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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."
Here's the Samsung demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"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.
Motorola Atrix from 2011 was an Android phone that would run a Linux desktop (X11) when you plugged it into an external monitor. And there was a dock for the Atrix that gives you keyboard, display and extra battery. The Atrix dock did not sell well and a lot of hobbyists picked them up at a discount and rewired them for their own projects, mostly into Raspberry Pi laptops.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
2017 Year of the Linux on Desktop!
oh wait it's actually on a phone?...
2017 Year of the Linux on top of Desk!
close enough.
First of all you are cherry-picking your statistics to believe your own lies.
1. Apple sells a lot more laptops than desktops. Only counting Mac desktops is sure to lower their numbers.
2. Chromebooks are not Linux, they're Chrome OS, dependent on Google and online applications. A real Linux system does not depend on Google for anything.
3. Without Chromebooks Linux is far from outnumbering Macs on the desktop.
Of course, Linux has more installs if you count servers, but you're talking about desktops so you can't include servers.
#DeleteFacebook
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
At home and at the office, where you surely can use an actual PC anyway. So, again, what's the point?
The point is that you don't need to buy a PC, or a laptop. Your phone is your computer. For 90% of people, a phone has plenty of computing power.
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.
Normal people don't run Linux!
Normal people usually run a browser, officially to use their workplace's outlook webmail and some google docks (but in practice even more to surf on Facebook and/or Youtube).
Which such a phone will provide.
Normal people might also need from time to time to open some MS Word document. To which the recent enough version of LibreOffice provided is compatible enough.
The only thing that is going to be hard to pull off with this kind of "smartphone as a desktop's CPU" is the typesetting dumpster fire that is PowerPoint (not two different version of Microsoft's official product are compatible with each other. Don't keep your hopes to high regarding pixel-perfect import to LibreOffice).
But on the other hand, the fact that this device has an HDMI out, kind of indirectly solves the problem, by making sure that the same device and software used to write the presentation can also be used to show it.
Also, this Ubuntu-based desktop is 100% compatible with Youporn which probably solves the needs of 99% of internet use.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You can't just take a desktop operating system and cram it into a mobile device. They don't work the same way.
Even if you tweak the system itself, create a new interface that works acceptably with a tiny touch screen - you still have a whole ecosystem, thousands of programs designed for big screen and physical peripheral.
That's not how DeX works at all.
The idea is : you keep Android (or Tizen) working on your phone just as before.
But whenever the phone is connected to the DeX dock, instead of blowing up the Android interface on the lot-of-inches monitor, you start a separate Ubuntu VM and display that on the screen and control it through the USB/Mouse.
(A little bit like having your USB Bootstick with you, except you don't even need a desktop to boot it, you run it on the smartphone's CPU).
And because all the above mentioned systems all run on the Linux kernel : Android (and Tizen) and Ubuntu. ...you can simply use a chroot or a container to spin up very quickly your desktop linux whenever docked.
(Instead of booting a whole VM).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I would also add that this isn't some kind of trade-off. It works without changing anything from the phone function of the phone OS while using it as a smartphone.
Why is this modded -1? He/she disputes OPs points and goes into detail. Just because you disagree with what he/she said doesn't make it a -1. That's the problem with slashdot.
I'd say that his repeated assertion is that everyone who isn't a giant nerd-lord (I might be a giant nerd-lord...) not be allowed to touch a computer is, by this point, flamebait.