"Termux + X11 on my Android tablet...feels pretty close to a real Linux setup." | Hacker News Reader

"Termux + X11 on my Android tablet...feels pretty close to a real Linux setup."

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33 pointssipofwater19 comments

1. Here's the complete description: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1jecn31/does... (old.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1jecn31/does_it_count_as_linux_hardware_if_its_android_i/mihgxt8/)

2. See also: https://old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1j2g5gz/motorola_mot... (old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1j2g5gz/motorola_moto_g_play_2024_smartphone_termux/mgs67qz/)

I'm still hoping they'll use the new Android virtualization framework to provide a properly integrated system, e.g. where it runs a Wayland server that forwards windows to the native Android graphics system.

They sort of said it won't though: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-purp...

My read on that link is they don't intend to let you run your own display server. You won't run KDE or Gnome or Sway. But it sounds like Android itself is the compositir, is the Wayland server.

I hope so! That would be much cleaner than running KDE or Gnome.

I'd love to see a sound system a la Jack or even Pulseaudio compared to Android's native sound system, though do recognize that at least for phones there are challenges, as of course you need to kill other sounds to accept an incoming phone call. Routing multiple outputs would be handy -- perhaps to keep some background music on while working played through a Bluetooth speaker, but then maintaining the ability to take phone calls either on the phone, or perhaps a Bluetooth headset without interrupting that music stream. Just because most people don't want more than one application outputting audio at the same time doesn't mean we shouldn't have it as an option. And I'm sure some would also find utility in handling multiple inputs as well, without relying on a discrete hardware mixer.

What counts as real linux? Is it that it runs a linux kernel, or runs a linux-libre kernel, or has a desktop linux user space as opposed to the android user space or a GNU user space, is it because real linux is meant to be unpopular such as desktop linux being unpopular while android is popular?

People don't call Android a "real linux" because you, as a user, aren't in actual control of the system: you can't root, you cant choose which system apps run on your system nor can you disable them, you can't change the underlying linux kernel.

You effectively are locked in by the OEM, who is the one that has higher privilege than the user. A real linux would allow the user to have actual control over their own system.

Termux does absolutely nothing to improve any of this.

I guess "real Linux"'s most arbitrary but concrete definition applicable for TFA is "glibc".

I am very much against this trend by major vendors to push Linux but just as a "VM" or similarly contained crap. MS is doing it (WSL), Google is doing it (pKVM Terminal), etc.

> I am very much against this trend by major vendors to push Linux but just as a "VM" or similarly contained crap. MS is doing it (WSL), Google is doing it (pKVM Terminal), etc.

I guess they are reasonable if you want to use a unix-like terminal environment but don't want go your way to flash your hard drive to install an entire new OS.

I myself use linux under WSL because my SSD capacity is very small already and I can't afford reducing it futher partitioning for another OS.

For the record, "partitioning it" is exactly what you did if you used WSL2.

"You effectively are locked in by the OEM, who is the one that has higher privilege than the user." Anyone that has ever rooted their phone and installed a different OS would strongly disagree with you.

https://itsfoss.com/open-source-alternatives-android/

Are people that bristled by RMS that they're this obstinate about refusing to call it GNU/Linux?

Seems to be a No Real Linux fallacy...

I don't follow. Android isn't GNU/Linux. This makes it tempting to say GNU/Linux is what we want, except that ChromeOS is GNU/Linux (it's a Gentoo derivative) and Alpine isn't (it uses musl+busybox) so "user controlled Linux" really is probably the best term.

One where you can write a bash script which changes network configuration and launches multiple programs installed from the app store

> One where you can write a bash script which changes network configuration and launches multiple programs installed from the app store

ROTFL.

https://unixwizardry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/UNIX-liv...

when you try to install something and it tells you that dpkg is locked

A GNU/Linux distribution, in Android the use of the Linux kernel is an implementation detail.

Besides Java and Kotlin userspace, you are only allowed to use these APIs on the NDK, notice none of them are Linux, rather C and C++ standard libraries, Khronos APIs and Android specific ones.

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

I connected Chatgpt app to termux to have shell access using custom gpts.

The thing is you can talk to custom gpts over voice.

There's day and night difference compared to using mobile keyboard to type for writing commands and files.