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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Is Termux still needed, now that new Android phones have a full Linux available?

I keep reading on https://www.reddit.com/r/androidterminal/ about user experiences with it and it seems pretty great.

Termux is just a terminal emulator. When you run programs in Termux they run natively on your Android system inside the normal Android sandbox of the Termux app. That has some limitations, for example software has to be compiled to use the paths of the Termux environment. Termux can't just install software into /bin and you can't write into /etc. So everything depending on anything more than the base Android system like dependencies installed by Termux has to be compiled specifically for the paths of the Termux environment. But it also advantages especially when you want a Terminal that is actually part of your Android system. You can just natively access the shared storage for everything Termux has permission to. You can also use the Android API out of Termux – for some things you need to install the Termux:API Addon app – and get stuff like GPS, SMS and contacts.

The Android Terminal app is just a view to a full VM. If you want a more traditional Linux system on your phone alongside Android instead of a Terminal in Android, essentially having a second system just conveniently running on the hardware of your phone, then that's for you. However it does also use more storage.

I've tried both, and Termux is still far better. At least when I tried it a couple of months ago, the Linux terminal lived in its own sandbox isolated from the normal Android directories. Yes, I get how this might be "safer", but it means I can't move files around in the command line which is my primary use of Termux (I can't stand using a GUI to arrange and rename files)

/mnt/shared is mounted to see your downloads and the like, so you can manipulate them just fine.

Apparently the OEM must support it (the AVF virtualization).

The phone's hardware must also support it. It needs non-protected VM support which is available in Exynos SoCs but not Qualcomm which is why some Samsung phones have it but other arguably better phones don't (e.g, S25 Ultra VS. Flip 7).

Right, I enabled it, and got that exact error when starting the Terminal app on my Xiaomi 15: "Non-protected VMs are not supported on this device."

Anyone know if the Samsung Z Trifold has VM support that works for the Android Terminal?

No not right now at least, because it uses Qualcomm.

Unfortunate. Looking forward to a trifold with AVF support. And, ideally, support for unprivileged AVF being available for third-party virtualization applications to use.

Interesting, first I've heard of that. It's android 16+ apparently. My Galaxy S21 FE is on Android 16.

I searched "Linux" in the settings and it found this experimental "Run Linux Terminal on Android" toggle... Which doesn't work. Tapping it won't turn it on. Oh well.

Oh wow, thanks for mentioning this, I totally missed that this was introduced.

it is trash on the hw acceleration side, while termux has vulkan linux to vulkan android wrappers - which in future will probably do hw encode and decode as well

Using ffmpeg packages in termux you can already access the mediacodec apis for hw accelerated encode/decode

yeah that is cool but i meant for something like firefox

As you say, it is still very useful for older phones. Only the newest top-of-the-line ones got the real thing.

last time I tried the linux terminal running on a vm was buggy and slow.

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