Slashdot Mirror
Samsung To Let Proper Linux Distros Run on Galaxy Smartphones (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung has announced it will soon become possible to run actual proper Linux on its Note8, Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones -- and even Linux desktops. Yeah, yeah, we know Android is built on Linux, but you know what we mean. Samsung said it's working on an app called "Linux on Galaxy" that will let users "run their preferred Linux distribution on their smartphones utilizing the same Linux kernel that powers the Android OS." "Whenever they need to use a function that is not available on the smartphone OS, users can simply switch to the app and run any program they need to in a Linux OS environment," Samsung says. The app also allows multiple OSes to run on a device. Linux desktops will become available if users plug their phones into the DeX Station, the device that lets a Galaxy 8 run a Samsung-created desktop-like environment when connected to the DeX and an external monitor.
An S8+ with Dex system is actually very close to perfect for me, what Canonical's Unity aspired to be probably. Even the Standard Android Dex desktop "thing" is pretty close to acceptably good. It's actually only really let down by the quality of the apps, I can't find a decent resizable "sh"-ish terminal or SSH client. There's quiet a few but they all have their own little oddities. After that there is a little bit of clunkiness in the GUI because Android isn't really "desktop" orientated but it's better than some tablet UI's.
They're very, very close. If this works well they'll potentially have nailed it.
Regards, Phil
Linux used to be the core of my computing experience. I used it on my desktop, I used it on my laptop, I used it on my servers, and I used it on my phone (through Android).
But changes within the Linux ecosystem have been ruining the experience for me. Systemd brought me some serious reliability problems. While GNOME 2 was excellent, GNOME 3 has been terrible. Wayland has never worked on any system I've tried it on, and X is feeling long in the tooth. PulseAudio meant that my sound would often not work. Even Linux's filesystems have stagnated, with us still using the old and limited ext4 FS, while other OSes are getting excellent modern filesystems like ZFS.
Over time I've realized that I'm better off without Linux.
When I needed a new desktop and a new laptop, I just got a MacBook Pro. macOS gives me the UNIX-like environment that Linux gave me, but it's far more reliable and the macOS UI is so much nicer than any of the open source desktop environments. While I routinely had to waste hours fixing problems with Linux, especially problems involving systemd, macOS just works reliably pretty much all of the time. It's a no-fuss environment that makes me way more productive than I was with Linux.
All of my servers now run FreeBSD or OpenBSD. FreeBSD gives me the UNIX-like environment that Linux gave me, but it's not infected with systemd, and it's far more reliable. OpenBSD gives me extreme security in cases where that's most important. Both of them are a pleasure to work with, compared to the burden that I came to realize that Linux was.
When I needed a new phone I got an iPhone. Android was perhaps my least-worst Linux experience, but I also got tired of Google not providing updates only a couple of years after I got my Nexus 4 phone. I don't want to have to jailbreak or root my phone just to be able to upgrade! At least iOS supports devices several years old.
So I can't see why I'd want a phone running a traditional Linux distro. My life and computing experience has gotten much better the more that I've distanced myself from Linux. There are a lot of great alternatives out there these days. Maybe Linux was useful around 1999. But the computing world has changed, and Linux has fallen behind nearly all of its competitors.
Thanks for the effort, Samsung, but this product is useless to me.
I wish they would just run Linux natively and dump the whole Android part.