This bug is widely evident in the PC industry.
Steps to repeat:
1. Visit a local PC store.
2. Attempt to buy a machine without any proprietary software.
Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary.
1) it was a lot of work
2) users don't like the result very much
https://lwn.net/Articles/780031/
There's a huge mismatch between how users want to interact with desktop and mobile applications that makes convergence really hard to do effectively in a single codebase.
> The key for enabling this is to go from remote to local by way of optimization instead of trying to go from local to remote by way of generalization. [1]
I think its analogous to this mobile/desktop "purist" OS. Specialize, don't generalize.
[1] - https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/general/remoting.html#...
A now-dead sibling asked about an escape key; on Android at least there are keyboards that have the meta buttons (no affiliation: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork... is one example).
While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges.
I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a model where I have one computing device and multiple views ("terminals" if you wish) [1]. But a consistent experience as Purism is pitching, and which Microsoft attempted with Windows 8 + Windows Phone 8, are viable first steps. There is learning to do here and it's great to see people taking on the challenge.
> I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"
Sure, but if they find it useful, fun, or just plain cool, I applaud it. I want more desktop-class computing capabilities on my phone-sized device and I routinely find myself deferring important actions until I can get in front of a "real computer." Many things are just too challenging or limited on today's mobile operating systems. Even with "convergence," as Purism calls it, there will still be cases where I simply want to use a larger screen, so I'll defer until I can dock the device and use some large form-factor I/O devices. But with the stance Purism is taking, I would no longer experience the frustration of software limiting me even when I am willing to endure the limitations of my hardware.
"We don't believe in sort of watering down one for the other. Both [The Mac and iPad] are incredible. One of the reasons that both of them are incredible is because we pushed them to do what they do well. And if you begin to merge the two ... you begin to make trade offs and compromises.
"So maybe the company would be more efficient at the end of the day. But that's not what it's about. You know it's about giving people things that they can then use to help them change the world or express their passion or express their creativity. So this merger thing that some folks are fixated on, I don't think that's what users want."
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/users-don-t-want-ios-to-me...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-photoshop...
But... https://xkcd.com/927/
https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Touch_Keyboard
I found vim is actually the most convenient editor to use on Android to edit code without hardware keyboard compared to any editor that I found on f-droid. And I don't use vim on a regular computer.
These days I have an iPad Pro as well, and it's sort of depressing. It could be such a better productivity tool if it wasn't crippled by a "mobile" OS.
> iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014) and later iMac models can't be used as Target Display Mode displays.
Or does that description apply only to 5K iMacs and not to ther other models? The "and later iMac models" statement reads as very broad to me.
Not OP... a BT kb/mouse has been a great consumer-friendly boost on larger tablets for me but sadly... lots of applications (on Android) don't really take advantage of this. They are still very heavily optimized for touch-only.
Example: MX Player (my fav Android player) does a great job binding keyboard presses to actions (spaceBar: pause; arrowKeys: forward, back, etc..)
In contrast, VLC for mobile lacks this "polish". Mobile browsers are another example where actions could be optimized for mouse input but I haven't come across a browser yet that acknowledges mice as a separate input source.
fyi (for anyone interested in tablet to laptop conversion to lessen gorilla arm):
Zagg Folio for 10" tablets (basically turns a tablet into a laptop). I picked this up a couple of years ago (not too many available for Android, most are essentially flimsy stands). They also have similar for smaller handhelds:
https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Keyboard-Android-Tablets-10...
The computer is actually like a computer card, that you can slide into different devices. A lot of parts like for example the casing for the laptop "case" are 3D printable.
The computer card is 65$ and then you can print your own laptop or you can buy the parts from them. If something breaks, print your own replacement part.
The icing on the cake: The "Respects Your Freedom hardware product certification" ("currently in progress with no known blockers") from the FSF for the version with Parabola preinstalled.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/support-the-libre-tea-co...
They commit to being fully Libre and want to go beyond this by:
" [...] providing full CAD files, schematics, and datasheets for all the parts (without NDAs) as well as having the 3D CAD files for the casework as a completely open GPLv3+ licensed project right from its inception. In addition, all firmware and kernel sources are GPL-licensed and will always remain so, and have been vetted in advance and do not contain any copyright violations or proprietary license-violating blobs (an extremely common practice nowadays)."
Another of their focuses is the environment.
The EOMA68 Standard: https://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA68
Clojure for the frontend is the best-in-class frontend dev environment that I've worked with. Instant hot code reloading, a browser-connected repl, great debugging tools, and a really nice collection of libraries for getting stuff done. I've never had to use native APIs for iOS and Android, so I can't speak to that from experience, but I know that there's some really nice machine learning work that's done in Clojure[0]. One of the main bits of Clojure philosophy is to just embrace the host platform, and our company has done that very successfully.
I think I agree that there are compromises, but on the whole I've come out pretty far ahead with the tools I get to use. My point, though, wasn't to proselytize for Clojure (even though I do love it!), but to point out that there are ecosystems that have made significant progress towards this idea of convergence, and that some people (me in particular) are very happy to be moving in that direction. I'm excited to see progress on the OS front.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103809433/338898127?re...
It's less powerful than a smartphone, but designed from the ground up for hardware hacking.
disclaimer: I am part of the WiPhone project
Libraries like Re-Frame[0] and Reagent[1], as well as build tools like figwheel[2] or shadow-cljs[3] are the best frontend web development tools I have ever used, and I've used Javascript, Typescript, and Purescript professionally with Angular, AngularJS, React, a big 'ol jQuery glob, and Halogen.
[0]https://github.com/Day8/re-frame