This (and the internet in general) is pretty anemic on details.
Is this a VM on top of dalvik? I assumed DEX was deprecated in favour of ART https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/gc-debug.html
I mean it is still compatible bytecode (i think) but who knows anything about android roadmap anymore?
Apparently it has no connection, even though they're both technologies for running things on Android.
Presumably someone in branding at Samsung thinks this makes sense. They might not even be wrong considering this is end user focused whereas .dex files are something only developers see.
This is why Samsung created the DeX docks. You connect your phone to the DeX device and then connect all the peripherals to the DeX pad: monitor (via HDMI), and mouse + kb.
You could connect to a TV, as well. Honestly, for actual IT/programming persons, such a set up is unlikely to be be exceptionally useful, but I could see using Ubuntu Linux on the phone in more modest ways. You could play a native Linux game (perhaps one you coded yourself), while using a Bluetooth controller. I'm kind of grasping for straws here, actually, but I'd say that the dex pad is pretty cool more broadly speaking. For example, you could use your phone's unlimited data to play back netflix or YouTube videos while connected to a TV. You could use the Samsung dex mode (which predates this Ubuntu mode by several years), while relying on only the touch screen to launch the playback of said video. For me this seems uniquely useful because my mobile carrier, T-mobile, limits tethering to several GBs (and bypassing it hasn't worked in the last few years) and it would be unwise to spend them quickly just to provide a data connection to the smart TV or another intermediary device.
I expect corporate HR departments to love this, actually. Give everyone identical cubicles with docking station and accessories. People can be shuffled around, and they can easily take their devices with their work with them. Send someone to headquarters for training or whatever, and they just have to bring along a pocket device and find a station to plug into when they arrive.
If you have an android phone try installing an X server with support for relative mouse mode. I’ve personally found most desktop apps are more usable on android this way than their native android versions (even when the android version has all the features I want which is rare.)
The battery life like this is horrible though. I’m not sure if it’s X11 or if it’s that using android’s graphics from C wastes a lot of cpu time or what.
Since the partner is Canonical, I would speculate it's LXC based. Also since they are looking to put a whole OS experience in a container it probably wouldn't be a good fit for Docker which really wants to push single process containers with no init systems.
But that's a different generation of hardware, I can understand why the project currently focuses on current gen hardware. The S9+ and note9 share the same processor and amount of RAM, so that's why I asked.
As someone who's been looking for a first-class Linux experience on a mobile tablet for a while and been very underwhelmed by everything on offer, I'm pretty excited about this and am very curious how it compares with running Linux on the upcoming Slate. That said, the S4 is quite a bit smaller and lighter than the Slate and more what I'm in the market for though I expect the Snapdragon to be quite a bit slower than the x86 in Google's product.
So what is preventing OEMs from releasing a Chrome OS phone which runs both Android apps and desktop Linux apps out of the box without this Dex/Canonical vendor-specific solution?
As far as I know, the compatibility layer for running Android apps on Chrome OS is closed-source, which means that any OEM wanting to do this would need Google’s blessing and access to their source code. However, if there were a phone that did this, I’d buy it for sure.
I've been looking for such thing for a long time now.
If you have a corporate Job like consulting or something equivalent it's very likely you are packing an awful laptop with you everywhere you go, a DELL or a Lenovo or something like that.
DEX opens a door for next generation Mobile Desktop , where you SmartPhone is also your Desktop Computer.
I really hope Apple does something similar in this area , the new iPad can be connected to a screen, but the real deal would be using the iPhone with as a laptop...
I won't hope that a phone would handle 10000 rows much better.
But that "Excel" thing might be an answer: the laptop must be running Windows, and Windows users often run an antivirus, and some Windows antivirus software is known to be terrible. (The MS-provided basic antivirus was always fine in this regard, though.)
So Ghz is Ghz regardless of x86 or ARM as thisvis just the clock speed.
Another discussion is how much work is done each cycle. For that you might use GigaFLOPS or TeraFLOPS (10^9 or 10^12 dloating operations per second) or another absolute measure of performance.
Yet that i5 will be way faster than whatever ARM is in Galaxy. It will also have much faster SSD than the eMMC in phones, and will be paired with faster RAM to boot.
All these things take way more energy, so your laptop will also have much bigger battery.
Some exception cases: the phone needs to run a Mobile device management agent that installs and launches an antivirus, or the mobile happens to connect to a corporate VPN that routes all traffic and then inspects it via some appliance.
Indeed one of the biggest drains on corporate productivity are unaccountable bully IT departments. I recently quit a job because I wasn't allowed to escape aggressive antivirus software that made compilation insufferable.
What did they do to that poor computer? On my 3 year old Thinkpad Chrome/Firefox take < 1sec to start and Gmail takes a couple seconds to load. Can't talk Excel as I don't use it.
3. Throw a large bucket of badly written monitoring apps, security apps, encryption apps, in-house apps, and pointless business notification apps.
4. Lock down the OS so the end-user can't remove or stop any of the added chaff.
5. Watch the nice shiny new laptop slow to crawl under the weight of all that crapware.
This is speaking from experience - I have 10+ years of designing and deploying corporate Windows based Desktop/Laptop builds. It all starts fine, until some clueless internal committee decide that they want to install everything and the kitchen sink onto your nicely designed platform...
The whole point on Dex is that you can connect a phone to a big screen and a big keyboard. Well, maybe your clients will provide you with a decent screen and a decent keyboard. (If I were a consultant, I'd pack my own. At this point lugging a laptop starts to make sense.)
Also consider Chromebooks. You get the desktop version of Chrome (ie whatever extensions you want), windowed interface, runs Android apps, and via the rapidly maturing Crostini project you can also run Linux apps. Heck on Intel based Chromebooks you can run Steam and use Proton/SteamPlay to run Windows games (and other Windows apps).
The nicest thing about the Chromebooks is that the software is identical, but the hardware varies from $200 cheapo devices all the way up to almost $2,000. This means you are far more likely to find your own sweet spot of price, size, memory & cpu, storage etc.
Some also have LTE so can be used as an alternative to a phone.
Because of their dependence on Google servers, Chromebooks (or using any cloud-based service) make it very hard to satisfy confidentiality requirements that are imposed by clients for consulting jobs.
> DEX opens a door for next generation Mobile Desktop , where you SmartPhone is also your Desktop Computer.
Remember, Microsoft tried this with Continuum for Windows 8/10 and Windows Mobile, it failed. No-one actually wanted the core of their desktop inside their phones. People have partitioned off different use-cases for their PC and smartphones, and the overlap is smaller than designers think.
> we still need the pc revolution on mobile devices.
The PC revolution happened because of very open hardware specifications and a non-monopoly on the firmware (the IBM BIOS was reverse-engineered by Compaq).
I think you’re underestimating Apple’s chip performance. Going by https://browser.geekbench.com/ the best performing Android devices(Samsung’s special thing for single-core, Snapdragon 845 in a OnePlus for multi-core) appear around even with an A10 for single-core and an A10X with multi-core. If this/last year’s Android chips were enough to make Dex viable, you’d expect last generation’s iPad Pro and the iPhone 7 to be capable of running Apple’s solution.
Oh not at all. Apple chips are beasts and surpass anything out there.
But it's likely a greater chance to see a snapdragon head into a convertible desktop format than an iPhone or iPad, neither even allow a mouse. Still have hope for an A12X powering a MacBook tho.
The Snapdragon 835 is not the enabler here. A mid-range 5-year-old phone has 4 cores at 2+ GHz, more powerful than a 10-year-old computer. Even back then this was powerful enough to run plenty of desktop workloads. The thing that's enabling usage of phones as desktops is USB Type-C which is fast enough and versatile enough to carry video output and a USB singal while powering the phone.
Absolutely. The power of the 835 was not the processing power alone, but pairing the 835 with greater than 3 gb of RAM. This helps push it into a desktop capable experience.
I bought a Sentio Superbook, and my pixel is the only non-apple device I have so I can try to use it in this manner.
"Microsoft tried this with Continuum for Windows 8/10 and Windows Mobile, it failed."
There are plenty of reasons for that, chief among them being the staggeringly-uphill battle of Windows regaining any significant marketshare in the mobile space and (presumably) the lack of software compatible with Windows on ARM.
Meanwhile, Android (and Samsung's phones in particular) are quite popular, and the vast majority (to my knowledge) of Linux desktop programs work on ARM just as well as they do on x86(-64).
You can't discount the confused product strategy re: old software in this failure.
People want desktops to run desktop software. Not WinRT/universal/modern/UWP. They did not understand this. So for multiple iterations, they shipped tablets, phones, etc., under the "Windows" brand that could not do what people think of when they hear "Windows".
They should have shipped a device circa 2012 that let you recompile desktop Windows apps for arm. They had the technology.
It's not that Continuum failed. It's that Windows Mobile failed as a platform (for other unrelated reasons), so we didn't even get to the point where Continuum was even a realistic consideration.
As this project (then called Linux on Galaxy) was first shown on Note 8, but now turns out Note 8 is not supported, I'd wait for them to officially release it and then get a device that explicitly supports it.
Yeah I'm aware of this, but my use case is different. I'm often abroad, but I also often need to contact numbers from my home country, so I wanted to have a phone I could ssh into from abroad and serve as a gateway
Texts are probably possible. (I use Pushbullet, but Android Messages would also work).
Only Apple seems to have got the control over the stack to get calls through iPad/macOS. I was hoping that Dell Connect would be an option but it's not clear that voice is pushed through there.
I want a laptop with a hole where the mouse pad should be.
I want to be able to put my phone into that slot, dock it, and use the screen of my phone as the mouse pad for the laptop.
I want my phone to do all the processing and work. I want the laptop dock to be an extension of my phone, running something like DEX to make the laptop experience work. The only thing I want this laptop dock to do is give me a screen, a keyboard, and maybe extra battery and ports.
Please, someone make this happen. I could use my phone for all computing at that point.
I very much doubt it. It doesn't run Windows stuff, so it's more of a competitor to Chromebooks, and those haven't sold like wild (less than 5% of new sales in 2016). Coupled with the fact that it restricts you in the choice of phone, and I think it's basically DOA.
I figure that’s a good opening for accessory sales (from a product design perspective). It wouldn’t have to lock you into a phone if the connector was universal (ie, the switch to USB C) and adapters to fit snugly into the slot—they could even be cases. Also has the advantage of modularizing the machine.
And most phones swing above chromebooks for price and power, no? This would be an improvement on the format if you ask me. Especially if it could eventually deliver a proper Linux distro or Mac OS.
An HP Elite Lapdock and a Note 9 will get you 90% of the setup you want. I have that setup, it doesn't dock into a slot, it hangs on the side with a USB C cable, but the rest is just as you describe.
I use this as an external monitor for my Chromebook Pixel which I use when I travel. Asus provides a USB A adapter for the USB C cable. I can plug the monitor's USB C cable into a USB C hub's A port, and do power passthrough and run a keyboard and mouse off the other A ports. Assuming your C hub does power passthrough it should charge fine.
USB C hubs with power passthrough, 3 USB A ports, and an HDMI port exist too, so you could run the USB display, HDMI, and a keyboard and mouse all from a single USB C port.
It will depend on their port configuration and display link integration though. The HDMI port might try to claim the USB display bus or whatever, and I'm not sure if you can put multiple USB displays on a single port like that. One will definitely work though.
Why would you want to delegate all your computing needs to the point of complete and utter dependency to the closed-source, restrictive hardware/software ecosystem that is the modern smartphone? You can't even disable the baseband on any flagship model, so just there you're enthusiastically advocating for 24/7 cellular tracking as a feature.
For those of us who don't have a supported device, there's an android app called [Termux](https://termux.com/) which provides a surprisingly linux-y experience. I sometimes code on my 10" tablet with a small (60%) keyboard.
I do lots of work on my phone thanks to Termux and a 60% bluetooth mechanical keyboard. It's one of my most essential apps on Android. Either using it directly or using it to SSH into servers, raspberry pis, etc.
He probably meant hardware keyboard. <strike>I don’t think anyone makes Bluetooth mechanical keyboards.</strike>
Ok I’m apparently totally wrong about that last thing and possibly the first as well.
Actually there are many. I've been using this one [0] for around 2 years, with blue switches. Despite some bad reviews, I don't have any issue with it. It can be paired with up to 3 devices + wired USB, so I can swap from phone to desktop to media center with 2 keypresses.
I use an RK61 one from Amazon[0]. Haven't had any problems with it. I use it quite regularly for my phone and some RasPis. I made a little bracket to hold my phone at the top of the keyboard so I can sit with it on my lap or a table and type for extended periods quite happily.
I use my phone as my primary mobile computer (I don't own a laptop anymore) and am very happy with this setup.
This + emacs + org-mode + a heavily customized doom emacs means I can track money using ledger, generate workouts using a python script outputting org tables and a lot more. Even worked out how to sync my folder to Dropbox, called from an emacs shortcut.
With a free/standard mobile device (that actually do not exists) you can do whatever you want without limit. Unfortunately OEMs do not want that. And "this" is another Trojan horse to let people think the can run free software hiding the details that their software run in a proprietary jail. With enough time and marketing we will have a new generation of people who find pretty natural download GNU/Linux from an OEM store, forgotten another piece of IT freedom we have till now.
With all the ugliness of Android-first computing, I percieve it as a good thing that major brands are waking up for the public request of native GNU/Linux UX on mobile computing devices.
I love this idea. With insane mobile processors, terabyte storage on phones, external GPUs, and USB-C docking, we're tantalizingly close to "I do my computing on this device. It's in my pocket with a phone interface right now. But once I plug it in at my desk with the GPU dock, it's my computer. And later, I'll throw it in the tablet and use it on my couch."
Backups will need to be good and easy if your main computing device can fall out of your pocket on the subway, and an OS which is happy doing this will need to exist. But for many people, this could be a beautiful world.
Linux on DeX currently supports one customized Ubuntu image (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS version provided by Canonical) which only operates on selected Samsung devices. (Note9 and Tab S4). :(
227 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadIs this a VM on top of dalvik? I assumed DEX was deprecated in favour of ART https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/gc-debug.html I mean it is still compatible bytecode (i think) but who knows anything about android roadmap anymore?
It's not related to dex/art of Dalvik.
Presumably someone in branding at Samsung thinks this makes sense. They might not even be wrong considering this is end user focused whereas .dex files are something only developers see.
Desktops and even laptops make sense exactly where phones don't: large screens, large keyboards, a lot of CPU and battery. This can't fit in a pocket.
The battery life like this is horrible though. I’m not sure if it’s X11 or if it’s that using android’s graphics from C wastes a lot of cpu time or what.
Also whether there'll be GPU acceleration or just framebuffer.
Can we play a 4k YouTube video out of the box in Firefox?
Also there's two SoCs. In most of the world there's a Samsung Exynos and in USA there's a Snapdragon.
There's surely going to be differences here. Especially GPU-wise.
I'm guessing they'll get the support with Android Pie where Samsung also promises that Dex will be usable without their special dock.
So what is preventing OEMs from releasing a Chrome OS phone which runs both Android apps and desktop Linux apps out of the box without this Dex/Canonical vendor-specific solution?
I've been looking for such thing for a long time now.
If you have a corporate Job like consulting or something equivalent it's very likely you are packing an awful laptop with you everywhere you go, a DELL or a Lenovo or something like that.
DEX opens a door for next generation Mobile Desktop , where you SmartPhone is also your Desktop Computer.
I really hope Apple does something similar in this area , the new iPad can be connected to a screen, but the real deal would be using the iPhone with as a laptop...
Even when Excel , Chrome , Gmail take 30-50 seconds to open up ? And your laptop freezes when you are dealing with more than 10000 rows ?
That's your opinion i guess.
But that "Excel" thing might be an answer: the laptop must be running Windows, and Windows users often run an antivirus, and some Windows antivirus software is known to be terrible. (The MS-provided basic antivirus was always fine in this regard, though.)
Galaxy S9 has 2 X 4 Core @ 2GHZ , my corporate laptop has an i5 from 2015 with 2 @ 2GHZ.
I'll go with the Galaxy.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/2018-ipad-pro-review...
So Ghz is Ghz regardless of x86 or ARM as thisvis just the clock speed.
Another discussion is how much work is done each cycle. For that you might use GigaFLOPS or TeraFLOPS (10^9 or 10^12 dloating operations per second) or another absolute measure of performance.
All these things take way more energy, so your laptop will also have much bigger battery.
On the other hand, there are laptops, that have cellular radios. My old Thinkpad surely does.
Depends on what you're doing with these 10k rows, though.
it's like comparing the revs of your cars, it's just the cycle rate, not the Instruction rate
This seems a drastic response.
1. Take a nice shiny new laptop
2. Install Windows onto it.
3. Throw a large bucket of badly written monitoring apps, security apps, encryption apps, in-house apps, and pointless business notification apps.
4. Lock down the OS so the end-user can't remove or stop any of the added chaff.
5. Watch the nice shiny new laptop slow to crawl under the weight of all that crapware.
This is speaking from experience - I have 10+ years of designing and deploying corporate Windows based Desktop/Laptop builds. It all starts fine, until some clueless internal committee decide that they want to install everything and the kitchen sink onto your nicely designed platform...
The nicest thing about the Chromebooks is that the software is identical, but the hardware varies from $200 cheapo devices all the way up to almost $2,000. This means you are far more likely to find your own sweet spot of price, size, memory & cpu, storage etc.
Some also have LTE so can be used as an alternative to a phone.
Because of their dependence on Google servers, Chromebooks (or using any cloud-based service) make it very hard to satisfy confidentiality requirements that are imposed by clients for consulting jobs.
Remember, Microsoft tried this with Continuum for Windows 8/10 and Windows Mobile, it failed. No-one actually wanted the core of their desktop inside their phones. People have partitioned off different use-cases for their PC and smartphones, and the overlap is smaller than designers think.
we are still in the mainframe/timeshare stage.
The PC revolution happened because of very open hardware specifications and a non-monopoly on the firmware (the IBM BIOS was reverse-engineered by Compaq).
Snapdragon's 835 changed that. So will the A12X from Apple.
But it's likely a greater chance to see a snapdragon head into a convertible desktop format than an iPhone or iPad, neither even allow a mouse. Still have hope for an A12X powering a MacBook tho.
I bought a Sentio Superbook, and my pixel is the only non-apple device I have so I can try to use it in this manner.
There are plenty of reasons for that, chief among them being the staggeringly-uphill battle of Windows regaining any significant marketshare in the mobile space and (presumably) the lack of software compatible with Windows on ARM.
Meanwhile, Android (and Samsung's phones in particular) are quite popular, and the vast majority (to my knowledge) of Linux desktop programs work on ARM just as well as they do on x86(-64).
People want desktops to run desktop software. Not WinRT/universal/modern/UWP. They did not understand this. So for multiple iterations, they shipped tablets, phones, etc., under the "Windows" brand that could not do what people think of when they hear "Windows".
They should have shipped a device circa 2012 that let you recompile desktop Windows apps for arm. They had the technology.
And it requires a note 9. Sunnuva.
A jail's a jail, no matter how big, decorated and comfortable seems to be.
Having owned the note 1, 2, 4 and now a pixel 2, I left because of the poor history of timely and current updates by Samsung.
If Samsung could provide the option of running native Android like LG is, this would be a compelling option.
I send SMS from the command line by curl'ing twilio ...
I do at least half of my testing this way, from inside my terminal that I am already working in (I wrote a little sms script in /bin/sh).Of course this means that your phone number has to be at twilio (either source the number from them or port it to them).
[1] - https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux:API
Only Apple seems to have got the control over the stack to get calls through iPad/macOS. I was hoping that Dell Connect would be an option but it's not clear that voice is pushed through there.
If you're on Google Fi, you can make (and take) phone calls on your desktop via Hangouts.
I want to be able to put my phone into that slot, dock it, and use the screen of my phone as the mouse pad for the laptop.
I want my phone to do all the processing and work. I want the laptop dock to be an extension of my phone, running something like DEX to make the laptop experience work. The only thing I want this laptop dock to do is give me a screen, a keyboard, and maybe extra battery and ports.
Please, someone make this happen. I could use my phone for all computing at that point.
It is still a concept, but Razer's two phones have been the same size, so it remains a possibility.
Is it just me or would something like that sell like wild?
Given how saturated the laptop market is, that's actually not terrible.
And most phones swing above chromebooks for price and power, no? This would be an improvement on the format if you ask me. Especially if it could eventually deliver a proper Linux distro or Mac OS.
Attempts have been made before, like the Asus Padfone line, but it never really caught on.[0]
[0]https://www.asus.com/Phone/PadFone_S_PF500KL/
Minus the hole, that is one of the many features of kdeconnect: Use your android device as a wireless touchpad and keyboard.
Basically, connect screen to get debian.
USB C hubs with power passthrough, 3 USB A ports, and an HDMI port exist too, so you could run the USB display, HDMI, and a keyboard and mouse all from a single USB C port.
It will depend on their port configuration and display link integration though. The HDMI port might try to claim the USB display bus or whatever, and I'm not sure if you can put multiple USB displays on a single port like that. One will definitely work though.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/DREVO-Wireless-Bluetooth-Mechanical-S...
I use my phone as my primary mobile computer (I don't own a laptop anymore) and am very happy with this setup.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Multi-Device-Mechanical-Rech...
And the buttons are in the right place (!)
Thank you.
BTW: dropbox is lame until you can use encfs over it ;)
> * Phones should be connected to an external display to use Samsung DeX.
> * Selected Samsung HDMI adapter/cable is recommended to use Samsung DeX.
> * Samsung DeX using a HDMI adapter or cable is only available on Note9 and Tab S4.
------ So really, DeX only works well (with HDMI cable) on Note9 and Tab S4?
Does it work if you do that + use Bluetooth peripherals?
Backups will need to be good and easy if your main computing device can fall out of your pocket on the subway, and an OS which is happy doing this will need to exist. But for many people, this could be a beautiful world.
"Only use authorized images provided directly through Linux on DeX. Other versions or unauthorized images may not operate properly."
Seems to imply, to me, that it is not impossible to run other images in this container.