
Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop - fermigier
https://www.nexedi.com/NXD-Document.Blog.E.Phone.As.Desktop
======
zozbot234
Context: /e/ is simply a fork of LineageOS, so these features should work on
Lineage as well. Support for USB-connected screens, docking stations etc. is
going to be highly hardware dependent, but everything else should work out of
the box.

AOSP derivatives are a suboptimal approach to convergence though (i.e. running
the same OS on desktop/laptop and a mobile device). Ultimately, a native
convergent OS such as PostmarketOS (running GNOME Phosh or KDE-Plasma Mobile)
or UBPorts should work a lot more smoothly. AOSP apps should be supported via
a container-based approach, as with Anbox.

------
IIAOPSW
This is exactly what I've wanted phones to become for years. It honestly
amazes / pisses me off that I can't buy something like this off the shelf.
Maybe I'll bite the bullet and piss away a few hours on rom flashing to get
/e/ on my phone.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
That's just wishful thinking. No manufacturers would release any devices with
this OS for the following reasons:

Phones are commodity devices where volumes have to be high and costs low.

The big manufacturers that have the resources to make and sell something like
this at scale(i.e. Samsung) want you tied in their ecosystem instead.

Maybe some niche manufacturer could make a device with this via crowdfunding
but the price would be too high for such a low volume as the niche of techies
this would be aimed at are savvy enough to flash it themselves on an older
phone for free.

~~~
ummwhat
I think you read this too literally. I want a device which acts like a phone
in my pocket and acts like a desktop when plugged into a
screen/mouse/keyboard. The perfect unison of essentials like ride-sharing with
the ability to do serious work. It doesn't have to be /e/.

~~~
thawaway1837
Isn’t that basically Samsung Dex

~~~
roywiggins
Yes, Dex can more or less do this. I didn't realize my Samsung phone could do
it for six months after I bought it, so maybe it's not well advertised. It
does work, but I haven't tried to get actual work done with it.

~~~
misterti
I have, but it doesn't work out or i haven't found adequate tools for my
programmer's task. Most of the apps can't be full screen, fortunately there is
dexmax app to fix this. Overall experience for some serious work is not good,
but for surfing it's fine. I succesfully used rdp to connect to my desktop
computer :)

------
mekkkkkk
Why has cheap KVM-consoles for phones never taken off? It seems like a great
way to get a portable/inexpensive laptop experience. Judging by the relative
success of Chromebooks, it would appear to be a ripe segment. And the
performance of any mid to high tier phone is more than enough for the casual
laptop user.

As mentioned in the article:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-
superbook...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook-
turn-your-smartphone-into-a-laptop-f)

~~~
jbverschoor
I don’t want a kvm switch. I don’t want to rely on some remote server to do
actual work

~~~
mekkkkkk
Well, in this case the remote server would be your phone. The switching part
would be plugging it in.

~~~
jbverschoor
oh like that. Yeah, for my phone I think the only things I'd want is actually
just vscode and a linuxy environment.

I was playing around with [https://ish.app/](https://ish.app/) on ios.. It
supports airplay. But I couldnt' get it to compile some things I'd want, and
it was still very slow.

------
mlinksva
> Until now, Nexedi has been maintaining a derivative of ChromiumOS with some
> extra features: NayuOS. However, the gap between ChromiumOS and its
> proprietary counterpart ChromeOS has increased so much that we see no
> possibility to maintain a usable NayuOS in the long terme.

In what ways has the gap between ChromiumOS and ChromeOS increased? Is that
true of Chromium and Chrome as well?

> Nexedi has thus decided to support the /e/ foundation and its sister
> corporation, with the hope that /e/ would some day become a usable OS for
> desktop or laptop.

Good for them, I think/hope!

~~~
smetsjp
What you do not get in ChromiumOS (last time I checked):

\- support for flash movies

\- support of certain video codecs

\- support of sound hardware of many recent Chromebook models

\- support of CJK input (at least in Guest Mode)

\- support of Android apps

\- support of Linux virtual machine subsystem

\- support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me)

Lack of stable support of CJK input in guest mode (and the difficulty to find
anyone capable of solving this problem or supporting us) was the biggest issue
for me.

Some years ago, the difference was:

\- support for flash movies

\- support of certain video codecs

\- support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me)

which was fine to me.

Note: I wrote the article on /e/ for Desktop

~~~
jdnenej
Flash is long dead and gone. Chrome OS probably also doesnt support floppy
disk's.

------
riquito
Microsoft tried with Continuum [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
ca/windows/continuum](https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/continuum) but
Windows Phones didn't take off

~~~
pjmlp
They were slowly taking off in Europe, and were already around 10% when they
decided to kill them.

~~~
realusername
Yeah that's what I don't get as well, they killed the product as soon as it
started to take off.

------
Tilian
Canonical tried something similar with Ubuntu Touch, which was, sadly, killed
off due to low market interest. With ever more capable phone hardware I'm
quite surprised we aren't seeing more progress in OS convergence.

------
pepijndevos
I find it difficult to evaluate an Android for my phone. Currently running
AOSP (actually phh-treble) rather than any fork that adds any significant
features.

In particular it's hard to tell if any particular fork is just a one man hobby
project, a fork of a fork, or has any significant work behind it.

Of course the big one is LineageOS, but they seem to make specific phone
images, mostly for high-end phones, rather than generic system images for my
low-end phone.

The list of generic system images is extremely long and not all that helpful:
[https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki/Gen...](https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki/Generic-
System-Image-%28GSI%29-list)

I ended up chosing phh-treble because it doesn't add any BS, promises quick
updates, and serves as a base for many other roms, lending it some
reliability. It's pretty much AOSP with hardware fixes.

That said, it doesn't do some pretty basic things like automatic brightness
and night mode, or a PIN timeout. So maybe that's eventually drive me to try
another ROM...

------
solarengineer
Of related interest: [http://nexdock.com/](http://nexdock.com/)

Connect your USB-C phones which support Desktop Mode, and the apps in them can
be used in the laptop shell.

They depend upon phones that short this via Android Q. They are tracking other
projects such as OXI, MaruOS, and Librem to ensure compatibility.

------
k_sze
I think it would be interesting to get this running on DLT One
([https://hackaday.io/project/164845-dlt-one-a-damn-linux-
tabl...](https://hackaday.io/project/164845-dlt-one-a-damn-linux-tablet))

Does /e/ _require_ a phone? Or would it work with a tablet as well?

------
csagan5
> /e/ has modified the source code of various parts of AOSP and Chromium web
> browser to stop informing Google (and the NSA as a consequence of CLOUD Act)
> of user activity.

The article is incorrect also about the browser: it is simply packing a re-
branded Bromite browser.

~~~
csagan5
Edit: the article has been kindly edited, thanks to the author

------
kovek
I’d love to see a tablet that can be connected to a monitor to go pc mode. On
the tablet, I could use a tablet pen to control the cursor/textinput on the
monitor.

~~~
roywiggins
Whatever newest Samsung tablet is probably supports this through their Dex
feature.

------
mirimir
I wonder if VirtualBox would run on this.

I see that some phones have 6GB RAM, and that should be enough for at least
two or three VMs. And many have lots of CPu cores.

But maybe I'm missing something.

~~~
curryst
I wonder if they are thermally capable of sustaining a high CPU load. Phones
strike me as fairly bursty in terms of compute usage; I'm curious if running
them hot for a long period of time would damage the phone.

~~~
jotm
As VR headsets/adapters have proven, yes, most phones will overheat with
continuous usage.

~~~
mirimir
They should have tiny fans in them. Or maybe just heat pipes with cooling
fins.

Back in the day before SSDs, I used to cool external HDDs with axial fans
during TB-scale operations.

------
rbanffy
Isn't Nexedi the guys who make a really nice ERP on top of the Zope platform?

~~~
smetsjp
Yes.

[https://www.nexedi.com/NXD-
Presentation.Status.Roadmap?porta...](https://www.nexedi.com/NXD-
Presentation.Status.Roadmap?portal_skin=Slide#/)

Our story with /e/ is that we decided that it would make more sense to invest
some cash in /e/ (we did it) than try to maintain NayuOS now that most
ChromeOS users expect to run Android apps (and this part is not in ChromiumOS
AFAIK).

Also, we observed a growing need for some kind of "desktop OS" for industrial
applications (robotics, industrial automation) that does not depend on Google
APIs (factories are often in China or do not have Internet access).

/e/ thus made a lot of sense.

Note: I the author of the post.

~~~
rbanffy
It's funny. At the company I work for we have a system of record that, while
built on completely different tech, reminds me of Zope a lot. I guess the
problems both platforms try to solve are so similar we see convergent
evolution.

------
th0ma5
Any way to put E on an S7 and then relock / de-root it?

~~~
ttsda
I'm pretty sure you'll blow the Knox eFuse which can't be reset.

~~~
mirimir
Which is a good reason not to buy junk like that.

~~~
zozbot234
Many phones are somewhat harder to unlock than Samsung models. The Knox efuse
is an annoyance, but most of that is security theater anyway. It doesn't gate
many useful features that a Lineage user would care about.

~~~
mirimir
OK, then.

It still seems offensive that there's no way to reset it.

~~~
zozbot234
It's a _fuse_. It's write-once. That's just how the device works. They
probably did it like that so that attempts to tamper with the device without
the owner's knowledge would always be detectable after the fact.

~~~
mirimir
From what I've read, it's actually not physically a _fuse_.

But in any case, it ought to be fixable by an authorized service technician.

Indeed, it's arguably a right to repair issue.

