Transform your Android device into a Linux desktop

Thom Holwerda 2023-08-02 Linux 5 Comments

Have you ever wanted to do more with your phone, like setting up a Webserver or a Node.js server and running a web app directly on your phone? Or doing some coding on the go? Yes, I have too. With Termux, you can run a full Linux Desktop on your Android device, and here’s how.

Even without resorting to a full X desktop, Termux is oretty great. I’m not really a terminal user, so for me it’s just for the novelty of it all, but it certainly seems to work very well on my Galaxy S21.

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Thom Holwerda

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5 Comments

2023-08-02 12:21 pm

cb88
“Termux is oretty great.” that’s any interesting typo… since thats almost how we say it phonetically around here more like alretty though.

Oh wait… its “pretty” haha
2023-08-02 1:57 pm

Alfman verbose=1
I use termux quite a lot to do things that are easier on linux than with android apps. Though I’ve never tried a full desktop, so this is something that I would like to try.

The article mentions the version in google’s official app store is obsolete, this is why…
https://www.xda-developers.com/termux-terminal-linux-google-play-updates-stopped/

Since November 2, 2020, all updates to existing apps in Google Play were required to target Android 10 (API level 29) or higher. While the precondition might sound like good news sprinkled with a lot of optimism, things haven’t exactly gone that way for Termux. In a post on the project’s GitHub Wiki, Leonid Pliushch AKA xeffyr, a major contributor to the software, explained the app’s compatibility issue with the aforementioned API level. Google has been enforcing the W xor X security feature since Android 10, which is why an untrusted app that sets targetSdkVersion to “29” or higher can’t invoke exec() on files within the app’s home directory. Such a design effectively breaks Termux when compiled against API level 29, as all its packages contain executables.
…
Why are all these changes not affecting the F-Droid build of Termux? That is because there is no strict Android SDK version requirement while submitting a package for inclusion in the F-Droid repository. Unlike the Play Store variant, a build targeting an older version of Android than 10 is unaffected here, so the team can continue to push updates without worrying about losing core functionality.

Essentially google broke backwards compatibility for calls including exec under all new android SDK versions. This forces applications like Termux to target old SDKs. But it means google doesn’t allow it to be distributed in the android app store. As stated in the article, f-droid doesn’t block it. But I expect that at some point in the future support for the legacy API will get dropped from android altogether. This means that barring some kind of compromise by google, the current version of Termux hosted on fdroid will no longer work either.
2023-08-02 5:43 pm

acobar
5 things I install on my Android devices: Termux, some supported distro, Octave, Julia (currently, Octave behaves better) and Matlab keyboard. Really nice.
2023-08-02 6:35 pm

jgfenix
It’s a pity that Samsung didn’t continue with Linux on Dex. It showed great promise.

2023-08-04 2:52 am

sukru
jgfenix,

They still have DeX, but it essentially is an Android Table in Desktop mode kind of thing. There are basic utilities and you can get Chrome in a window, etc. Yet, very limited compared to the old one.

And, yes, it would be really a game changer if they improved on the previous Linux setup. The phones already have capable CPUs and sufficient amount of RAM. Having an official “laptop shell”, where you’d dock the phone to get a full Linux (or ChromeOS) desktop experience would be excellent.

(Something like this: https://liliputing.com/5-laptop-docks-that-let-you-use-a-smartphone-like-a-notebook/)