New Samsung Video Demos Linux on Galaxy Smartphones (liliputing.com)

Slashdot reader boudie2 tipped us off to some Linux news. Liliputing reports: Samsung's DeX dock lets you connect one of the company's recent phones to an external display, mouse, and keyboard to use your phone like a desktop PC... assuming you're comfortable with a desktop PC that runs Android. But soon you may also be able to use your Android phone as a Linux PC [and] the company has released a brief video that provides more details. One of those details? At least one of the Linux environments in question seems to be Ubuntu 16.04... While that's the only option shown, the fact that it does seem to be an option suggests you may be able to run different Linux environments as well.

Once Ubuntu is loaded, the video shows a user opening Eclipse, an integrated development environment that's used to create Java (and Android apps). In other words, you can develop apps for Android phones with ARM-based processors on an Android phone with an ARM-based processor.
Samsung promised in October that its Linux on Galaxy app will ultimately let users "run their preferred Linux distribution on their smartphones utilizing the same Linux kernel that powers the Android OS."

Comments

Samsung is so unoriginal

[OrangeTide]

Motorola Atrix from 2011 was an Android phone that would run a Linux desktop (X11) when you plugged it into an external monitor. And there was a dock for the Atrix that gives you keyboard, display and extra battery. The Atrix dock did not sell well and a lot of hobbyists picked them up at a discount and rewired them for their own projects, mostly into Raspberry Pi laptops.

Normal people and computing requirements

[DrYak]

Normal people don't run Linux!

Normal people usually run a browser, officially to use their workplace's outlook webmail and some google docks (but in practice even more to surf on Facebook and/or Youtube).
Which such a phone will provide.

Normal people might also need from time to time to open some MS Word document. To which the recent enough version of LibreOffice provided is compatible enough.

The only thing that is going to be hard to pull off with this kind of "smartphone as a desktop's CPU" is the typesetting dumpster fire that is PowerPoint (not two different version of Microsoft's official product are compatible with each other. Don't keep your hopes to high regarding pixel-perfect import to LibreOffice).
But on the other hand, the fact that this device has an HDMI out, kind of indirectly solves the problem, by making sure that the same device and software used to write the presentation can also be used to show it.

Also, this Ubuntu-based desktop is 100% compatible with Youporn which probably solves the needs of 99% of internet use.