Android 16 to include a Terminal and full Linux VM support with GPU acceleration | Hacker News Reader

Android 16 to include a Terminal and full Linux VM support with GPU acceleration

notebookcheck.net

25 pointsteleforce4 comments

The same thing is I want to exactly the opposite. Android as a VM supported by Google.

I want to be happy about this but man oh man, that bespoke special Android userland layer makes this feel like a major old-school Microsoft embrace extend extinguish.

It's going to knee cap progress on getting a phone we actually have permissions too, a phone running a regular Linux userland, and it's going to have so many limitations and restrictions.

This will open some horizons and be pretty cool, but man, I just have so little interest or excitement for Android, for the many layers of sandboxing that will be used to being this us. Android is a notable weirdo & it doesn't contribute much.

If done well, a android tablet would be a heck of a good laptop with this.

If you view a Chromebook as a Android tablet with a keyboard, then we already know what it's like.

Software wise they've done a good job. It isn't some have hearted effort. For example, they've gone to the trouble of ensuring Debian GUI packages you "apt-get install" appear in the Chrome Launcher. The only downside is the Debian container is very isolated compared to solutions like termux, so tricks like port forwarding over ssh and rsync'ing your photos don't work so well. While the isolation is annoying, I'd take security provided by the app isolation model of ChromeOS / Android over what Linux Desktop's provide as a reasonable tradeoff.

But Linux Desktop apps need substantial hardware - at least 8GB of RAM, a CPU with at least I3/N100 single threaded performance. Developer tasks like vscode and kernel compiles require even more. Commonly available Chromebooks don't have that. The situation for phones is worse.

Maybe one day we will get to the point that I can replace my laptop with a phone that plugs into a Thunderbolt port, but that day is not today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com