alt Hacker NewsI don't understand what this would be useful for. The Linux terminal app on Android (check Developer settings if you want it) already exists and it uses hardware accelerated virtualization, while this uses QEMU with TCG. The Linux terminal app also supports running a DE (No VNC - as in no VNC, not NoVNC - required!), has full shell, full root, all the features of Podroid, and hell, you could even swap out the terminal if you wanted to. The only advantage to this seems that it supports Android 14, 15, and 16. Am I missing something, or does this have no purpose?
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Not everyone owns one of the limited range of devices that Linux Terminal is available for. For example, no Snapdragon chips currently in use support the "non-protected" virtual machines required by the Android Virtualization Framework. Also, it doesn't jive with Samsung Knox, so the few Samsung devices that this might work on (mostly international models with Exynos chips) will likely not be supported.
Isn't this super limited? It seems to only support the latest version of android which only recently released phones have.
The Linux Terminal app is incredibly buggy in my experience, but that may be because I use GrapheneOS.
The Linux terminal app on Android reddits are full of reports of instability. It is far from being useful as far as I understand. I had so much hope for this being a good way to use my phone as a portal for development, but it's a dud. At least we have termux and proot.
This. Also, for phones that don't support Android virtualization, there's a user-space hack, part of Termux upstream, that allows for root-less chroots via LD_PRELOAD: https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/PRoot.
systemd won't boot with this (needs to be PID 1), but a lot of software will work just fine and there's nearly zero emulation overhead.
Android's terminal app is really slow and takes some time to boot comparing to Termux.
Also, the Terminal app is essentially a webview (as I understand, the reason is architectural).
you seem to have articulated precisely the advantage that makes it serve a purpose for me: supporting the version of android on my phone. presumably i am far from unique in not having android 16
The new app is truly awesome, was able to get a desktop environment running, and a minecraft server & client. Just a shame that you can't pass through USB.
> The Linux terminal app on Android (check Developer settings if you want it)
I don't see it. How do I install it?
I tried it on my Samsung phone. Keeps crashing, "recovery" just deletes everything and you start over from scratch. No session lasted more than 5 minutes.
We can use old phones for running PiHole.
Wow, didn't know this existed, thanks. But 761 Mo download?? That's insanely big for a terminal, what could possibly make this bundle so big?
Personally this toggle doesn't do anything (Android 16, Samsung) so I'm not sure when it's supposed to be ready
My understanding is that the integrated linux terminal is not supported on all processors like snapdragon ones and also is not available on all manufactures like Samsung. Therefore this approach covers a much bigger audience.