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Comment by chankstein38 | Hacker News Reader

If you're on Android and can download QPython, it works just fine and has for years. This seems way overcomplicated, it depends on a remote computer that's on 24/7? Ick.

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Also, if your Android phone is a Pixel, you can run the recently added Terminal app, which runs a plain vanilla Debian distribution within a VM. So you then have a pocketable Linux machine to develop code on. Not only does Python run on it, you can install the entire Anaconda Python suite.

Wow, that’s cool! I wonder whether one day Apple is going to allow something like this with headless “macOS” VM on iPadOS to make it a viable local development platform.

I would venture a guess some time between: "The heat death of the universe" and "Never".

Why would that be preferable to Termux?

Because, wonderful as Termux is, it has a very nonstandard filesystem layout, so installation scripts for something like Anaconda will not run without extensive modifications. And Termux has no access to /proc, /dev etc., so lots of utilities fail. Since Terminal provides a full Linux VM, all programs that will run on Linux just work as expected.

Termux can access the full file system if you have root access, which is how I play around with it; however, running a VM is a safer and easier route, especially as smartphone manufacturers are making it tougher to root the device you own.

I haven't noticed anything like that. Some more obscure tools have trouble with the file system but that happens in ordinary Linux too. Though I have no experience with Anaconda specifically so you likely know better whether it'll need adaptations to work under Termux.

I run htop just fine on my handhelds and I'm pretty sure it sources directly from /proc, /sys or something.

On my unrooted Pixel, I get "Permission denied" errors if I ls /sys, /dev, /proc and / within Termux. And /usr and /var don't exist.

Also, you can have NixOS instead of debian: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-avf

I tried this a while back with. NET and Blazor. With split screen I was able to add some code and preview live in the browser and build and 'install' a simple pwa.

Presumably with an external monitor and the desktop mode it would be better.

Code from tiny llms such as Gemma are a waste of time but it "worked". It was neat to generate a working app completely offline.

The main problem was that the VM crashed on my pixel fairly frequently. Might be better by now.

I don't think it's actually the VM crashing, it's the Android OS killing what it thinks is an idle app.

Got a direct link to the app? The play store search is just offering me the Tom Hanks movie about a dude stuck in an airport ...

Edit: found it using these instructions.

https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-avf?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Sadly I'm an iPhone kid - and yeah the 24/7 computer running is not ideal. It's been nice building on the server that I'm using to host the app, but then again I could just run the Dockerfiles via QPython and push the code via git?

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