Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC

I really wanted the Ubuntu phone to succeed. I backed the Indiegogo for their fancy phone, and when that failed I installed Ubuntu OS on a Nexus 5 to play with.

I never activated any phone service on it but I think I would have enjoyed it if I had. It was kind of neat to have a smartphone that didn't hide the fact that it was a computer. Even without plugging it in to a monitor or anything, I was able to play with the Chrome dev tools on the fly and it was pretty fun.

GNOME is still plugging away at this, making sure their entire OS is usable on mobile. Even without a market or audience.

I think the true reason is that onñy a small fraction of people are interested in convergence and most people are fine, or even truly desire, to have different devices and experiences.

Millions (billions?) of people are happy to leave their phone in another room when working on their computer and vice-versa. Sure you could use a do not disturb button but it would be a major PITA to have enough granularity to allow or disallow certain app/services to notify you and you would be certain to forget to activate/deactivate it when you really want.

I think it's more than phone hardware is still really locked down/non standardized, so there aren't a lot of viable options to get alternatives on there without also being a hardware designer and having the bank to go with that. Need a big country to force a standardization on the hardware interface/bios and an opening up similar to what we have in pc components and this will get a lot more interesting. Sadly the chance of that happening is near zero and the interests of google and apple lie in more lockdown, not less.

In the long term markets usually specialize https://ashishb.net/tech/the-android-chrome-merger-saga/

Linux barely works on a limited set of hardware that it was designed for. Indeed I don't think it's reasonable to then also make it work on some completely different phone hardware that has a operational life of like 2 years + full of closed source hardware and drivers.

If you want users, the thing has to be usable. For the thing to be usable it needs software with perfect hardware support. Google, Android vendors and Apple (and to some extend System 76) understand this.

You can get like 65% of the way there by just using i3wm with an onscreen keyboard and really big window borders (so you have somewhere to poke to change windows). But you have to contend with the fact that it is a basically fine touch window manager showing you… applications that were designed without touch in mind at all.

Imo trying to make a single UX that just changes a little bit to suit different device types is a misguided approach. Using a large screen with a mouse and keyboard is a fundamentally different thing to using a phone with a touch screen.

Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!)

There are some fuzzy boundaries - e.g. imo Gnome 3 has proven that a single experience can feel good on both a tablet and a single screen laptop with a good track pad. But I think paradoxically you need to take different approaches on different use modes if you want to provide true unity.

Man, that would be great. Imagine going out for a walk with just your smartwatch. Then you go back home and you insert the watch into a phone case and it gives it more RAM and CPU power and it becomes your phone and you go out again. Then when you come back you put it inside your big box and now you have a computer. All with the same accounts, OS, apps.

One step ahead is innovation, two steps ahead is a martyr. Microsoft is a lot of the time two steps ahead, but the technology and/or the people are not ready for it.

Hasnt harmed their product Microsoft Profit (TM) too much however.

I have an idea for a ring you can wear on one of your fingers and this ring actually runs Java [1]

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/300495374337

There's something charming about the slickness and naviete of this abandonware site.

No release in years: https://github.com/maruos/builds/releases

It looks like it is on maintenance mode: https://github.com/maruos/maruos/commits/master/

It does look like either the OS or the website have fallen behind.

> People who want a portable computer have settled on laptops

Especially now with laptops like the Apple Silicon macbook air, with more than enough power and battery life.

I used to want a beefy phone that could run a full Linux desktop when plugged into a monitor, but that was a long time ago (ironically, Google is getting there with some of the Android 16 stuff...too bad the switching cost from Apple for me is too high at this point).

But then the M1 air came out, and that was pretty much game over for me. I've since upgraded to my M4 pro but it's still small and light enough to go everywhere, I have no need for an all-in-one phone.

On the contrary, I think that this problem has such a simple and obvious solution that you even have to wonder why it hasn't been solved yet.

In essence, the hardware completely allows you to have a device that can connect to a monitor via USB, connect to a keyboard via Bluetooth and function as a full-fledged computer.

DeX is perfect for certain business settings (mostly sales, but many management functions also) where you home-base out of a desk, then hit the road during the day.

When you home-base, you're producing more in terms of text, longer form emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. So having a keyboard+monitor+mouse is important.

When you are on the road, you really just need to make calls, text, get driving directions, send short emails, etc. Occasionally make a presentation, which is doable off of the phone without any external devices.

I've done this workflow in short spurts and it's frankly really fantastic, modern productivity tools usually have an Android app version that's fine, or a web-app version that's also fine. I was often also making calls from the same phone that was driving my KVM.

Pretty much the only thing preventing me doing it permanently is multi-monitor support at "homebase", and sometimes being able to print sanely on a corporate printer setup.

> a problem very few people have

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727972

Everywhere I might hook up my phone to a monitor there is already either a preexisting computer hooked up, my laptop with its ultra flat keyboard trackpad combo to hook up, and/or lacking the appropriate back support and table height for me for me to ergonomically use a keyboard and mouse there. This might make sense for someone who travels a lot and wants to work in odd places but the assumption that people can Find A Monitor That Has A Keyboard Flatspace In The Wild is what’s broken.

This product would have been wildly successful if they just released it as a laptop case for a phone, Framework-style. Dock your phone into the PCMCIA slot to activate the laptop, etc.

Would be a good HN convention to add (dead) after a project like older posts get tagged with the year.

The use case for me is mostly hotel stays. When travelling for fun I don't particularly want the weight (and risk) of packing my laptop, but I would like to be able to play movies and music on the hotel TV. With a cheap light keyboard I could also do email and similar light admin things with the benefit of the bigger screen.

Until recently I was also travelling frequently for work with a heavy MacBook running a variety of Enterprise malware that would prevent me from doing any personal stuff with it - being able to use my own phone for light leisure activities that I normally do on the personal laptop would have been very useful for the boring hotel evenings. Adding another kg+ of laptop to the already heavy backpack was too annoying to put up with - my cheapo bluetooth keyboard and mouse weigh in at a much more acceptable 280 grams.

In short, there's a use case - but most phones are too locked down to take full advantage of the possibility.

I could commute to the office every day with nothing but the shirt on my back and the phone in my pocket if my work-provided device were my phone. I would not need a backpack or briefcase, which means that for any errands or dinner plans after work, I don't fumble with a backpack. I already leave my preferred keyboard+mouse at my office desk.

If I needed to fly to another office for a business trip, same story: I could sit down at any desk, grab a spare bluetooth keyboard from IT (if there isn't already one on the bookable desk).

If I'm over at a friend's house for dinner and get paged, I could just ask to sit down at their desk and plug my phone in.

I would love to not have to carry a laptop around to all the places that I do today.

I'm not sure why you neatpick that. I feel the complete opposite. HDMI screens are everywhere. Usb-c ones less but still present.

I have a screen at work, with keyboard and USB hub. Same at home. And at most of my friend's homes. I have a screen (tv) in a hotel and flats to rent. I even had one in a cabin recently (use them with tv stick for my kid's shows).

I also have an external USB/HDMI screen that is lighter than a laptop, that I sometimes carry for multiple reasons.

Keyboard is a bit harder, I won't have it provided in a hotel, but there are plenty of small and light models, foldable etc..

I choose current phone specifically for usb-c/HDMI option and a full desktop experience and use it often. It's easy, it's fast, it's stable. Perfect for mobile gaming with a small BT gamepad as well.

I struggle to find a place without a HDMI screen waiting for me.

If phones consistently gave you a useful desktop environment when you plugged them into a monitor, I imagine that might change.

I think offices are the most likely places to have something like this, though. My company has monitors with USB-C dock inputs set up at each desk; you grab a desk and plug your laptop into it when you get there. But they're just using DisplayPort Alt-Mode, and a phone with a desktop mode would work with them as well.

I wish I could do that for work; would save me from lugging around a rather heavy laptop. :)

There are now ar glasses that do HDMI, and there are lots of portable keyboard solutions, with a trackpad or trackpoint or just a mouse.

haven't tried it, but I see glasses as an almost practical future.

Why can't the phone itself act as the input device? Sure it's not a full-fledged keyboard, but it could work wonderfully in a pinch.

You could also use it with Nexdoc, https://nexdock.com

you can always bring a portable screen/keyboard with you

Yeah, Maru is based on Android 8. Not exactly modern anymore.

Ooh now this is interesting! I have to start following them I guess, been itching to switch since the most recent Android update absolutely destroyed the battery life on my brand new Pixel 9 Pro XL.

My friend has a foldable screen phone and carries a cute foldable keyboard with touchpad. He can plug in when available or just do light stuff at cafes with the keyboard in his bag

I've been diving towards this outcome for awhile now.

I have a gpd pocket 4 for my machine, but carry a chiri CE 5x3 and the MS arc mouse (and am looking for a second screen).

It's an extremely small footprint in my bag, and i'm not sure it can get much smaller. You could remove the keyboard and the mouse from the Pocket 4, but given they're on top of the hardware it wouldn't save that much space.

I can, in theory, do the same setup with my phone instead of the pocket though. I'm yet to really hook it all up and test (I expect several points of failure given past experiments), but the idea really is intriguing.

It does however require people to get more comfortable with smaller keyboards/mice (please for the love of god, if nothing else, swap left control with caps lock), or at least more portable ones.

And as for the ideal of "carry a drive, hook up to hardware as needed", that'll always run into the common issue of who is maintaining the hardware. We need cheap and easy to fix/replace hardware for that to ever really be a thing.

"Maru is built on the latest Android Oreo." That's Android 8.0, from 2017.

Also Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS.

They could sell MacOS as a mobile app subscription like logic Pro for iPads or for one time fee somewhere between $99 - $199, and many would switch from MacMinis I guess.

Pair this with some nice "Vision Air" glasses as a screen replacement..