Sadly, Dex is hardly ready for any sort of full time replacement. The fact that it eats key presses (samsung reserves some common key press combos, for odd and atypical behaviors, for instance, if you press shift and space within two seconds of each other, it eats the keypress, and tries to activate the change language option)
For the hardware its running on, I found it surprisingly sluggish.
Over all, I wish they'd just call it beta software, and not ruin first impressions with this really buggy implementation, of a brilliant idea.
> if you press shift and space within two seconds of each other, it eats the keypress, and tries to activate the change language option
That annoys me too, but Windows also has a similar problem - if you accidentally press Start key & Space at the same time, it switches you to the next keyboard language. I wish I could turn that shortcut off on both operating systems.
I just need a command-line environment for some of my stuff when I'm remote, and Termux so far does the job wonderfully for a small amount of processing power.
I can even pass URLs to the share intent and run commands on it (ex: youtube-dl, etc)
I'm more used to a workflow like Panic Coda (integrated text editor with built-in SFTP). For that, I found Quoda [1], even the name suggests it's trying to be a Coda clone for Android. It's a bit rough & needs work - nowhere near as good as Coda on the Mac - but it got the job done when my main machine was broken & I had to use my DeX for a while.
I got a DeX Station for my S8, as the official ones are really cheap on eBay now. Plugged into my Dell monitor & bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it's a surprisingly good desktop experience. It feels like the direction Apple might be heading with Marzipan too - imagine if there was an iPhone dock that let you run iPhone apps just like desktop apps, like an alternative to a MacMini.
The DeX Station has a built in USB port, and the big surprise for me was that you can plug in an external USB hard drive (and with the right software you can access Windows NTFS & Mac HFS drives), and it even works with my Focusrite 2i2 audio interface. Once I plug in the Focusrite, suddenly my phone can play music over my JBL studio monitors. (I haven't had a chance to test if I can record phantom powered microphones at 24-bit 96kHz with it, but I've seen blog posts suggesting that should be possible too.)
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] threadFor the hardware its running on, I found it surprisingly sluggish.
Over all, I wish they'd just call it beta software, and not ruin first impressions with this really buggy implementation, of a brilliant idea.
That annoys me too, but Windows also has a similar problem - if you accidentally press Start key & Space at the same time, it switches you to the next keyboard language. I wish I could turn that shortcut off on both operating systems.
I can even pass URLs to the share intent and run commands on it (ex: youtube-dl, etc)
Termux filled the terminal gap for me as well.
[1] http://getquoda.com/
The DeX Station has a built in USB port, and the big surprise for me was that you can plug in an external USB hard drive (and with the right software you can access Windows NTFS & Mac HFS drives), and it even works with my Focusrite 2i2 audio interface. Once I plug in the Focusrite, suddenly my phone can play music over my JBL studio monitors. (I haven't had a chance to test if I can record phantom powered microphones at 24-bit 96kHz with it, but I've seen blog posts suggesting that should be possible too.)