Honestly even though I’m fully invested in desktop/laptop Linux. I kinda don’t get the buzz for a fully Linux phone, When de-googled Android exists and is already optimized for phone/touch use.
Only argument I have in favour of it is, it’s less dependant on Google.
But outside of that I don’t get the hype for running desktop apps (that normally aren’t designed for small touchscreens) on a phone.
You aren’t meant to use it on the small screen. We have increasingly powerful computers in our pockets that we use to watch TikTok, wouldn’t be nice if you didn’t have to buy a laptop/desktop for school/work and could just dock your phone and have a full desktop experience?
You could already do that with a lot of use-cases, but we can’t yet fully utilize the power of our phones when docked.
I’d much prefer the devs to spend time adding more linux drivers for the hardware and then we can just install linux without android
Basically androids is linux but on crack. One thing that’s holding developers back from further developing Android are Google and smartphone manufacturer. As time goes by, Google implements many things they consider “security,” but they turn out to be the biggest stumbling block.
Don’t believe it? We used to be able to customize our Android devices to our liking without having to worry about “Play Store Integrity Check,” “Play Store Protect,” or “Bootloader Check,” etc. Now, we can simply resign ourselves to using the stock Android device that came with our smartphone, without being able to modify it or sacrificing the features lost due to custom ROMs.What’s super ironic is the “Android is more versatile than iOS” crowd is suspiciously quiet now.
We told you, Google doesn’t give a shit about you. That was a strategy for rapid growth. Once they got everything they wanted out of you they were going to lock it down just like Apple did.
Android does provide other abstractions for app devs. That could become a flatpak runtime at some point though …
One of the big questions that comes to mind is, why do I need Android to run Linux stuff?
because it’s a pocket computer that fits in a small place and can drive an external display
Firefox desktop on an Android convertible tablet.
Edit: I realize there’s no context here. Android tablets have great displays and battery life. Being able to run desktop apps, like Firefox, Codium, GIMP, etc, is a great way to have a low-power ARM laptop, while easily being able to switch to landscape mobile apps for say, reading magazines or Lemmy, etc.
Basically great “single devices”, especially for travel.
Imagine GZDOOM without paying for delta touch
I don’t really care for this one (though it is pretty cool) but I’d love to be able to run Android applications natively on Linux in a way applications cannot detect so some moron dev doesn’t try to block Linux.
I wonder if this effort is going to bring us any closer to that.
There’s Android Translation Layer (ATL) which is currently being developed.
Not sure if it will meet your specs but I do hope it can replace Waydroid in the future.
Waydroid right?
Android certification is a problem though from what I can tell
Eh, it’s always run slow and buggy for me. I prefer Genymotion even though it’d not open source. It even runs on old Atom processors last I checked.
Could someone test this with programs like GIMP, Darktable, and Inkscape? I’m curious about the potential of the Android phone as PC, particularly with the merging of Android and Chrome OS. If Android’s desktop mode progresses enough to a level of maturity to run Linux programs sufficiently, this combined with the general Linux on ARM efforts of Asahi and others could prove to be THE solution. Just imagine one of those tri-folding phones unfold to a tablet size with a folio-style keyboard and trackpad, then plugging the tablet-phone into a monitor and desktop setup to “get real work done.”
Gimp already runs OK on ChromeOS, so I would expect the same on Android soon.
Because Linux runs in VM on ChromeOS, there were some annoyances and there will likely be some on Android.
Maybe they fixed it, but for a long time Linux on ChromeOS couldn’t access Yubikeys because Google choose not to expose those devices to the container.
And some keyboard shortcuts and mappings couldn’t work because again Google limited what the container was allowed to see and control.
And if certain kinds of problems happened, you ended losing both the apps and your data inside the Linux container.
Yeah, it will be cool to run desktop Linux from your phone. But if doing Real Linux Work on Chromebook doesn’t appeal to you, don’t expect it to be better on Android.
Year of the linux phone?
