Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

I'm mostly worried about Termux. I can't imagine a phone without a decent terminal and I feel my options are going to be severely limited.

View on HN

Likewise. Termux is the killer feature for me. This needs to wait a year or two so a FLOSS phone is ready for daily driving D-:

Netflix, Snapchat, Pokemon Go, Super Mario Run, etc. will intentionally never work on a FLOSS phone, so I doubt it'll ever catch on outside the tiny enthusiast community.

I'm running a FLOSS phone and Netflix works fine. Pixel 4 XL with my own build of AOSP with MicroG.

You still have some non-free bits necessary to do the DRM that Netflix mandates.

What sorts of uses do you have on a phone where a terminal is useful?

Managing your servers from the bar?

Half-jokes aside, keep in mind you can use small Bluetooth keyboards and get a micro-laptopish experience, or connect the phone to a monitor or TV and use a large Bluetooth keyboard to get a more desktop-like experience.

I imagine a terminal could work very well in those settings, if you need one.

* youtube-dl single-handedly would justify installing termux

* rsync (backups, pulling audio files, pushing pictures)

* vim

* git/hg (all my notes live in a repo)

* random scripts (ex. When I was losing weight, I tracked calories with some shell scripts. I also have one that uses root and /system/bin/input to automate things.)

Here:

* youtube-dl

* python

* ssh for shell access

* socat + dynamic ssh port forwards

* access android APIs [1]

* general scripting, also using [1]+[2]

* backups (rsync, pigz)

* ffmpeg to transcode .mov to mp4 from a digital camera on the go

* openssl to debug stuff/inspect certs

* dig for checking dns

[1] https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux:API

[2] https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux:Widget

No one made youtube-dl GUI wrapper app, is it really?

They did, it's called NewPipe

Does NewPipe support all the sites that youtube-dl does? I know they cover more than just YT itself, but youtube-dl's coverage is massive.

The openssh binary to log into hardened remote servers which are not compatible with JuiceSSH or other apps alike.

The option is simple although tiresome, reimplement it in Android Java or Kotlin, instead of trying to pretend Android is Linux, given that POSIX or Linux specific calls aren't even part of NDK Stable APIs documentation.

Any app that access the Linux features directly just works out of luck, given that there are no compatibility guarantees.

I managed to get VS Code (as code-server) running natively and dotnet running on my Android tablet. It makes it a nice little development machine.

Basically anything Android native is horrible for developers; you can't even get a decent IDE or text editor. You still don't have source control, web servers, programming languages, etc. Termux with a few addons gives you all that.

I wish Google would recognize the value of a real Linux/Unix environment the way that both Apple and Microsoft have in recent years.

Google is shipping a full Linux VM integrated in the base OS on Chromebooks.

Where's the love for Android, though?

You mentioned Microsoft and Apple they have shells etc..on desktop OSes not phones.

My Android device is a tablet with a keyboard and trackpad. It's not all just phones.

Android tablets have very few users. And I doubt giving a Linux shell will change that. Chrome OS runs Android apps now. It also has tablets and convertibles.

And the low market penetration outside the US school system proves how much consumers actually care about it.

And yet it has the features the op wanted.

I am happy with Shader Editor and C# Shell, though. For anything better I use a proper laptop.

That's my point. Everything available for Android proper is a toy. I have a Tab S6 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage -- it can do a lot more than play Netflix.

My point is that I am fine with it, I don't want to code on the go on my phone, beyond some toy programming while on the bus, train or waiting for check in.

Coding on Nokia Communicator (even the latest versions) or Nokia's Linux based phones/tablets was also not the best ergonomics.

Also I don't care about having a Linux CLI or something like Termux, any kind of devenv is ok for me, so to extend my list, if you want to develop Android apps on S6, then install AIDE- IDE, it will surely appreciate those 8GB.

I think you missed that my Android device (the Tab S6) is a full 10" tablet with a keyboard and trackpad.

No I did not, from my point of view we should embrace new computing models instead of trying to turn everything into a PDP-11, and from that point of view there is AIDE- IDE, and plenty of other developer like experiences.

If none of them are good enough, it is like my business professor used to say, market opportunity.

I also own a tablet with keyboard, by the way.

More Playgrounds, less POSIX CLI.

New computing models are more restrictive and less focused on creation and more on consumption. That's fine for some people but this is hacker news. If there were a new computing model that supported my use case, fine, but there isn't. Playgrounds suck for adults. I've tried every Android editor and IDE and it's like going back 20 years.

Our hardware is now powerful enough to support all computing models in whatever sandbox you want. There's no reason I have to give up my POSIX CLI. Personally I'd prefer Android native GUI software capable of interfacing with a Linux technology stack that can run programming languages, web servers, etc. This should be obvious and yet somehow it's not available.

No market opportunity because the OS is locked down making all this impossible.

Right now on Android I'm using Termux with an proot Ubuntu userland and running code-server which allows me to run VS Code as a PWA on Android. This is, by far, the best configuration I've found. But soon Google will make even this hack on hack impossible.

99% of users don't care for this CLI on tablets. It's also a huge security hole.

> I've tried every Android editor and IDE and it's like going back 20 years.

Yet you are trying to go back 50 years instead.

> No market opportunity because the OS is locked down making all this impossible.

No it isn't, you just have to free yourself from POSIX chains and embrace Android APIs and architecture models.

> Yet you are trying to go back 50 years instead.

I think some Linux desktop users might have issue with that statement.

> No it isn't, you just have to free yourself from POSIX chains and embrace Android APIs and architecture models.

Each app in Android runs completely isolated from every other app (and more so every day). You can embrace Android but you have to throw out literally the last 50 years of technology. And plus, Android itself is kind of awful. It's the most hacked together OS that's been created in the last few decades. New does not mean better.

Are you really expecting developers to basically recreate the last 50 years of software development tools? What makes you think that's viable?

It's not surprising that most pure Android tools suck because they can't leverage everything that has been done and is currently being done on the desktop, servers, etc. Everything has to be recreated almost from scratch or shoe-horned in and it's awful.

This doesn't really fix it. Rewriting everything in Java/Kotlin won't magically grant the terminal all of the permissions that it used to have.

True, but it will allow the use of official APIs instead and do the application the Android way.

Whatever Linux calls Termux makes use of, they aren't allowed and work by chance.

Here are the official NDK APIs,

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

Anything else is considered unstable, not guaranteed to work across devices or OS updates, or even selected for SE/seccomp validation.

Android is not Linux, no matter how many think that it is the victory of Desktop Linux.

My point is that the permission issue is completely unrelated to the unstable API issue. If you don't have permission to do something through raw Linux syscalls, you won't have permission to do it through the official stable API either.

I have done Android coding since version 2.1, never felt the need to do raw Linux syscalls.

This is what many seem to fail to understand, Android is not a Linux distribution as such, trying to pretend otherwise will only lead to disappointment.

But how is that relevant to the permissions issue we're discussing?

Because of this " If you don't have permission to do something through raw Linux syscalls, you won't have permission to do it through the official stable API either."

Just because you aren't supposed to do Linux syscalls directly, doesn't mean there isn't an Android compliant way to achieve the same goal.

For example, you aren't supposed to fumble with Linux networking APIs directly rather use the NDK and Java APIs for the same.

> Just because you aren't supposed to do Linux syscalls directly, doesn't mean there isn't an Android compliant way to achieve the same goal.

But in this case, they didn't give us Android compliant ways to do any of the stuff they restricted.

> trying to pretend Android is Linux

It's literally a Linux system. I mean, yeah, Android/Linux isn't GNU/Linux, but there's literally a Linux kernel under there and it's certainly usable enough with termux or such providing a saner userland.

Why would termux not work in 11?

Android 10 poses significant friction with termux. So far I believe the solution has been to target android 9, but google will not allow that indenfitely and updates to play store must likely at some time target android 10.

That is my very informal and perhaps very obsolete view of it. But I could be misremembering details.

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com