VMware Horizon / Amazon Workspaces, as well as dozens of terminal emulators and SSH clients, so then connecting to “the big machine” for “serious work” becomes feasible for anything not bound by GPU or access to peripherals. Desktop workstations would once again become the domain of artists, musicians, scientists, and engineers that needed the extra local power.
USB-C/USB3.2 fits very well for this usage case.
You can have a phone with one connector connect to a dock.
It has the speed needed to allow it and supports networking, display (USB3.2 has 20 Gbit/s faster than DVI and almost as fast as DisplayPort which has 24).
The port is backwardscompatible, so you can connect other stuff to it (when you have an adapter of course) instead of the dock.
Traditionally a mobilephone was a peripheral in USB land. Not a host (like a computer). But these newer specifications (maybe some older too) support your phone to be the host device. So to the dock for the data it can be a host device (act like a PC) and still be a peripheral for the power delivery (in the past peripheral s were always the one receiving power, now it’s independent of the data).
And allow a phone to automatically switch between these modes when connected to something else. So when you connect your phone to your PC it will act like a peripheral.
That’s called USB OTG and has existed for quite some time. You just need the right cable to connect to the phone to put it in OTG host mode. Normally these exist as microUSB/USB-C male to USB A female adapters.
Yeah, I suspected it might be, that’s why I added the ‘maybe some older too’. I thought I had read it/heard about it before.
Thanks for refreshing my memory
In 2013 a bunch of phones with MHL and Full HD displays appeared, I think the cheapest was the Nexus 5. With Pocketcloud from Wyse, a bluetooth keyboard and mouse it was perfectly usable as a RDP terminal. Even all mouse buttons were mapped correctly.
Personally I have wished that Ubuntu would have continued the Ubuntu on Android project. This was basically a desktop Ubuntu with a few sockets to make Android notifications, the address book and a few folders available from the desktop environment.
Thinking it further it should be possible now to make Android apps available on the Linux desktop simple by sharing a framebuffer to be able to use some of the installed Apps where no proper Linux equivalent is available.
But I doubt, it will catch on. Android vendors have moved to wireless desktop sharing. For Powerpoint or video clips two seconds of delay don’t bother, for interactive workling, it sucks. OK, with USB 3.0 at least with the high end chipsets video output is coming back, but I do not see many hardware vendors investing in better software than just presentation stuff and video playing.
Remember the Motorola Atrix in 2012? This was a good idea, there was even a netbook dock available, but the target audience remained unclear and Moto did not invest in much more software than the web browser back then.
The HTC Evo 3D had MHL support back in 2011 and could be used with a BT keyboard at the same time. I tried it and it was fantastic, but needed an adapter (micro USB/MHL to HDMI) and sucked the battery to no avail despite the necessary external power.
Back in 2010 you can also plug a Nokia N8 on a monitor with the HDMI adapter. It was an extension mode, not just a copy of the main screen. Mouse/keyboard could be used either with bluetooth or USB. You could connect USB thumbs drive too. Even networks drive were supported before i-dont-remember-which update of Symbian^3
Microsoft did the same with Continuum, so bad that plateform died.
I ask myself if a desktop GUI on a phone is just geek’s desire or a real usefull option.
Edited 2018-11-14 09:26 UTC
Smartphones has become so powerful that basic desktop usage, even playing 4K vids or playing OpenGL ES game is possible. That would same people from buying too much useless stuff, avoiding electronic wastes, save space and energy.
I’m all in favor of size and energy constrained devices. If more power is requested, one should have a personal or distant (aka cloud based) computing farm that can be controlled with the smartphone. That would share the computing needs.
I actually see things going the other way – GNU/Linux phones or tablets running Android in an LXC or Docker container and given full access (VFIO, or just a single-tasking Wayland compositor proxying SurfaceFlinger) to the phone’s screen, and unleashing the full power of the underlying host OS when connected to real peripherals. Anbox is the first real stab at this, but it’s still in alpha.
https://anbox.io/
Why GNU/Linux as host? Android has failed utterly at pushing timely system updates thanks to OEM kernel shenanigans, but with a GNU/Linux system with the user in full root command of the OS that’s not really an issue. Android gets isolated to userspace where it can do its UI and application work in peace.
The only thing this requires is open GPU drivers, and we’re very nearly there with the new Bifrost drivers.
Edited 2018-11-15 18:16 UTC
tidux,
I do like the idea. It could solve so many of our problems with android if all localization were moved into userspace and run a standard linux OS underneath. We could switch android environments easily at the userspace level rather than the firmware level. If an android vendor stops supporting it that’s not a huge deal because we can just install to another. It could run both desktop and android GUIs. There’s a lot to like about this.
I wouldn’t holding my breath waiting for this to happen, but it would get my support if it did!
Miracast has existed for a long time, and is supported by Samsung in particular, though under some alternative name that makes it sound more Samsung-y and makes it difficult to know it is interoperable.
Miracast links your compliant TV (nowadays most, I think) and your cellphone/tablet over an ad-hoc point-to-point 5GHz WiFi link, so it is pretty fast and low latency (no Wifi router involved). Miracast and a BT keyboard/mouse should be enough to get you going.
All the pieces are there now to make this work quite simply. Only interest is lacking, so far, to make discovery even simpler.
Edited 2018-11-14 09:43 UTC
Except Google wants you to use chromecast instead of miracast (WiDi, in Intel speak), so they broke miracast in the Nexus/Pixel line.
And then they say “Just use chromeCast!”– which is a complete no go in corporate environments where miracast
/ wireless display is actually pretty useful.
And why would there be any interest in this? A phone will never be a computer, laptop or otherwise and a computer will never be a phone, cell or otherwise.
Especially a cellphone which doesn’t have a user replaceable battery and basically no i/o ports like the high-end,high cost disposable crap phones like we’re seeing from Apple and Google these days.
Edited 2018-11-18 16:16 UTC
except Apple’s iPhone where you will remain locked into their wallet garden forever 😉
Nobody force people to be iDiots.
Problem remains with apps that will still be optimized for touch input.
This makes for some use case scenarios to not work as intended, at least for those accustomed to it (like drag and drop).
On a side note, the Lumia phones were capable of doing this as well long before DEX came up. You could basically load any OS image from an embedded bootloader.
Thom, allow me to notify you of the fact that the domain name for the OSnews url shortener is being cybersquatted. If you can’t regain control of the domain, please remove the link from OSnews.
At the moment, OSnews is functioning as a link farm to a cybersquatter’s site…
Thanks for letting us know. I removed the shortURL feature.
About the article, nobody (except a 2% of the population) really wants Desktop Linux. I know I will get flamed for this, but Desktop Linux not only has gaping holes in application support (Office and Netflix that were mentioned as examples aren’t officially available in Desktop Linux), but even stuff that is available as an application for Desktop Linux is available at whatever old version your distro’s “repo” happens to have.
And Desktop Linux on ARM is even worse, because even the few applications available outside the repository walled garden are available only as x86 packages.
DEX will become yet another feature nobody uses, much like MHL.
Edited 2018-11-14 11:24 UTC
kurkosdr,
I don’t have a problem with anything you say except for one: Calling ordinary desktop linux repositories a walled garden is not a fair criticism of desktop linux in general. Walled gardens are about restricting owners. I do appreciate that many owners may not have the skill or motivation to do things outside a distro’s repos, but calling them walled gardens goes too far. For starters, you have root. You can build whatever software you want from source without paying anyone for developer privileges on your device. You can install external software. You can install other repositories. Apple’s app store repository is a walled garden because apple intentionally fights owner’s ability to load their own software or otherwise escape apple’s control over them. Desktop linux operating systems like ubuntu, debian, fedora, redhat, etc, for all of their faults including those that you touched upon, are among the least restrictive operating systems that we have. It is not remotely fair to call them walled gardens.
I could agree with using “walled garden” to describe google’s chrome books, which are running a highly restrictive userspace on a modified linux kernel. However the rest of your post makes clear you aren’t referring to these restricted chromebooks, which have netflix and msoffice.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/296
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-install-and-run-micr…
It kind of sucks that these big companies are more willing to endorse locked platforms that push owner restrictions, but this has long been the case with media companies. Another example is roku, a highly locked down userspace running on linux, netflix supports it. The reason netflix only supports google chrome but not firefox is because google embraced HTML5 DRM. It’s because desktop linux is *NOT* a walled garden that microsoft and netflix don’t want to support it
The technological hurdles the repository system imposes for the 98% of the population are not any less significant than the ones iOS imposes. You are welcome to prove me wrong by posting compilation and installation instructions for the latest version of VLC (with VDPAU/VAAPI support) that will fit in a reply comment 🙂
PS: When you have done that, we can assess the difficulty of them versus installing a custom-compiled iOS app using a developer account…
PS: “B.. but unlike iOS it’s not on purpose” you say? Yeah of course it’s not.. no attempt here to allow the OS vendor control what software users have access to by the GNU brigade, with the goal to restrict software choice in case the GNU won the OS wars… They played and they lost, and Desktop Linux is now stuck with the repo walled garden.
Edited 2018-11-14 18:50 UTC
kurkosdr,
Well now your saying the exact opposite of what’s true. The lack of developer support on niche platforms doesn’t make them walled gardens, it simply means developers don’t have the motivation to write apps for them. It’s a legitimate gripe for you to have, but you are technically wrong to call it a walled garden.
Edited 2018-11-14 19:49 UTC
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of repositories as a walled garden.
Firstly, most upstream projects have a repository for the major distributions. For example, if you’re running Debian Stable, you can either install docker from the repo, which is probably old by now, or enable the docker upstream repo with a simple command line.
I haven’t had to compile any software in a long time, except openconnect because they haven’t made a release in two years but have tons of new options.
Netflix on chrome on linux works great…
I watch Netflix on Firefox all the time under Linux, not sure what the issue is here….
leech,
For a time firefox was holding out against DRM for HTML5, I didn’t know they changed. It’s a mixed blessing, I think.
https://itsfoss.com/netflix-firefox-linux/
So DRM under Windows is fine, but DRM under linux is a mixed blessing?
The rest of your assertions are equally biased– An OS having OS specific repositories is a “walled garden”– and then you reference MS Office and Netflix, two particular vendors that depend on you remaining their customers.
Much like Windows, you can add other repositories to various forms of Linux– OpenSUSE has the build service, Ubuntu has PPA’s, fedora has rawhide, Debian has testing and backports, Arch has the AUR, FreeBSD has the ports collection– all of these allow you to update to much newer versions of software without having to ever type “gcc”.
grat,
I’m genuinely confused here, I agree with you. Did you mean to respond to kurkosdr?
Not only did I mean to, I honestly thought I had.
In my defense, I’ve been sick with a fever for the past two days.
grat,
Yeah it happens, no problemo. Sometimes I’ll reread some of my posts and see blatant mistakes that I can’t explain why I didn’t catch them “in the moment”.
Negative Nancy.
🙂
Blanket statement. I predict that in the future, everyone’s personal smart phone will be the only device they use. Smart phones are becoming increasingly more powerful and both iOS and Android are becoming ever more adaptable to covering the duties of a phone and a desktop.
Wow, you really convinced yourself of that?…
Among free office suites (some smaller ones with varying degrees of quality… though I like GNOME Office / Abiword) largely only Libre Office has a decent level of compatibility with MS Office, and even then it’s better not to rely on it when exchanging more complex documents with MS Office users / when your livelihood depends on it.
As for GIMP, it doesn’t really even strive for Photoshop compatibility / you ignore the huge ecosystem of Photoshop plugins…
Now, my needs are fairly basic, so when I want to write a document I use Libre Office (if Notepad doesn’t suffice, and it usually does), and when I want to edit a picture I go to GIMP …but I have no delusions about their utility.
All I have to say is that in 15 plus years I’ve never had a problem using OpenOffice, LibreOffice or FreeOffice as a stand in for MS Office. No compatibility issues or anything. I’ve also not had any problems editing Photoshop files in Gimp. Just my experience. Perhaps I’m not a power user.
cmost,
I’d say LibreOffice works remarkably well for at least 95% of the features, but it depends on the features you use. I used to be a big user of formatting classes in ms-word, but I stopped using that feature entirely when I began converting between OpenOffice-Writter and MS-Word because it wasn’t compatible.
If you depend on exact page alignment (ie for diagrams), the rendering engines don’t match perfectly. Consequently I’ll actively compensate by making my pages somewhat shorter when they are supposed to be page aligned. Taking away 2 lines doesn’t look out of place, but adding 2 lines results in an extra page that’s completely empty save for those two lines.
Sometimes I encounter other problems and bugs using tables and images, but they’re not related to compatibility. My experience with LibreOffice on the whole is mostly positive, it just isn’t perfect. I prefer LibreOffice to microsoft’s ribbon and I won’t be turning back!
And… perhaps you didn’t notice the problems / maybe issues surfaced at whomever you exchanged files with.
> Microsoft Office works quite well with WINE but who needs it when there is LibreOffice and a host of other high quality office suites that are fully MS Office compatible.
There is also a thing called Office365, that works pretty well in Chrome and Firefox.
One of the things I liked about the Lumia 950 XL I recently acquired was the ability to use the USB C dock to add external monitor and keyboard and mouse.
However, it can also do the same thing wirelessly!
Last night I had connected the phone to my ROKU and had a full HD desktop on the screen. The phone switched into a “trackpad” mode so I could move the mouse around. When it needs to type it can use the on-screen keyboard. So, without anything other than a ROKU I was able to use the phone like a computer. This is the Continuum feature I believe. And it worked very well. Better than my iPad Pro going to Apple TV or using the HDMI connector. [iPads and iPad Pros with iOS 10 forward often have resolution or glitchy video problems using Airplay or HDMI dock to play back media on an external monitor, it works once you get it working as long as you don’t switch things and come back, but it often takes 3 or 4 tries to get it to display right the first time.]
It’s a great feature. And I suspect a bluetooth mouse and keyboard would do the job of everything and make it truly wireless computer. Though it does pull the battery down a bit, so you probably want power
I’ve done similar with iPad with Airdisplay, but all that does is project the iPad or specific apps onto the TV. Not really the same thing. Even the Miracast from Android was more like Airdisplay than this feature on the windows phone.
I’m looking for a good SSH terminal that works on Windows phone. Any suggestions? I figure once I find that, then with the wired dock or a portable Roku I can turn almost any TV into a monitor (as in hotel rooms) and probably be able to do 60 to 80 percent of my work while traveling from the phone alone.
I’m going to set it up to see if it’s viable and how it works out. More out of curiosity than anything else.
And yes, while iOS and Android have had similar capability for a while, and the ability to handle web and SSH and other functions within the device,, using it on an external monitor didn’t really change the resolution or usability of the app. It was just a portable app on a bigger screen and not necessarily a change in the screen dynamics to make it more computer like.
It really is too bad Microsoft killed this off last year. The potential is really there. Much better than I’ve had with iOS and Android so far. It may never have become as widely popular and used as iOS and Android, but another 3 to 5 years and I bet it would have had a better chance. Especially if MS worked on the hardware to refine it like they have with the Microsoft Surface series of tablets and notebooks.
It’s funny, I’m not a Windows 10 fan on the computer itself, but I’m liking Windows 10 Mobile on the phone. Very bizarre (at least to me).
Edited 2018-11-14 14:33 UTC
The Apple ARM processors are by far the most capable, they would make good laptop processors today as is. Apple also has a good desktop operating system that is basically the same as their phone os.
However, I don’t see how allowing consumers to just buy one $1000 phone instead of buying a $1000 phone plus a $1000 Desktop would help apple’s bottom line. I think they’d need to charge at least $1500 min for this kind of functionality to replace the lost potential income.
So that’s my bet 5 years from now mac mini is dead, all hail the new mac mini the iphone XV.
That may be true; apple won’t release good enough specs to know for sure. Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Samsung are all making ARM processors that would make perfectly serviceable desktop processors. Difference is you can buy a desktop computer with a Tegra or Exynos processor *right now*
Chromebooks/Chromebox? or something else? Most benchmarks I’ve seen have Apple SOC killing all other ARMs. But you know, benchmarks are not always the whole story.
I was pissed that they said it was the Note 9 only, yet they were bragging about it working on the Note 8 (which I have). I signed up for the Beta to get the apk anyhow, but does anyone trust downloading apk files from random places? I don’t.
Frankly using wireless to connect everything to your phone is dumb. Now the idea of docking stations makes a lot of sense and if the processing power gets to the point that a USB-C graphics card enclosure connected to a phone makes sense. I could see myself replacing my laptop with a phone. Razer’s GPU dock already has gigabit ethernet and 4x USB 3.0 ports. This makes it a completely functional desktop computer when docked. I owned the last serious attempt at this with the Motorola Atrix. Ram sadly limited it’s usefulness, and the Linux OS was way too locked down. The Librem5 by Purism was looking good but I think it’s going to be too crippled in RAM capacity, 3GB should be upgraded to at least 4GB IMHO.
Edited 2018-11-14 21:27 UTC
Hi,
I doubt this a lot.
A “limited to a max. of 15W because the form factor prevents the dissipation of heat” system will never be able to reach the performance of “LOL, we can consume 500W 24 hours a day every day if we want because we’re a honking great desktop in a tower case with fans everywhere to get rid of heat!” system.
In other words, performance of smartphones will always be significantly less than the performance of laptop/desktop/workstation because of thermal constraints; and we all know that software expands (due to lazy developers and/or new features) to make use of all the performance, and user’s expectations increase such that “less performance” (e.g. going from desktop performance to smartphone performance, or even going from the newer computer you got last year to the older computer that you thought was fast 3 years ago) never feels acceptable.
– Brendan
But do you really need huge performance 24/7 ? If the Razer GPU (aka “rendering farm”) is docked only when necessary, that saves a lot of power and redundancy.
What actually is this “Razer GPU” thing? I tried to find something that works (for smartphones) and found *nothing*. What I did find is stuff for PCs that have PCI-E/Thunderbolt (that are completely worthless for craptastic smartphones that don’t support any PCI/Thunderbolt and wouldn’t be able to provide the RAM/interconnect bandwidth needed if they tried).
– Brendan
Brendan,
Same here, I don’t think we’re the types of consumers who would benefit much from phone/desktop hybrid. I would imagine it’s better for users who mostly get by with their phone, but would benefit from a larger display and keyboard.
Also, I agree with your examples: why are spreadsheets and searching through PDFs so slow? Technically I use foxit PDF, but searching is definitely slow. Why!? Yes, some of those documents are big, but my CPU can scan several gigabytes of memory per second, so what exactly is the holdup? It’s too inefficient!
I don’t normally use excel, but the other day I was asked to look at someone’s spreadsheet…I had no idea it was so slow with moderate datasets! It was taking 5-10s to recompute fields. It had maybe ten tabs with maybe a few thousand rows and some summations, which may be “large” by spreadsheet standards, but for a computer that’s absolutely trivial. I’m used to working with databases that are a thousand times bigger and can run complex queries almost instantly. With CPU’s capable of billions of computations per second, I just don’t think spreadsheets have any excuses for being slow. Not for nothing, but if I worked at microsoft and had any kind of authority there, this slow performance nonsense would be fixed!
With compressing/decompressing, I understand why these can be slow.
For me, the worst performing software I use routinely are gimp & inkscape. I know graphics are intrinsically resource intensive, but these are particularly slow because they don’t use multicore or GPU acceleration. Why not? I think portions of gimp are even written in python, which takes ages to load up. Maybe these will run better on my new computer, but I still think there’s some serious inefficiencies there.
Edited 2018-11-16 04:53 UTC
Office suites are slow because coded in Java or such, with complex data structures.
For the performance boost of “rendering farm”, current there is no offer of that kind, but if the demand increase, there might be.
The idea would be to have a stronger PC at home that you can use to offload the “number crunching” problems your phone cannot process.