I am looking at getting the new NexDock. It looks like a great product to try out using my GrapheneOS Pixel in desktop mode. There is a way to do most things I do on a computer from within Android/GOS.
I did see on their website that Pixel outputs at 1920x1080 and the NexDock itself is is 1920x1200. Has anyone tried Pixel desktop mode on the new NexDock? What’s the experience like? How’s it look?
Is it worth trying this out yet?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the need here but can’t you just plug your phone to your computer for free? Not sure 120px will make a huge difference and you don’t rely on a 3rd party that way.
the nexdock’s purpose is for your phone to turn into a laptop, not a PC, like when you wanna use it for work or on the go among other things, originally for Samsung DeX but yeah it seems it can be expanded to something like google’s implementation.
Yes you can connect it as a pc if you instead have a monitor, KB + Mouse
with that said you should probably get a phone holder to better incorporate it like
but yeah
Sorry, not sure to understand. What is for you the difference between laptop and PC exactly?
If you have a portable monitor (some of them are collapsible and quite lightweight), it can be a PC IMO.
I refer to PC as a general computer, could be a laptop or desktop. Mostly just “not a Macbook/iPad” is my definition of it. 
EDIT: of you mean that you want to potentially wire the GOS phone to an existing laptop? I thought that people would use a tactile portable monitor or maybe just their phone to move their mouse and type around. But I might be very much wrong haha. 
yes but how are you gonna type and navigate with just a portable monitor
you are carrying a keyboard and mouse separately at this point and can add to the bulkiness/heft
the nexdock makes it a more minimalistic and lighter way to carry
it also reduces the risk of say losing your keyboard or mouse or forgetting it
So, you plan on having a laptop + GOS phone?
Or a portable monitor + GOS phone?
Some monitor are tactile and then it’s some kind of tablet experience with moving windows around + virtual keyboard.
Otherwise, if you plan on having a laptop alongside GOS phone, there is maybe a more direct way to connect them via a cable. 
portable monitor with using the virtual keyboard really defeats the purpose of a desktop experience, this is something that nexdock fullfills
yes technically you can get a keyboard with trackpad and portable monitor but I would personally still prefer something like the nexdock over this
So then, what would be the use case?
To be used in the metro or in an office at a desk?
If first, virtual keyboard or wireless one while having the phone inside a bagpack and connected with a long cable sounds like a good compromise in terms of portability/ease of use. Mostly a matter of learning a few keyboard shortcuts, mouse should be quite dispensable in that situation.
If second, nothing beats multi-monitors setup with a proper mouse + keyboard setup.
no I would think more in the scenario of
you’re a college student, and you sit in a café doing the study/assignment. But yes the metro/airport I also think the nexdock fullfills very well.
with that said in an office yes, I would say you have a proper setup and plug it in, it’s more on the portability side of things
For that, I would consider:
I think it should be enough especially if the assignment is mostly consisting of text editing, apps in the browser or basic tools where minimal movements are required (no Blender on it for example).
With that said, I have not tried it myself but I guess that you can get more lucky looking around for generic reviews (not tied to privacy specifically). If it works with a GOS phone, the rest should not matter too much. 
PS: my personal experience when I was a college student was pretty to work on a regular Linux distro on either my own laptop or a college’s available desktop. I didn’t needed the extra security given that I never really used personal things for my college work (might be different in your use case 
).
I use the Pixel 9a with the NexDock XL (I don’t think they sell this anymore). It works great now. When I first got the 9a in September the version of GOS was tempermental with NexDock XL. Bu, updates in the Nov or Dec timeframe have greatly improved Desktop Mode, and I use it for work now. It still isn’t as good of a desktop experience as with the Librem 5, I use it also. But, it is fine. The Desktop and Window managers aren’t very efficient with use of the desktop space. And controls can sometimes be wonky. I lose control of some windows, and I have to close and re-open them. But, overall it seems to be improving over time.
Thanks for all the replies.
My desire to experiment with Desktop Mode on my Pixel is that I want a secure, easy to maintain, and private desktop/laptop OS. Linux is fine, but I am just a little fatigued of maintaining an OS that requires so much tinkering to keep things working, is lacking in basic security features, and is honestly a pain to keep synced with my phone due to the lack of certain tools that work on both Android and Linux.
I have no illusion that Desktop Mode is totally polished and a great experience. I was just looking for personal opinions of people who have used it. I just need it to work more or less as well as ChromeOS…which it seems like maybe it does, but with some glitches.
I do not want to constantly plug my phone into a Linux laptop because that then introduces the security flaws of Linux to the phone. The appeal of the NexDock is that you can work on something that resembles a laptop without needing to maintain an OS, and there are likely far fewer security risks using the NexDock since it is essentially just a battery, monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and USB hub. I like being able to work on a laptop and not need to be at a table where I could set up a monitor.
I might try it out now, or might wait to see the official release of Desktop Mode into AOSP before going ahead with it. If anyone else has feedback who has used Desktop Mode and/or the NexDock, I would love to hear it.
ChromeOS is pretty much just a hardened browser and I’m not sure that Linux is that hard to “maintain” if you use it with the same usage of “browser-only” needs like ChromeOS. You can set it up once and forget for years if really worried about the maintenance of it.
I’d pick that over a proprietary tool but you do you.
Also, Linux is a desktop OS. You can do quite more things on it in comparison to a basic mobile OS but maybe that is indeed too overwhelming and overkill if you can do all of your inside of Vanadium.
actually alot of what you can do except 3D of course, you can
coding? Acode
document processing? onlyoffice
what else do you do in a college or office work? print files? check android has that too
and the linux environment does exist in android and probably soon to be a thing all though it seems to
still be buried in developer options, i’m still waiting for it to mature.
one way I can see maybe requiring a laptop is if you’re doing some class that requires a single VM like say IT Administration courses for example or some software that you may need a little tweaking to run (say running it through wine) that you can’t just run natively and embarrassing the whole class
I use a fairly unmodified version of Fedora Workstation with fairly commonly used apps. Stuff is broken all the time. I’m doing web searches almost once a week trying to get something working again. Updates break my web browsers. Sites don’t work properly quite frequently even when the browser itself isn’t broken. My GOS Pixel…I install an app and it works…nearly 100% of the time (aside from banking apps…which I don’t use). I trust my permissions work properly. I trust when I turn my mic and camera off they are off. It comes with an integrated Chromium browser that works quite well and isn’t coded and owned by a crypto company. I’m not trying to convince anyone else to ditch Linux, I just am looking for a way to not deal with it if I don’t have to. I used to use more functionality that Linux provided, but some of those products I won’t need to use anymore, and with the upcoming release of Tor VPN, the GOS ecosystem should just continue getting more robust. This thread was not intended to debate the merits of attempting to use GOS Desktop Mode (which is not proprietary), I was looking for feedback from people who have used it and have thoughts about it.
I guess I love building computers and open source too much so that I didn’t waited Android phones to be decent at being a decent desktop experience.
First time I touched a Linux distro was around 20 years ago, nothing anywhere close to a decent experience back at that time. Then I stuck with optimizing my workflow by using nice shortcuts + keyboards + config for my distro so that I could hop in every direction and keep everything under my control with no BS tools.
Nowadays the landscape has maybe changed. And I mean, GOS is an awesome project so I guess it is very much a viable option now?
But I guess I’m too old to give up all of my knowledge/tooling in favor of some mobile app that might be brittle in comparison to the alternative (nothing anywhere close to Sublime text, Neovim or VScode on Android). Also, a phone is for me for either:
It requires to be constantly charged, is fragile and doesn’t allow to have a custom setup with several monitors, dedicated GPU, playing games with friends on League (or alike) and is just not the same kind of device.
You don’t really do real work on a phone from my POV. But again, I might be too old to know how mobile GOS might be.
Also, I never loved using half-ass solutions that are an ersatz of a tool. Like hacking WSL2 inside of Windows to have a Linux-like experience. Or trying to homelab on a Synology or Mac, nah rather have the whole bare metal Linux machine to actually learn useful skills there. No need for any brittle wrappers.
But again, my hobbies + job + projects are also very much tied/aligned with the UNIX mindset and I won’t give up that in favor of a locked-in ecosystem like Android that can be shutdown any time.
You build you computer, you run Linux on it, you’re set for life with valuable skills.
Maybe there is a learning curve, but at least you learn things and understand how they work rather than being like “bro, it is borked, sucks” and turn the machine down. Abstractions are cool until they are not and you need to get your hands dirty.
Getting them dirty from the start makes your troubleshooting skills very useful down the road and you’ll have the hacker mindset with any future tech you use from that point.
Precisely, Android on desktop is cool until […] is exactly what I do want to avoid.
No need to have exceptions when there is a FOSS path, I won’t be locking myself anytime soon. If you really want security and want to be close to UNIX, I still recommend MacOS.
Linux is cool if you want to learn the hard skills and get it future-proof for yourself without bending the knee to Apple’s way of doing things.
GOS desktop looks like the worst combo of all. But it is maybe a very good ChromeOS replacement indeed. And yes, I liked ChromeOS a lot too back in the day (if on a tight budget).
I run the same on a Framework laptop, not a lot of issues. Especially nothing intense or heavily broken and mostly comes down from my wish to tinker things left and right.
I really don’t see how this can be a thing. A browser is in itself not related anyhow to the OS.
An exact example of a bug would be welcome. I’m a web developer myself, so you can throw technical details at me, I’m rather curious on how it’s Linux’s fault here. 
Unrelated to Linux in itself. Some laptops allow for that perfectly too.
Even better on desktop of course.
Linux is owned by a crypto company??? Ubuntu? Brave?
Very confused as of who is owning what. 
Very fair. I was mostly curious about the use case. Thanks for the quick discussion and explanation from your (unique) use cases here.