DistroSea It has been updated with an important new feature. Rather, its developer has introduced changes to its service, and one of them changes things a lot: now it is possible to connect to the Internet. It is a function that is only activated for registered and identified users, and will allow, for example, having Linux on the mobile phone, always taking into account that the user experience is not the same as if it is used natively.
So what posted on the X social network, where they also report that Linux Mint 21.2 is now available and that there is an RSS feed to find out about the latest news. But, without a doubt, the ability to connect to the Internet It is the star novelty, since it allows you to use the service on mobile phones, do some management and send it wherever you need it, something that was not possible until now.
DistroSea now allows you to send files over the Internet
If someone is wondering what has really changed, let's give an example: we are far from a computer, and they send us a file that we have to edit yes or yes with LibreOffice. There is a mobile version of the office suite, but it is not complete. Now that DistroSea allows you to connect to the Internet, we can go to their web page, start a distribution that we know has LibreOffice installed by default, open LibreOffice, make all the necessary changes, and once finished, open Firefox and email it to us, or do by Telegram or whatever we want.
However not everything works perfectly, and for some things you have to install some packages. The good thing is that the Internet connection also allows this.
Limitations still present
DistroSea allows us to launch live sessions Linux, and this is the first limitation: the changes will not be saved. Peccata minuta if in the end we take advantage of much of what Linux has to offer us. Another is that it has no sound. Then we can find a problem with the edges of the screens, something that will depend on the browser and is more serious if we want to use Linux on the mobile. We may not be able to close maximized windows from the button because it matches/is below the top bar of the mobile host system.
Another limitation, at least if we think about running Linux from the mobile, is that it is not possible to write anything... But for that there is software like Onboard: we can get a virtual keyboard to write anything, although it is more difficult in full screen applications like Kodi. Speaking of the famous player, it is there and can be used, but it skips and no sound. What did you expect? Even so, this novelty turns a tablet or mobile, even iPhone and iPad, into something that far exceeds an original PineTab that was very slow and could not install programs from official repositories.
In the previous paragraph there is a crossed out part. It is left like this so that the original text can be seen, but you can use the mobile web page (request it if you are on a tablet and it does not come out) and a menu appears on the left from which it is possible to write with the native keyboard.
Available until…
I've been playing for a while with my tablet with its Linux via DistroSea, and I would say that the experience is decent. The impressions have been so good that one cannot help but wonder if this will always be like this, free, or there will be a time when it becomes paid, at which point I will say that about "my joy in a well." But dreaming is also free, and why not do it with something that goes even further, with improved performance and also active sound.
Something similar has existed for a long time, and even better, but it is priced at €9/month in its basic plan. Is about Shells, which is a kind of virtual machine that can be run on any device. Manjaro announced it back in the day saying that they were going to bring their operating system to the iPad, but the truth was very different. Now we can do something similar from DistroSea, and so one wonders if this will continue. I don't remember if DistroTest allowed you to connect to the Internet, but from what I've seen in various videos it couldn't. Therefore, DistroSea does not want to be just a successor, but something more. Let's hope it lasts.