Android Power Users Can Now Run Full Desktop Linux Environments Without Root Access
Running Linux-based operating systems on smartphones has come a long way. We now have several Linux-powered smartphones on the market that cater to different use cases. Some pack in flagship-level performance, while others try to be a value-for-money proposition.
Sadly, these devices are out of reach for most people around the world due to excessive taxation from their countries and shipping charges. Of course, many do have an older spare Android smartphone laying around.
Why not make good use of it? In this article, we will be taking a look at a very cool project that turns an Android smartphone into a Linux machine with a simple APK file and no root access.
https://itsfoss.com/local-desktop/Open linkView original on lemmy.cafe
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https://localdesktop.github.io/
Minus the itsfoss spam
https://github.com/localdesktop/localdesktop
based on proot, seems like it has both x11 and wayland which is pretty neat. i guess this could be better than termux with termux-x11 in some ways.
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I can't find a list of supported devices, which is disappointing
It should run on most modern android smartphones.
Well it didn't on that guy's
GrapheneOS is not regular android. It disables JIT and hardens many settings. So, things like proot and others can be finicky to work. Everyone else should be fine unless its an old phone or some chinese phone with certain broken features or restrictions.
Not running on my Sony 1 VI with Android 16
You can open an issue on their github. They can help better.
Yeah, doesn't work on GrapheneOS either, bummer
Did you find any solution to this? Or issue to bump up?
From a cursory search there is not. Maybe, try asking on their forums to see if you can disable some security feature.
There's also a native desktop mode for grapheneos now, you can activate it in dev options
Yeah but dont expect feature parity with samsung's dex. Dex's a mile away in small quality of life features. Android's baked in desktop is so barebones I cannot fathom it took google 9 years to get this out. Its embarrasing.
I sold my samsung and moved to grapheneos, but I really miss dex. And gallery.
What about the gallery do you miss?
Simple cropping, drawing and blurring are something I now know I used nearly daily basis earlier. Tried to find a gallery viewer that had simple pixelize and cropping, couldnt find one.
Installed aves libre for pictures, and now using signal's inbuilt pixelize function.
Ah yeah the pixelize feature wasn't something I even knew about. Personally I use Fossify gallery which is nice but I don't think it can pixelize
Nothing in android remotely compares to a full gnu/linux desktop
Not what you want. And it only works on Pixel 8 and above
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/grapheneos-desktop-mode/28826
I didn't, but I didn't look too hard. I wasn't really expecting it to work
Yup, same thing with pixel8pro and grapheneos
Not working on One UI either it seems? That said some people have mentioned it working so I'm not sure what's the cause here.
Although the usage of (x)wayland is novel, there have already beem projects which do something similar before.
Termux can run a linux container in a proot, which you can then connect to via an app like vnc to get graphics.
There exist several options to automate this setup, such as anlinux. There is also the proprietary andronix, which used to be open source but now it looks like tgere repos aren't being updated.
It's bad reporting to frame this as a novel app, when it's not. The novel thing is the way this app does xwayland rendered by a native wayland compositor (instead of remote desktop softeare or other solutions), which is really cool though.
This seems great?!
So with this, you can do pretty much anything in any Linux distro minus any sudo related commands?
This looks to be running a full virtual machine via the Android Virtualization Framework in the same way as the new "Terminal" app in AOSP, soyou have full root control over it.Edit: I was wrong about the backend, per below it uses proot instead
No, the repo says it uses proot. There is no virtualization done.
You're right, thanks!
Well it doesnt seem to work on an s25. Pretty sure its oneui's fault tho
While this is much easier to setup than running Termux, this really doesn't seem to be working well for me. I keep having this problem where it stops excepting mouse input for seemingly no reason. I know it's not frozen because my keyboard still works but I can't use it for more than a few seconds before mouse inputs stop working. I don't have this problem with Termux, I have other problems with it but that's a different story.