Android 16's Linux Terminal will soon let you run graphical apps...we ran Doom | Hacker News Reader

Android 16's Linux Terminal will soon let you run graphical apps...we ran Doom

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28 pointssipofwater15 comments

I was very excited for Android's new virtualization features until I discovered that Android will only allow GOOGLE/OEM SIGNED VM IMAGES!?!? You won't be able to use your own kernel in the VM. https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/security

Custom kernels would have been an important use case for virtualization since you might be stuck on an old kernel due to lack of updates from the OEM, or your kernel might be heavily trimmed down and missing many useful features.

And not only that, virtualization is also restricted to only Google/OEM apps. There will be no way to grant user apps access to the virtualization API.

So the only benefits you get from virtualization are the minor security improvement and maybe a slightly less locked-down user space.

One thing that is nice though, is how the VM architecture not only protects the host from the guest, but also the guest from the host. Other than that, incredibly disappointing....

Eh, how does that work with GPLv2. I get to have source code for the bundled Linux, but I can't compile my own modifications of it and run them?

I really dislike companies that shit on the spirit of licenses they profit from.

0: https://xkcd.com/1053/

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

2: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.en.html

Even with GPLv2 it's pretty clear what the purpose of the license is.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

Technically there is nothing stopping you from running your own compiled kernel since you can just unlock the bootloader and run whatever you want.

I'm still with nunpad0 though since if you unlock bootloader on a Pixel you lose a ton of features and on a Samsung you lose the warranty. Many apps will stop working too. The whole Android ecosystem is just a few steps away from complete Tivoization.

Not on devices from verizon, though

GrapheneOS could allow device owners to choose their own signature root of trust?

I believe you indeed can do this, but you need to recompile GrapheneOS. Which brings me to another one of the turn-offs of GrapheneOS: you also need to recompile GrapheneOS if you want to have root access.

I understand that it's for security, but compiling Android ROMs is generally painful and GrapheneOS is otherwise quite flexible is letting the user choose their own security/paranoia level.

"Motorola moto g play 2024 smartphone running the Android 14 operating system: Boot times for Alpine Linux version 3.21.2-x86_64 using Termux application version 0.119.0-beta.1 and QEMU running under Termux": https://old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1hzbwe9/motorola_mot... (old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1hzbwe9/motorola_moto_g_play_2024_smartphone_running_the/)

Nice work on the tests, TIL of alpine-virt, did not know that you could speed up boot that much by just disabling unused kernel modules/drivers. And apparantly you can just ignore half the CPU, use only the BIG cores and suffer little in terms of performance.

Will never be tired seeing how far Termux users can push low-end hardware. That phone is literally $30 USD and you all will be out there running QEMU and GPU accelerated X11 on it.

Curious, why go through all the trouble but still emulate x64 though?

Termux Andronix userLand Anlinux

Already has it, they allow variety of distributions

Chromium, Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice etc 1000s of them

Cannot run docker, or any kind of sophisticated dev tool

I managed to get a decent development environment going a while back using Nix, but I quickly discovered that Android is otherwise unsuited as a productivity OS anyhow.

Yes, that's why the idea is running linux instead

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