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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.
About time. Why can't my phone be my PC? Plug in a monitor, wireless keyboard, and voila! Unless you are running seriously heavy software (Where you would probably use a desktop anyway) a smartphone could probably run 99% of your stuff. I am only talking as software developer here.
My daily-driver laptop is an 8GB RAM 128GB SSD i7 8 core computer.
I can get a, say, Samsung Galaxy Note8 with 6GB RAM and 128GB SSD ARM 8 core CPU. Definetly not fast as my laptop, but probably fast enough to compile some files and run a development environment.
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
After all, it is totally ridiculous to carry around powerful universal computers and restrict them to be used as a phone and phone-type app only.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We heard you like Linux, so we put Linux in your Linux so you can run Linux in your Linux.
VT-100's with no permanent seat assignments, worked perfectly well back in the days of horse-drawn computers. Ah, the reedy "beep" sounds!
I wish they would just run Linux natively and dump the whole Android part.
I though at first that Samsung was unlocking the bootloader so you can install the OS of your choice.
But no, this is an app. Meh.