Qualcomm claims that my Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus’ Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU is faster than the Intel Core Ultra 288V chip. My smartphone also has 12GB of RAM and 512GB of solid-state storage. In short, it’s more powerful than most of my laptops. So why not use it as a laptop?
Why not, indeed, says Google, which has introduced – at long last – a native Linux Terminal application in its March 2025 Pixel Feature Drop.
oh i like this.
too bad its still android with al there tracking and bloatware. Hopefully degoogled roms will follow
I’m pretty sure I saw this is going to work on graphene
This doesn’t sound like proper linux to me. I want to be able to plug in a USB (or what ever the storage device would be, microUSB for phones I guess) and boot from that. Where 1 image works for any device of the same architecture. This is the main thing I dislike about ARM currently.
How about multi-booting via Ventoy?
I don’t think anybody expected that. This is just a shitty headline.
Yeah, and I’ve never understood why that is. How come you have to build a custom hardware abstraction layer for each device separately on ARM chips?
My dream has been to have a phone that works like a phone until I get home and plug in a monitor and kbm then it’s a full fledged PC. Think Dex but not shitty Samsung Android. While I’m dreaming while docked it could also utilize a desktop grade GPU.
Honestly the steamdeck shows we are getting close. It works like that, just in a slightly bigger form factor and without some of the phone hardware.
A little more tech advancement and I think this won’t be that hard to do.
IIRC you can do exactly that with the Nintendo Switch (carry it around like a handheld until you plug it into the TV and it becomes a stationary console), though i’ve never had a Switch myself so i don’t know for sure.
The switch is more or less the same when docked, only additional feature is you get to use a higher resolution.
That would be the life.
I join you on this. The closest I found is a and old surface pro with Linux and waydroid on it. It is nicer than all my previous try but far far from perfect, not even good. Just meh + +.
I do this today with my Librem 5 and a 1 TB uSD
May I introduce you to what already existed at one time? (Motorola Atrix 4G from 2011 with Ubuntu desktop when docked.)
I think it would have been much bigger if Pixels had hmdi out in the first few gens.
Dex is the closest I can get right now. I’d love to have one device. However I’ll need to degoogle and foss more things. I rely on Google Too much for games and such.
And what’s stopping you? Install new LineageOS on an unblocked Samsung, check one checkbox xin developer settings and here it is. Without the GPU, of course.
Isn’t that Termux?
Yes, except google is slowly killing Termux with a thousand cuts, while they will kill this only after a few years.
Google just doesn’t understand that they’re killing off the only people who want to buy their shitting products. How many people use Androids? How many people use Pixels? I would feel most people want these phones because we’re tech savvy people who don’t want the abstracted stuff Apple sells.
I thought Android’s market is people who don’t want to pay for iOS for various reasons, mostly due to cost.
There are way way more android phones in the world, but its mostly outside the US, so people pretend Apple is king.
Yes kinda. But if you buy the cheapest iphone and just use it until eol, it’s not too bad. Problem is the cheapest iphone, isn’t too cheap anymore.
They do? Can you elaborate?
Author faces regularly many issues when trying do make a new version of Termux to yet another set of googles demands or restrictions, sometimes unable to update play store version for years. As an (just) example, see this issue: https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-Android-10
This part of the merge between Chrome OS and Android and is intended to replace Cros
This is just a Linux VM just like th Crostini in ChromeOS, so I’d expect similar 40%+ performance loss compares to for example proot container through Termux running natively.
The only thing this could probably offer would be giving you better OS GUI Integration into Android, like Crostini on a ChromeOS device. But if that is needed you might as well just use an Android port or an Android equivalent of your Linux software anyway, it’s not like you’d ever want to run Matlab, GIMP or OpenFOAM on your Android phone with its tiny screen anyway LMAO
Why do we want this when we can already install it via Termux?
Life is full of choices, isn’t it.
Sadly not always good ones…
This is native while termux is emulated, I think.
Is there an official source for this?
The article links to thid blog post, but I did not see anything relevant in it:
Sorry Google, PostmarketOS will scratch that itch and soon enough eat your lunch: https://postmarketos.org/
I like postmarketos, but lol. Lmao, even.
Man I feel I’d almost wiped the debian install and added NixOS (nix package manager works fine under debian) using nixos-infect
A clean install and a night’s sleep and I’ll probably forget I was attempting this, but looks promising.
And I’m having issues writing / completing the install to /boot
Files are written to boot by the nixos-infect script, then disappear after sometime… If the VM is shutdown / rebooted I get the previously displayed unrecoverable error screen.
Might be an easier way to achieve this.
Is this termux or what?
I am pretty sure it was possible even like 15 years ago through unofficial app on Google Play. What’s new here?
I remember running some linux distro on my G1 wayy back in the day. Idk if it was debian, but it was a formative learning experience for me since it taught me what “chroot” was.
It’s now official™
Samsung’s DEX had a downloadable Linux VM running nearly a decade ago.
And they killed it right?
Never even got to a production release. ☹️
Motorola had something similar too. Forgot the phone model, but it ran a modified version of ubuntu when you put it in a dock.
Wasn’t it just running Android in desktop mode?
What’s the catch
Its goog so:
- you get Debian terminal, run whatever you want!
- they get to track everything you do, remember your passwords for you and sell that data to everyone they can!
The GrapheneOS devs have been working on enabling this with all their hardening tweaks
Everything you want, except sudo! That’s freaking dangerous for you!
This incident will be reported.
To Santa!
If this will be anything like the Linux environment in chromebooks, then it will lack hardware acceleration. This could result in linux programs feeling sluggish and slow.
Can’t believe it’s been 10 years since Ms-Dos mobile.
Like the Nokia N900 did back in 2004 - except it was a real mobile OS (but fully yours)
- 2004 wasn’t even 770 times.
