The part that makes it so tough is monitor arms come in standard sizes and are nowhere near long enough or extend far enough for me to sit comfortably. My dad modified my desk for me years ago to mount a monitor arm on wooden blocks, but it means I can't move the monitor much.
Being able to wear glasses and ditch the monitor entirely would be a game changer for me. I know next to nothing about AR though, being as I assumed, perhaps wrongly, it isn't something that would work for me.
Edit: Thank you for the replies. It means a lot. I've got some options to explore here now thanks to you.
2 years ago I switched to a 55" 8k TV as my primary monitor.
While everyone was giving me the usual crap about it, this guy, when I showed him what it would look like with 400% Zoom, he went and bought one for himself at home.
He thanks me every few weeks, but still didn't dare to set one up in the office.
(ps I have mine standing on a normal height-adjustable table, so you wouldn't have to hunch at all)
If your corrected vision needs stuff 6” away, don’t expect AR or VR to be a solution with current optics
FWIW, I use a monitor arm that's mounted on the front left side of my desk (my dad also modified my desk so this would work) so I can pull it as close as I need. It does mean I can't push it back to a normal monitor distance but I'm the only one using my PC so that's not a problem. Oddly enough, I recently got cataract surgery so now I have a lens that makes me focus further away, but now text is too small to read at that distance so I have to use readers to focus closer and use the arm.. seems a little silly but it mostly works out.
My other recommendation would be to consider a standing desk. Even if you prefer to use it sitting, you can tweak the desktop height to your liking and help mitigate the posture issue.
So far I haven't seen anything that can deal with more than -8, and getting a custom prescription is usually prohibitively expensive. I can wear contacts to offset things somewhat, but they just cause added eyestrain.
It allows you to setup a larger virtual desktop that you can then pan around. Instead of moving your head around, you could instead just shift the viewport. Might be more convenient than a larger screen and/or monitor arms assuming you also setup zoom/display scaling.
By default, you pan by moving the mouse to an edge, but iirc you can setup key bindings and/or gestures.
[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution#Panning_viewport
I thought about these glasses, too, when I tore and detached my retina. With the surgery they drained me eye and my focal distance was initially maybe 1cm, and as my eye refilled the focal distance grew. At the time I wondered if sometime like Google Glass would work for me. I feel like there could be a lot of applications for these if they'll work with such short focal lengths.
Something made of precisely cut 2x4 lumber or 2040 frames, assembled like a whiteboard frame but have just a single beam where the board would be. Then the pole of monitor arm can be bolted onto the beam to hang upside down.
Once assembled, the whole thing can be rolled in and up to the front edge of the desk, right up to your face. If someone else needs to use your computer, the carriage can probably be moved back towards the wall.
The reason why display arms extend only so far is because a long cantilevered weight love to wreck the base. The desk top is going to break if it's too far out. So stretching the arm is probably no go.
Google for "long reach" monitor arms; some models have a reach of 30 to 40+ inches. They're not exactly cheap since they come from ergonomics vendors but they allow you to bring a large monitor as close to your face as you like and, depending on the model, clamp to a table like a standard monitor arm. I've had various models of them for a couple of decades now.
The other problem is they aren't quite up against your eyes the way VR headsets are. They project a screen that appears to be quite far away. I imagine you could lower the resolution though, and it might look closer.
The screens are a few inches from your eyes.
b) There are monitor arms that extend quite far, and are easy to install. I use this one: https://a.co/d/fV5llce. Granted I don't keep it 6" away from my face and my desk is a bit too big for that, but I could get it really close if I wanted and my desk was smaller.
There's roughly 4 different approaches to Linux on Android:
• virtual machine emulating x86_64
• Termux
• arm64 binaries running in chroot
• proot.. Same idea as chroot, but doesn't use forbidden system calls
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43973395 & https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-purp...
> The main purpose of this Linux terminal feature is to bring more apps (Linux apps/tools/games) into Android, but NOT to bring yet another desktop environment.. Ideally, when in the desktop window mode, Linux apps shall be rendered on windows just like with other native Android apps.. GPU acceleration is something we are preparing for the next release.
Hopefully Android 2025 Linux VMs will lead to iOS 19 VMs at WWDC, since Apple wants to sell smart glasses to compete with Meta glasses.
edit: apparently this only just released on LineageOS 22.2. Also your hardware needs to support pKVM as you mentioned, which means only recent devices (only Pixels currently?).
In full sunlight I think this requires opacity. I lost the plastic cover for the lenses and I hacked up some cardboard thing.
These glasses have a really cool 3D side-by-side mode. The button activation is awkward, but it effectively turns this into a 3840x1280 screen. I couldn't really find much desktop support for this, but there are a few YouTube videos that are 16x9 SBS and they look really really cool. Unfortunately in this mode the desktop is then super-wide and spread across two eyes, so it's almost impossible to use a regular laptop with them. A 3D OS desktop would be killer on these!
I didn't try to go full mobile with a phone.
The cord is somewhat annoying, but I think I prefer it over a big stupid battery and some wireless protocol.
One wrinkle is that the interface is USB-C. The glasses need power, and though you can/could power them over HDMI, they don't support that. You need the device to support HDMI over USB-C and recognize the glasses as a display. The manufacturer offers a completely hilarious battery-powered HDMI-to-USB-C adapter. I have no idea why there is no powered solution; maybe there is.
Yup, I found laying my head on the left side where the cord comes it also causes them to overheat quick. My solution is to always lay on the right hand side of them and I actually put some stick on heatsinks on the left "leg" body that also really helps keep them more comfortably cool.
Also weird quirk with them and USB-C I've found.
If you plug them in to a macbook it's 50/50 if they work or just turn on the tint. If that happens, rotating the USB-C plug causes them to work.
https://www.amazon.com/Formerly-Connects-Lightning-Compatibl...
I was an original Google Glass developer (2013) and not allowing development via a simulator was one of their biggest mistakes ever. You had to continuously test squinting into the actual hardware. After about 25min it would overheat and you were forced into a cooldown period of about 30min. You couldnt easily put together tests or parallelize testing mundane parts of the app off-device. I ended up with the worst headaches after three months and we pivoted our business to something else soon after.
The keyboard I use and really like is the iClever BK05:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018K5EJCQ
It is backlit and has a standard full size PC layout, including function keys and an "inverted T" cursor key section. The key feel is nearly as good as my ThinkPad. And it comes with a nice little stand to support your phone at a typical laptop screen angle.
It comes with a soft pouch that holds the keyboard, the phone stand, and the manual. Folded up, it fits easily in the cargo pocket of my pants.
Like the keyboard described in the article, it is not suitable for use on your lap because it doesn't lock open. That doesn't matter for me, because I need a place to put my phone anyway.
If you read the reviews, note that the "top rated critical review" has a glaring mistake:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1RVWODQ8SCS2X?ie...
The reviewer says that the keyboard has no support at the left and right edges, so those outer sections don't lay flat and tap against the table as you type.
Wrong! This reviewer didn't notice the two little black tabs that you need to flip out so the keyboard lays flat and well supported. This is also described in the short manual.
Guess it's good to hear I must have had a dud.
[0] https://eshop-cy.com/en/product/targus-pa820u-stowaway-porta...
As far as being outside, I imagine it's very dependent on personality. I often get restless and distracted working from home, and being outside or in a public space will help me feel a lot calmer and more focused. There's also a certain amount of intentionton it takes to "go to a specific place to do a specific thing" that helps me mentally.
It's not something I'm doing every day, but when the weather is beautiful and I'm feeling stuck behind a desk it's so nice to be able to work outside.
Working in a park is amazing. You are still enjoying the ambience/vibe, but yeah, you're also writing a blog post or whatever. For me, that doesn't distract from the park or the productivity. They both enhance each other.
Same with a coffee shop -- this is why coffee shops have wifi passwords, because many people in there are on the internet, soaking up the ambience/vibe.
I think this is only a bandaid to the problem that we're still spending so awfully much time at work, despite massive improvements in worker productivity. I _don't_ want to be working on the bike trail or while lounging or by the pool, I want be in places that are not work
It's not really related I know but it's neat how all those not-strictly-computers are getting more useful!
Edit: forgot the video link! It's https://youtu.be/4ZAzi-4Ko3g?feature=shared
Shame that rooting is such a pain, and risks bricking the device. (Apparently Google's introduction of an anti-rollback bootloader this month has caused a few people's devices to get bricked when they tried to root.)
I hope rooting will be easier for all the interested.
Very curious why these have stalled out at 1080p. They don't have to go much higher, give me 2560x1600 and I will be very happy.
But proot being slightly too slow is a real bummer. I was able to get a lot of stuff working natively on Termux, but every once in awhile you hit a wall and it's sad.
I can relate to the clunk of having 3 different pieces to the setup, but I found myself using just the phone + keyboard pretty often for quick things. And since the desktop environment seems to sit in the background just fine, it wasn't much more than just turning on the phone and opening the keyboard. So in that sense it wasn't much different than a laptop.
> Termux, which is an Android app that provides a mix of terminal emulator, lightweight Linux userland, and set of packages that are able to run in that environment.
Tim Cook, I know what you know (and fear losing Mac sales to iPad and iPad sales to iPhone, so you want them nerfed), but this would make me upgrade my 2018 iPad Pro. I’d love to be able to leave my expensive macbook home for the vacation, and still be able to do some emergency hotfix on a tablet with keyboard (ideally connected to eg. hotel TV).
I have two now - the SPX - they're ~$200 used, with LTE and 16GB of ram, and a SP8 - i5/16gb of ram ~$350 used from FB marketplace. The SP8 runs Fedora 40 and it's light enough that I just keep it in my backpack whether I'll need it that day or not.
Can check out side-loading UTM using AltStore or a local dev account.
https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/
You do lose JIT support in newer iOS though.
This just adds more value more simply than the new ecosystems most AR/VR glasses are trying to establish.
I don't know the specifics but it would be better than having to root the phone and use chroot.
It's sad that a phone running java on top of Linux isn't able to run Linux app without big downside like termux and proot. Hopefully it changes.
It can. It just can't run something expecting glibc, X11, Wayland, or any of the other large number of userspace libraries that Android doesn't have.
But a pure Linux app works no problem. Just shell in and run it, easy.
it was sorta possible before too, but now, it can start up programs with a window etc (and of course someone ran doom on it)
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/android_15_linux_debi...
So to your eyes you're focusing at an object 2-3+ meters away rather than 2-3 cm in reality.
Isn’t this just a function of the parallax when rendering both screens?
I also run a low spec android phone, and I tried the same brand of glasses with it. My workaround was a screencast to HDMI adapter, paired with an HDMI to to DP over USB-C. Both are cheap.
Occasionally the screencast flakes out. But when the network is working well it's pretty good.
I've done some cursory research on the XREAL Air 2 Pros because they are currently discounted at 299 USD. I'm interested in retiring a 4K 43" monitor which has been slightly too large.
My question to anyone who has tried XREAL's products is whether the more expensive XREAL ONE model provides a much better productivity experience for 499 USD?
So far, I'm not convinced the Air 2s provide a 'stable' enough image for productivity tasks as this article states. I found a Youtube reviewer who created a rendition of what it is like to use them for video editing - and they weren't enthusiastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZhD8Dt6akY&t=316s
Linus Sebastian from LTT did go on Jimmy Fallon a few months ago and show off the XREAL ONEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=vybLi25Q8Fw
For me, I'm not interested in XREAL's Android offerings; I'm more interested in Graphine or e/OS, but would need to purchase a new tablet and a new phone with USB-C display output. I did pick up a Chuwi Hi10 X1 Intel n100 tablet a few months ago for about 200 USD, so that solves the battery problem for me. https://store.chuwi.com/products/hi10-x1-n150
If I didn't have that, and wanted to go the powerbank with X86 route, the company MeLE does have some very, very small mini pcs. https://store.mele.cn/products/mele-quieter-4c-n100-3-4ghz-f...
To many people asking about keyboards, I'd recommend simply getting a 60% with bluetooth, or an adapter which converts a regular USB keyboard into a bluetooth adapter. I'm also a trackball user, and the Japanese company DEFT makes some decent ones.
EDIT: To clarify, I meant the "Xreal Air 2 Pro", not the "Xreal One Pro". The latter are much more expensive.
Well, though not in production any more, there is one that is absolutely perfect: Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard.
You can still find it on eBay, and it’s unfathomable — though perfectly in-character — for Microsoft to have terminated it.
Re: Bluetooth keyboard – you can get a Thinkpad keyboard as a Bluetooth one. It’s slimmer that the usual bottom half, so it’s much more portable. But it’s not folding, of course.
Am I the only one who wishes they could be inside in a windowless room 24/7/365? There’s climate control, HEPA filtration, good chairs, peace and quiet, precisely the light level and color and direction I like, etc, at all times. Every time I go outside, the environment is worse than being at home indoors.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one on the planet who doesn’t enjoy being outdoors at all.
I spent a decade in a building like that for my 9-5 job. It gets old, unless you really hate sunlight and fresh air.
I still go out though to walk and cycle, sometimes eat, but anything else is more comfortable at home.
Seems like the sort of thing that might later turn out to have been a bad idea regardless of how it seemed at the time.
I enjoy outdoors for relaxation and forgetting about work though.
They're running a 3rd party OS on their phone using a 3rd party external keyboard and 3rd party display. Interoperability! Imagine that! Running whatever software you want with whatever accessories you want on hardware that you own! Tech should have made it easier to accomplish this!
Issue is that Apple doesn’t allow apps to run JIT so if you want the JIT version of UTM, you need to sideload or Jailbreak. The non-JIT version is on the App Store.
Unless they have a way to lock open, foldable keyboards will always subtly bend which is annoying enough for me to ditch the folding part entirely.
Or head tracking.[1] Aphysical rotation exaggeration avoids trading eye for neck stress.
> I do feel a little weird wearing these in public, but not that weird.
Non-weird can be an expensive constraint, fruitful to relax if going beyond a minimalism setup. A baseball hat can barnacle quite a bit before people find it remarkable... at least around Boston. For instance, for head tracking, an Intel RealSense, or a hat fisheye camera and tennis ball on the table, or an optical marker on a hat chopstick, can be simpler, easier, lower power, and less expensive, than invoking "and it has to look non-weird". With current tech, that's almost as challenging as "and it has to be a product".
> as these AR glasses continue to improve and Linux continues to be flexible and awesome.
I suggest Nreal (now Xreal) made a bad call here. They developed internally on Ubuntu, but chose to shut out linux. (Caveat: I've not followed in a few years, maybe that's changed.) Unicorn dreams and race to mass market - maybe the right call if everyone started watching media on phones with glasses. But it could have been an inexpensive risk mitigation, and a worthwhile investment once market fit was clearly a long haul. Is there some doc which lays out alternatives for a company who thinks they have a crown-jewel binary blob, to allow the community to wrap it for linux consumption, with minimal "we just throw a blob over the wall - we don't support linuxes" cost? It's been a lot of years that something like TFA has been possible, during which a lot of developers could have been exploring for viable market niches. Instead of... not.
Is there a window manager and/or eyeball tracking trick that could be added to this setup to bring content into the center?
You can't comfortably use any XR system for more than videos, if you can't use your neck to look around.
The issue with the top and bottom edges and the too low res are the only downsides; both will be fixed as time passes and the inconvenience beats lugging a laptop and charger around and finding outlets instead of literally never needing any except while sleeping.
I guess you'd need a stable connection though. I might try this as soon as Android actually impliments desktop mode correctly. Surprised OP didn't use Samsung Dex.
I know there are splitters break a USB-C port out into a USB-PD port and a data transfer port, but can those (or a different accessory) also be used to provide PD to the phone for prolonged usage?
eta: Never mind, just saw that the XREAL Hub addresses this. I still wonder if there's a cheaper option, but most seem to be designed for PD out, not in.
Anyways, ended up returning it but kind of wish I thought of just using the phone. Might finally get me to learn NeoVIM
I am a complete novice with this but very interested in replicating the setup as I feel the urge to be freer while coding
To cope with that I have ended up making some toys like Discord bot that evaluates code, requested access from Insomnia 24/7 to SSH into Linux environment for programming purposes.
It was fun experience and I've ended up learning a lot of programming stuff before I've even started my study in university for computer science.
https://www.iphones.ru/iNotes/otkazalsya-ot-ochkov-rasshiren...
> Can someone please make a good folding keyboard? This little $18 piece of plastic is decent for what it is, but this was the weakest part of the whole setup, and it feels like it should be the easiest.
I tried once the apple vision pro and it seemed fine, amblyopia-wise at least. It was too briefly though to know for sure how it would be like using it for longer.
Here is the blog I did discussing the limitations: https://benkaiser.dev/web-development-in-vr/
I wonder if something like this running on the quest could technically work, but I suspect it would be too heavy running Linux chrome in a chroot. You also lose the cool "place and resize your windows anywhere" if it's all stuck inside one window for a desktop.
On keyboards I found a Royal Kludge mechanical keyboard, feels great but unfortunately one of the keys switches is cracked, I'm sure I could glue it down but haven't yead had time to dismantle it.
In terms of lilputian mice, the "CapacMouse" is.. far far better than it should be.
im running the newer pixel fold, so ive already got a ton of screen real estate.
ive made a couple code changes phone-only now, using the amazon internal browser that has ssh access to my dev desktop.
im missing the ability to get cloudwatch logs and the like, but when i get a good mcp, i think i can leave my laptop at home
my previous workflow was mostly on pen/paper though, only touching the keys when i know what code im going to write, or when i need to lookup something specific, so i think im in a better spot for phone dev than somebody with ten monitors each showing some chunk of code
I hope some exec from Apple reads this and thinks about it.
Look forward to when Apple releases AVP Air.
might have to try it with AR glasses. but, the screen is bright enough that it's usable outdoors anyway
i've been using copilot with voice input, with a bit of on-screen keyboard usage when it's not cooperating. i'm mostly giving it fairly simple edit instructions ("write a for loop at line 50"), rather than full on vibe coding, and it's working much better than i expected
i'm not using emacs/vim, because the steam keyboard doesn't have a ctrl key, and i have to use a less ergonomic kde on-screen keyboard to push it (and i'm a heathen that prefers vscode anyway)
I am thinking about some kind of wearable keyboard, either attached to trousers on laps, or kind of gloves. But gloves usually have no tactile response.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43985513#44016985
https://kbd.news/Tackle-keyboard-2549.html
I want to try some version of this next. I’ve tried tap strap (overlaps with glove idea) and I currently use a retractable lap approach, where the keyboard folds out from chest to be used, it’s still too much friction and too awkward.
This Tackle keyboard approach is a bit obvious once you see it if one can be fully touch type without crossing middle then a split keyboard mounted on torso could work… perhaps … these things require actually trying I’ve found.
Researchers ate already able to translate thoughts into text[1][2] by wearing a special cap with a fair amount of accuracy.
[1]: https://www.extremetech.com/science/new-cap-uses-ai-to-read-...
Void FTW!
One overlooked aspect is ergonomics. Laptops are terrible for posture, unlike the poster's HMD setup.
Do American phone companies block sharing wifi from your phone, or why would someone with a phone feel they are tied to a wifi when needing to use a laptop?
I cannot imagine working without a mouse.
I guess as a start the chroot provides glibc and all the other libraries that run natively, but how does any of this interact with hardware?
My issue is the phone. I will need at least 24Gb of ram for my work.
I haven't keep up lately, but as a linux-only dev, is there any hw combo which would give me full native hardware support and the ability to develop for the platform?
(I don't count linux-on-[android|win] as a solution)
> RAM usage often gets close to that 12GB ceiling.
Unused memory is wasted memory. Just because you're almost maxing out those 12 gigabytes doesn't mean you'd be in trouble with less.
Google lens was shot down by a society of thoughtless individuals but we'll see ar happen in a couple decades, I'm sure.
Will be great to life through phones being replaced by glasses and then eventually contact lenses.
They could have worked out the details to make these devices less hostile to bystanders but they didn’t because it was all just a marketing gimmick with no solid business underpinnings.
I'm sooo ready for the one device life! :D
The Vision Pro, like most full headsets, tries to do too much.
So good enough for gargoyling or other situations where even a laptop form factor is a pain, but not a proper replacement yet.