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New Samsung Video Demos Linux on Galaxy Smartphones (liliputing.com)
Slashdot reader boudie2 tipped us off to some Linux news. Liliputing reports:
Samsung's DeX dock lets you connect one of the company's recent phones to an external display, mouse, and keyboard to use your phone like a desktop PC... assuming you're comfortable with a desktop PC that runs Android. But soon you may also be able to use your Android phone as a Linux PC [and] the company has released a brief video that provides more details. One of those details? At least one of the Linux environments in question seems to be Ubuntu 16.04... While that's the only option shown, the fact that it does seem to be an option suggests you may be able to run different Linux environments as well.
Once Ubuntu is loaded, the video shows a user opening Eclipse, an integrated development environment that's used to create Java (and Android apps). In other words, you can develop apps for Android phones with ARM-based processors on an Android phone with an ARM-based processor.
Samsung promised in October that its Linux on Galaxy app will ultimately let users "run their preferred Linux distribution on their smartphones utilizing the same Linux kernel that powers the Android OS."
Once Ubuntu is loaded, the video shows a user opening Eclipse, an integrated development environment that's used to create Java (and Android apps). In other words, you can develop apps for Android phones with ARM-based processors on an Android phone with an ARM-based processor.
Samsung promised in October that its Linux on Galaxy app will ultimately let users "run their preferred Linux distribution on their smartphones utilizing the same Linux kernel that powers the Android OS."
"What's the benefit to this versus what I already have?"
Presumably it's available out of the box and ready to go with a few touches of a button, with official support from the vendor.
That means you have to carry an external display, mouse, and keyboard with you.
Or you could have an external display and keyboard at home, and another setup at the office, like millions of people already do with their laptops.
I think this is a pointless effort. You can't just take a desktop operating system and cram it into a mobile device.
Except they're doing the opposite. Maybe it's not an efficient use of screen space, but scaling up a small screen works. A keyboard obviously works fine. And you got no problem using the mouse to hit an UI element made for sausage fingers. As long as you don't need multi-finger gestures other than pinch and zoom which map great to the mouse wheel you're doing okay.
That means you have to carry an external display, mouse, and keyboard with you. Or hope they will have a spare external display, mouse, and keyboard wherever you go.
It's not for people who need a laptop, quite the opposite. It's for people that only occasionally need something bigger than a smartphone, most likely at home where external display = TV with HDMI. You already have the phone (sunk cost), you already have a TV (sunk cost), buy a little dock and keyboard/mouse and you can write that letter and do that spreadsheet without the laptop.
Granted, right now it only exists on super expensive Galaxy S8s and the dock itself was not cheap but if they can bring it to cheaper phones and bring the price of the dock down - it already went from a launch price of $150 to $90 - there's hundreds of millions of people who have just a smartphone and nothing else. Who don't have a ton of Windows applications they miss. Who are not gamers (or at least Candy Crush-type gamers), who don't need workstations, who sometimes just needs a big screen and better input.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What's the benefit to this versus what I already have?
The benefit is that you don't have to be a basement-dwelling geek to get it to work. You just plug it in and turn it on. This is for normal people to use their phone with a large display and a nice keyboard, to edit docs, work with spreadsheets, tweak images, etc. For many people, their phone is their computer, and this will make that easier and more common.
There is nothing inherently wrong with communism. It just doesn't work with physical goods. But it seems to work fine with software and other intellectual property, by eliminating the need for artificial scarcity.
There are more than two billion computers running some form of Linux. Normal economics doesn't reflect all that value because it is "free", but it is a tremendous amount of goodness available to each according to their need.