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Comment by vetinari | Hacker News Reader

In the past (pre-Android 10), you could do that with Samsung Galaxy phones - plug them into USB-C dock, launch Linux-on-Dex and you got Linux desktop.

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Still works with my Samsung on Android 11.

ETA: actually, still an android interface, not X or anything.

That's why I wrote Linux-on-Dex, not Dex. Dex itself works, Linux-on-Dex doesn't anymore. Linux-on-Dex was Ubuntu container with X11.

you can do that right now with a PinePhone.

Wait... What?!

EDIT: ah, sadly looks like it's not something that's daily drive-able

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCKMxzz9cjs

you can get a convergence pack with more RAM (3GB) and storage and with a USB-C docking bar (that you can also buy separately). Once plugged, you have a desktop GNU/Linux, I've tested with Plasma Mobile and it's working quite well (got a few crashes, but it's not flagged as fully stable yet).

The software is OKish and getting better at a steady rate. The SOC in the PinePhone is nowhere near beefy enough though.

Running the same stack on an M1-chip would probably a game changer usability-wise.

Can do that already:

* Termux on any android

* dex on highend Samsung

* moto has something similar

* chromeos also has a built-in VM

This is pretty cool. I could host my development environment on my desktop PC and using Termux, ssh into it and use vim as an IDE.

I can also forward ports so I can access things from my browser, though no debug, console, network tooling. There is an obvious lack of tooling - a full fat Linux desktop would be much better equipped, but it is incredible that this is possible at all.

I'll experiment with this.

The AnLinux app is great to setup a linux rootfs on linux. But it's limited, you can't run docker for example.

I would love to recycle old phones into Kubernetes nodes !

What changed with Android 10?

Samsung discontinued support for Linux-on-DeX (which was always experimental/beta anyway). I assume whatever hacks they had in place to make the thing work were too hard to port to Android 10 for what was essentially a feature for hobbyists.

You can still use DeX itself to get a desktop environment when you plug your phone into a dock, but it's an Android desktop environment, with Android apps running in floating windows.

Linux on Dex (ubuntu in container) was abandoned and cannot be launched anymore.

Dex itself works, but that is just an Android desktop.

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