On Monday, 14 December 2015 at 15:01:36 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
On 12/12/2015 01:13 AM, Joakim wrote:
Desktop Android's certainly not there yet for everybody, but
it is for
my admittedly low demands, and soon will be for everybody, as
google has
said they're working on built-in multi-window for the next
version of
Android.
Personally, I would need far more than just multi-window
support for Android to be a worthwhile desktop OS for me. A lot
of the issues (though not nearly all) relate to software
ecosystem.
Yes, even after Android gets multi-window, it will take years for
all the software to adapt. Hell, there still aren't that many
Android apps that have a tablet UI, despite Android tablets
having been around for years.
Also, this is purely psychological, but I feel claustrophobic
when using multi-window that doesn't allow arbitrarily-sized and
overlapping windows, even though I don't use that feature most of
the time.
For example, I can't even find a halfway decent alternative to
windows notepad, let alone any better text editor.
I find that hard to believe, considering Notepad may be the worst
text editor I've ever used. :) I've been using the vim package in
Termux, same as I do on every other machine.
Basic undo/redo support is rare in Android software, as is
saving/loading actual files and sharing user files between
different programs on the same machine, which is something
desktops had pretty much sorted out decades ago.
I don't know about the prevalence of those features, as I
uninstall far more apps from any Android device than the few I
usually install, but I suspect undo/redo will become more common
as Android starts getting used more for productivity and file
support has always been there, if not front and center for mobile
usability reasons.
The whole backup/restore situation is a mess (there's an
article that explains my issues with it better than I can, but
my link to it is buried somewhere ATM), PalmOS already had
backup/restore sorted out much better over a decade ago. Heck,
even same with iOS if you can tolerate iTunes and, well,
Apple/iOS.
I've never restored an OS, so not something I've had to deal
with. I usually simply manually backup any files I consider
important, and almost never put anything worthwhile in app
settings, so don't care about those. For example, I never
bookmark anything in browsers, going from memory and google
search instead.
That's just a few off-the-top-of-my-head examples. There's many
others, like the bluetooth keyboard lag/unresponsiveness that
you've already mentioned, and I can confirm from experience.
No doubt, it will take a while for mobile OS's to become more
productive, as opposed to being used mostly for consumption, like
browsing or listening to music. But that is inevitably what's
going to happen, just as PCs killed off the more powerful
workstations.
My point was simply that if you program and like to do a lot of
stuff from the command-line, the recently introduced Termux app
actually makes for a surprisingly pleasant experience on an
Android device. And programmers are guinea pigs for what
everybody else eventually does.
