Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS

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WSL finally has competition... American Sign Language

But you may not run them as root!

I'm fine with that so long as I eventually get to play PC games on my phone.

I'll just stick to Termux and proot, thanks

They are using a VM I think, and they will have Wayland compatibility and app launcher integration like ChromeOS I assume, while still giving you terminal access to that OS.

So it will be better than Termux + some distro + some VNC viewer.

Very cool but I hope they give it proper GUI integration, not just a webview or VNC, which is how the alternatives work.

Termux: "Look at what they have to do to mimic a fraction of our power"

Maybe they could rather fix AOSP. Based on that recent LTT video Google doesn't really give a fuck about it anymore.

I just recently bought 2 phones (one returned, other isn't far from that), one with A14 the other with A13. Changing minimum width to >600dp (to simulate a tablet (larger screen) and trigger tablet mode) has very wild results now. I mean like overlapping icons in notification shade, completely non-functional 3 button navigation, app tray squished to less than width of 1 icon (completely unusable), icons getting off-screen, gesture navigation occasionally not working either, notification shade icons and notifications offset from their background (just a visual problem) and a lot of wasted space everywhere.

Sure, it's in developer settings, but so far whenever I did something to this in up to Android 11 including, the phone just beautifully adjusted to this and everything suddenly made more sense on a large screen.
Though maybe I was just lucky?

I am currently typing this on an old Moto G5s Plus (2017) with the now discontinued PixelExperience (11) ROM. My last bug-free Android experience. I can even route hotspot over a VPN, how cool is that.

Wow. I did not expect people to cite LTT on Lemmy. Who cares about this garbage person?

Probably people who missed the drama. Not like he really owned up to it on his own channel himself.

One disagreement is enough to make you a "garbage person"? Are you 12?

It was a lot more than a single disagreement.

Team members (both former and current) have made some very concerning comments over the years about Linus's private and public behavior, and have repeatedly raised concerns over the breakneck release schedule negatively impacting quality.

Whenever they get information wrong, or make clear mistakes on things that then effect how they review a product, they hide behind the tight release schedule of their videos, which is something entirely under their own control.

Linus himself has shown shockingly poor judgement and communication skills multiple times as he has publicly ran his mouth off and been overall an unprofessional jackass when people have pointed out his mistakes in the past.

They handle redactions and corrections incredibly inconsistently, if at all, and only when there has been significant backlash.

The whole "getting a hand made protoype waterblock for free, failing to do the bare minimum to ensure they installed it properly, blaming their botched install on the maker, choosing not to contact the maker to discuss anything, releasing a scathingly negative review to most likely tank the fledgling startup who sent it to them with install instructions they ignored, being intensely belligerent with everyone telling them they installed the thing wrong, claiming they lost the prototype when the maker requested it back, then selling the prototype as a reward for a charity auction"... that is only the biggest, most publicly called out fuck up recently, in an ever growing history of this sort of bullshit that goes back for years.

Beyond all that, if you have ever watched a single video of his about anything you already know about, it becomes immediately obvious just how much he's and his team are learning the bare minimum about things and then just skating by on production value and speaking as though they have authoritative knowledge.

None of this is inherently damning, except for just how much money his organization makes, and that they project an image of being trustworthy authoritative knowledge sources when they really aren't. Their entire business is based off the concept that they offer trustworthy and reliable information, but they explicitly don't often enough that it is an inescapable problem. When called out on it Linus very publicly loses his shit and blames it on everything but their own failure to do proper research and take enough time to ensure quality control.

This is a marked downward trend in their content and public behavior that has been going on for more than eight years.


Lastly, I never said he was a garbage person. That was the comment I replied to.

Disagreement? What? Piss poor review that completely invalidates itself... Selling someone else's stuff... Not actually owning up to any mistake... What else is he supposed to do to call him garbage?

what did he do?

A garbage review of a cooler by putting it on the wrong GPU, then keeping the important prototype and then even selling it. Of course he never apologized or anything. It's like with "Internet historian", who turned out to be a pile of shit that only steals from others.

Are what point do they stop pretending and just make it a pure linux platform with a different packaging format for any linux app to run in? They are doing it with CROS (or whatever the new Chrome on Linux OS is being called) and maybe it's time to do it with Android. Running a VM just seems quite wasteful.

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But Google would much rather keep all of the data for themselves. If you could actually control what’s happening in your phone, it could interfere with Google’s main business model.

Desktop Linux has nearly no app security. So the VM approach is a malware prevention. Android is the most used OS in the world.

AppArmor no?

Mainly for server applications, not for protecing like your .bashrc, your .ssh or .gnupg folder etc.

You cam teach it expected behaviour of apps...but for .folders I would say that falls under SELinux, which seems to have a learning curve to it

let me??? Termux has userland covered.

Not everyone wants to live in the terminal. I would argue most people don't.

You are certainly welcome to run a stupid-graphics app that gives similar abilities.

So what games are we talking about in the terminal?

I don't know. I quit playing video games.

Oh cool how do I run VSCode in Termux?

Install the server, fire it up, open up chrome in Android and point to it?

Correction: no something's not right it didn't work for me. Looks like it's almost working in nix-on-droid, but something is causing code server to crash.

Yep

Or run an X11 app and connect the GUI, but id argue the web interface is more usable on Android.

Try to use the npm package instead of the nix package, worked for me

Would you want to?

Yes! On a tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard. Should I not want to for some reason?

we should count chrome os as linux then, linux market share +++

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I just need sudo and a package manager

The promise of the smart phone was a mini computer in your pocket. I think we got it, but then the vendor locked the user out of admin on their own bought and paid hardware 🤷‍♂️

Try Termux, it's great.

While it doesn't get you sudo, it does get you a package manager and a decent amount of programs.

I use it and rclone to sync my cell phone's photos to a S3 bucket.

You can totally use sudo if you're rooted. Using su also allows you to acces your native shell instead of Termuxs

You're totally right, but I wasn't assuming they had a rooted phone.

Is there any difference between the native shell and Termux's? I just installed fish and chsh'ed it to default: after syncing over all my dotfiles it looks and acts as expected.

Is there any difference between the native shell and Termux's? I just installed fish and chsh'ed it to default: after syncing over all my dotfiles it looks and acts as expected.

I did the same, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I don't know for sure, but if I hat to guess I'd say that Termux uses chroot to emulate a more Linuxy experience by changing your root to /data/data/com.termux/files/ with it's own bin, etc, lib and so on directories

Using su you escape that chroot and start using your roms root directory at /

I might be totally wrong with this, but that should hopefully clarify the way it behaves

Aah, okay.

I don't mind the chroot too much, especially as you can just use Termux's termux-setup-storage script for accessing files.

But, yeah, I can see how one would want to use su for that!

what package manager?
edit: nvm its apt

Last I looked you could pretty easily get root on many phones, just if you did you couldn't use stuff that checks the device security

If you want to carry two phones you could use one for banks and 2 factor authentication, and have root on the other

Banking is pretty significant

Yeah, that's why you'd want two phones

Terminal applications only? Or does that make me able to run LibreOffice, Kdenlive and whatever I like?

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It gives you a Linux VM but the only interface is the terminal. I've used this with a ChromeOS fork.

Thx. I have limited use for it then. I tend to carry my laptop anyways and just whip it out once I need to type in long terminal commands with pipe symbols, extra characters and press Ctrl-C. I don't think my phone has an adequate form factor for terminal tasks. Though, I occasionally use it to ssh into machines and do some quick fix. But I already have an app for that.

Let's me repurpose an old phone for some headless container funtimes. If I can infect it with NixOS I'll be golden.

Terminal applications only?

As a first step definitively, simply because such a feature needs to start somewhere and text mode is easier than writing a wrapper for graphics systems.

Or does that make me able to run LibreOffice, Kdenlive and whatever I like?

I'm thinking that this is the end goal. Google struggles to get desktop-like apps onto Android tablets. Many people use iPads as primary work computer these days. My employer is switching to them and we're late to the party.

An audacious step for Google would be to distribute Flatpaks in the Play Store. That's very unlikely but it's technically a possibility.

Also, Steam integrating an x86 emulator for ARM devices makes even more sense now. I thought it's mainly for ARM Chromebooks but Android tablets getting an "Install Steam" button and becoming more compatible to games than Windows on ARM would be so bonkers.

Okay. I mean I already have Termux for that. And I don't think a phone or tablet is a good device to operate the terminal or type in VI key bindings. They're much more made for graphical applications and touching buttons and graphical elements. Let's see where this is going. I still like using computers and having like 105 proper keys accessible for my fingers. Especially if my mode of interacting with the device is typing in text. And not clicking on things. But I get that nowadays lots of people use tablets and phones and stuff. And this certainly is a necessary first step.

Desktop apps in a WebView using vnc on a VM on a tablet are a miserable experience that nobody wants to endure

I tried that, too. I already had a Debian VM on my phone years ago. Along with some VNC software and an android app to connect to the virtual desktop. It was really cumbersome to use. Especially keeping it open in the background and using it while doing other things was next to impossible.

Samsung ships a traditional desktop environment on their phones and tablets since years. Phones need to be pluggeg into a USB-C dock, tablets need a type cover. Others followed them with similar environments. Surely this is not meant for touch-only use.

I know. And that seems to be quite well made. Unfortunately they don't have HDMI output on their mid range devices. At least the Samsung phone of my wife doesn't output anything when connected to the TV. And we both refuse to spend $1.000 on a phone. And I mean this convergence is kind of a strange use-case. On my desktop I have a computer attached to the screen anyways. KDEconnect syncs everything and I don't need to attach my phone. And on the go, I don't have a keyboard and monitor with me. I think convergence is useful if you want some private stuff on the second monitor at work. Or while sitting in the computer science lab at school/uni and those machines are locked down. It's a bummer only/mainly Samsung does that. And the situation with HDMI and that USB alternate mode and the manufacturers using that to distinguish their flagship devices from the regular ones. It's probably only a few cents and mainly politics that keeps me from enjoying thinks like this.

I think it's more targeted at tablets than phones.

Nice, so I'll have a workaround if Termux is too crippled by Android's restriction.

I need yt-dlp in my pocket 😬

I prefer the other way around. A decent android emulator for Linux.

They run like shit on ChromeOS, so Google can shove it where the sun don't shine.

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Probably because ChromeOS is only installed on crappy computers. Runs like lightning on my Lenovo.