<p><pre><code> > "Google wants to turn Android into a proper desktop operating system"
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Years ago (2020 I believe) I received a new laptop and Samsung S20-something for my new job. The laptop was DoA and I was unable to complete any of the internal training courses assigned to me (which required certs and such to access). I remembered DeX and on a whim, plugged the Samsung phone into my hub with Monitor, Keyboard, and mouse. Set Chrome to desktop mode and "worked" entirely on my phone until they replaced the laptop. It worked shockingly well, even back then.<p>I don't think those types of "desktop mode" features ever took off, myself included, but I really wonder why. If Apple let you run macOS from a tethered iPhone, it just might!
FWIW GrapheneOS is rolling it out as well: <a href="https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114132940314692519" rel="nofollow">https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114132940314692519</a><p>Looks like the GrapheneOS implementation will be less restricted and will let you run operating systems other than Debian, including Windows 11.
The articles language is pretty confusing in the way that the author continues to say "the phone can run linux", even after saying that "of course, android is linux".<p>If the only shortcoming of android, compared to a more typical linux distribution, was that it didn't have a shell interface, that can be solved with the variety of shell programs available for the android environment.<p>However bigger issues remain unsolved by adding a shell. The configuration of the _actual_ linux kernel used in android being one of the most significant. For instance, typical linux has excellent support for all USB class devices, whereas android disables this functionality. USB-on-the-go only supports specific devices in most android distributions.<p>Rather than running a linux user space in an android chroot environment, as has been possible to do for years with many embedded linux flavors: archlinuxarm, debian, gentoo, ubuntu, all have documented means of installing a more full featured user space in a chroot over android.<p>The better/more desirable configuration is to run the more full featured linux kernel and user space directly on the phone h/w, and then run android in a chroot or virtual machine when access to an android only app is needed. Such as this phone:<p><a href="https://furilabs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://furilabs.com/</a><p>This allows the android subsystem to be completely shut down when not in use, thus disabling the goggle surveillance and other undesirable features of android.<p>For any semi-technical phone user, this article is old news. The only thing new about it, is that the chroot is configured by goggle itself, which pretty much insures that the config will be primarily for the benefit of goggle, not the user.
It has enforced isolation so a bunch of things termux kinda does do, won't work to do with file sharing. Not that termux (non rooted) is perfect: Termux can't even make symlinks into externally removable SD cards, if they are formatted for app use and not used for simple file transfer.<p>What it does termux doesn't do so well, is get to the screen. With termux you seem to wind up needing to vnc to an X server on yourself which is clunky.
It's always mind-boggling to me that software engineers find ways to screw things up, and then hype up effectively bringing back features that would have existed if they had done nothing at all.
I didn't know they were doing virtualized hardware sufficient to run a Wayland. That could be very very very simple/bad performance, who knows. But it's something!<p>I really thought this was going to be a terminal only release.<p>I wonder how much of this work was already existing vs how much was diy. Did they use existing virt-* work? Did they bring in ChromeOS's many many virtualized device sandbox daemons?<p>Linked from the article: <a href="https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-linux-terminal-doom-3521804/" rel="nofollow">https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-linux-terminal-d...</a>
it would be really cool if I can hook a portable 15" LCD to my pixel 8, run a debian and use some bluetooth keyboard/mouse to do serious work without carrying a laptop. the LCD though has to be externally powered otherwise the phone battery will run dry quickly.
Memories of Maemo.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo?wprov=sfti1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo?wprov=sfti1</a>
> Of course, Android is Linux.<p>> The Linux Terminal runs on top of a [...] virtual machine.<p>It should, uh, at least be noted that "Android is Linux" doesn't really matter if you're just going to use a Virtual Machine anyway. Android could be based on BeOS and you could still have a Linux virtual machine. You could have a Windows virtual machine, for that matter. I wonder if Microsoft would be interested...<p>I would be interested in what it would take to get a non-virtualized Linux terminal on Android. Android is just a Linux distro at the end of the day, right? Could you chroot into a Debian environment?