In 2013 I bought an Ubuntu Phone. Not because I needed a new phone, but because the demos kept showing one specific thing: plug the phone into a monitor, and it became a desktop. Same device, same apps, no second OS. I wanted that to be real. I didn't just buy one. I was twenty, and I started writing to OEMs and ODMs, asking for datasheets and reference devices, half-convinced I could port a convergent shell onto something I'd eventually sell. What I got instead was a crash course in why phone hardware is the way it is. Halium kept me alive on a handful of devices, but most of the time I was fighting opaque binary blobs, vendor kernels frozen on branches nobody had touched in a year, and OEM support that was technically polite and practically absent. The hardware ended up unmanageable, the optimizations I wanted were impossible to land, and the plan died there — but that was the period where I learned the most about how things actually work below the application layer.…