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Hello, the work that UBports is doing to maintain and improve this system is to make a tribute or at least collaborate with them as much as possible. Doing things well requires time, perseverance, doing and remaking until you reach a point where you know you can not improve.
For some time now I have questioned whether the approach that has been made about convergence is correct. Should not we make it easy? Developing an application to work on tablets, phones and computers is not. Why do not we rethink how we arrived at convergence? Because it can be reached in several ways.
Have a single huge application, in terms of size and use of resources in a small device to access the data and that when you connect to a monitor to access them to edit is the path you are trying to get, but if we can optimize all this that much easier.
How? Separating data and data processing, but linking the access between the desktop application and mobile data in an easy, safe and fast way (by wifi or cable). The data would always carry updated on the mobile (being able to make backups programs on other devices) all data agenda, tasks, activities, calendars, emails, documents, tables ....;
The processing would be with software optimized for each device and fully compatible with the data format, always saving the data in the mobile, to avoid duplicates or different versions.
I think this way would be more optimized to work, allowing mobile devices to go more fluid and avoid having to run heavy applications when they are not going to use much of the code.
Forgive for all the text but I think it was important that at some point we stop and go back to where we are going.
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It sounds like you're basically suggesting to just have the phone be a data storage device, perhaps with some viewer apps, but not to have actually converged applications.
I don't think this really would solve anything, and still would require massive development effort to make legacy apps work this way.
I think it would be better to keep pushing for the design vision where you can run the same apps on any form factor. This forces designers and developers to limit themselves and think more about specific problems the apps are trying to solve, and provides better interfaces and better applications.
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When I visit a website, I expect it to work equally well on desktop, tablet and phone. Nowadays, this expectation is fulfilled quite often. Take this forum as an example
So why not put the same standards to native apps? Seems only natural to me.Some years ago, HTML and the best practices in design were not suited to handle mobile devices. Then, the technicalities were solved and the way of thinking changed. UI toolkits like Qt now help to evolve native applications in the same way.
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@dobey I do not suggest that at all. But while the developers manage to overcome the challenge of executing i786 architecture applications in arm devices in a native way, without resorting to virtual machines, the optimal thing is to use the best application for each device, I even suggest that we do not keep the data in the cloud, but that our mobile device is the cloud where we can run a server, a database (the raspberry pi already does). The mobile would have all the prominence in terms of data processing, including editing, then you can connect a PC to the same as when you connect to your raspberry pi or nextcloud or gdrive.
Without a doubt, the work that UBports is doing is worthy of recognition and I hope that the ut project is a success. The normal thing is that they get it when the old devices with ut are no longer in the market due to the limitation of their technical specifications. Running firefox, libreoffice, inkspace on a mobile of only 1 gb of ram would be quite an achievement, but unrealistic. -
The problems have nothing to do with running x86 apps on ARM. The problem has to do with running apps built for touch on traditional PCs, or apps built for traditional PCs on touch devices. The goal is to push developers in a direction to solve those problems, not to be enablers of legacy developers.
It's not about being able to run legacy applications. The goal is to replace legacy apps with sleek, modern applications, which are designed to handle the challenges of both touch and traditional input methods, as well as varied screen sizes and resolutions.
You can do what you want already, really. Set up your own NextCloud server at home, sync your data between your phone and home NC server running on your PC, and use traditional PC apps to edit your data on the PC. If that's all you're looking to achieve, there's basically basically nothing to do at this point, beyond simply improving system integration. But that is not convergence.
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Just a little sideways move to a better location.
