Google is building its own DeX: First look at Android's Desktop Mode

Taking better advantage of a display is nice but imo the really exciting part of desktop mode is the planned integration with Google's Linux Terminal app (i.e. 1st party linux VM support). I have a Samsung DeX device and while you can get a basic dev environment working easily it can be really cumbersome to make it comfortable to use and integrate with your normal tablet workflow. Being able to install full-fat linux apps and run them in a window would be a complete game changer.

source for planned integration: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/392521081?utm_source=...

Dex is annoyingly close to being really useful.

I think Samsung recently added a "desktop Dex" mode that's supposed to be less mobile-ui. I haven't tried it tho.

I remember when they presented the S10, with the initial implementation of Dex.

It felt so close already back then, sluggish, but still usable. But that initial implementation was running some in-house version of Ubuntu with a custom kernel (if I remembered it correctly).

I just wish this becomes a reality much sooner then later. Especially if I can have my dev environment on some remote VPS with either tunneling, github code spaces or Azure DevBox

Just FYI, Dex is really fluid on flagship devices.

Rumor is Samsung won't support Google's Linux Terminal (at least for their existing phones) since their Knox conflicts with the Android Virtualization Framework :-(.

Honestly I'd like to see Windows 11 running under this as well, but that seems incredibly unlikely.

It's interesting to hear because Samsung had a Linux feature previously: https://developer.samsung.com/sdp/blog/en/2017/10/18/samsung...

Chrome OS allowed this even before 2020. So you could open Linux (even GUI) and android app right next to each other... Had whole JS dev workflow/toolchain running on that ( did not want to clog my main computer with that ). Problem with mixing apps is that for some you have to use mouse/ stylus because their GUI was not meant to be touched.

> Dex is annoyingly close to being really useful.

I feel this a lot. I use it daily, mostly as a thin client for remote desktop use but there are little niggles that would make it better. Examples:

- Let me control how the top bar and taskbar are viewed

- Let games capture the mouse in remote desktop (for fps type games)

- Fix the small issues that cause the mouse capture to fail on steam link occasionally

- Fix rendering issues with firefox while in desktop mode

- Let the youtube UI work in a more "desktop" way while in dex mode

These might be mostly app responsibilities, but if they could fix some of this stuff dex would be a dream instead of just being mostly useful.

It's a shame that Chrome OS was subsumed by Android instead of the other way around. IMO in many ways it had better foundations.

They had Linux on DeX in 2018, killed in 2019. It was a partnership with Canonical

https://9to5google.com/2018/11/09/samsung-linux-on-dex-andro...

It was the Ubuntu 16.04 desktop running in a LXD container. It crashed when the tablet went in out of memory, so I had to be careful with what I was running.

> IMO in many ways it had better foundations

Security-wise: True; but Android is a gigantic yet well-oiled ecosystem at this point, from silicon designers to manufacturers to vendors to developers, running on handhelds to TVs to wearables to gaming devices (including AR/VR consoles).

> shame that Chrome OS was subsumed by Android

ChromeOS had a decade but Google is wise focus on just one desktop platform. I don't think it should surprise anybody that a platform with 3bn users & 2mn odd apps won out.

I think it was introduced with at least the S9+, mine has had DeX since I got it originally.

I have it on my old S8

Reasonably fluid, but not when it comes to heavy web pages with a lot of 3D. I have an S24U I use in DeX for most of my day but when I do have to switch to my ten inch 6800u laptop it absolutely demolishes the DeX experience. There's still a fractional second of lag that Samsung hasn't done away with yet.

Using android on a laptop with a keyboard and mousepad was always an awkward experience. It's kind of like trying to use an iPad as your main computing device. Similarly bad experience.

Hopefully they work on that.

When I tried the external display mode on my Pixel 8a, I did some development with a bluetooth keyboard, bluetooth trackball and vscode tunneling into my desktop.

So the development wasn't local, but it was sort-of usable. (And the editing is local in any case.)

Similar with a keyboard and mouse with Android TV - I thought it would be useful for YouTube searches etc, the UI is so ill adapted to keyboard I gave up.

It's always funny charging my phone off the USB C for my monitor, nudging my mouse and seeing a pointer appear on the screen though.

I just wish it would do 4K resolution out of the box.

The hardware can do it, it's just that the system settings won't show you the 4K resolution option for some reason. But you can do some hacks to make it appear and then it works just fine.

You need to install a nondescript app called 'Samsung Good Lock' from the Samsung store (not available in Play store), and use that to side-load an app called 'Multistar', which is an app to tweak display settings. From that side-loaded app you need to tap the 'I Samsung DeX' which does various setting changes to "Make Dex even more friendly", it doesn't specify what it does exactly, but it'll make the 4K resolution option appear in the system settings.

This all feels real sketchy and I don't understand why Samsung doesn't just enable 4K resolution officially, because the hardware is clearly capable of it.

With every OneUI update there are rumors that it'll natively support 4K, but so far that hasn't happened AFAIK. Admittedly I haven't used Dex in a while for myself, but judging from recent Reddit posts this hack is still needed.

This is the right answer. DeX itself was introduced with the S8 series.

With the S9 they introduced the developer test version of Linux on DeX but it never came to the S8 or S10 and it was already discontinued with the Android 10 update :(

Partially, it still has lots of issues that were never fixed.

https://chromeos.dev/en/linux

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-suppo...

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/guide...

Note specially the parts of WIP, missing features, to be yet done, and so on.

Last I used it, I still wouldn't want to write code on Dex. But it was great for everything else. I could definitely complete just about any other tasks I needed with it. It was a little clunky, but doable; teams calls, getting into internal tools for triaging systems issues, the company CRM, all that stuff.

These instructions sound like a parody sketch about bad UX.

What do you mean by tunneling here; remote desktop or does vscode run on the 8a?

It's not a full laptop replacement, but at least for me it's good enough at what it does that I can just take my phone or tablet with me on short vacations and not be paranoid that I'm gonna have to do something complicated like log into my bank or write some verbose emails that I'm normally afraid to do from my phone. In those instances, plugging one of them into a KVM and Dex mode is sufficient to get over the hump.

Aye, to some degree they are, but I'm also glad that android is open/hackable enough that goodlock lets you add these additional preferences. (I also use it, for me it was for ultrawide resolutions)

Samsung's Good Lock is kind of their testing ground for new features.

It lets people who want to tinker do it, while keeping people who probably shouldn't tinker from doing it.

It's not available in the Google Play store because the play store rules are really stupid. A lot of apps aren't available there.

According to the Samsung Store it is developed by developer 'Good Lock Labs'. According to this Wikipedia source [0] they developed this app 'in cooperation with Samsung'. Browsing through the sources I did find a 2016 article from Samsung themselves [1] about Good Lock, indeed confirming it is theirs.

Also, it looks like Good Lock is now also available on the Google Play Store, and there it lists Samsung Electronics as the developer [2].

I guess this does make it less sketchy of an app to use, but it still feel wrong to have to do so many weird steps to get a menu option working.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Lock [1] https://news.samsung.com/global/make-your-galaxy-smartphone-... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.an...

VSCode runs in Chrome on the Pixel 8a. But it connects to a remote VSCode server via a VSCode tunnel where eg your compiler runs. See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/tunnels

I had no idea the vscode tunneling stuff worked in the browser. I thought it was SSH. Do they have some sort of WebSocket proxy? Do you have a link to how to set this up?

Plug for reddit.com/r/androidterminal !

Maybe it's possible anyways? Qualcomm was able to integrate their own hypervisor on top of AVF

Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 | Adding Third-Party Hypervisor to Android Virtualization Framework

https://lpc.events/event/17/contributions/1447/attachments/1... https://youtu.be/hLdUCrlheKg

They offer both ssh and their own tunnel protocol.

So you start the 'server' on eg your desktop, and that registers with eg GitHub or Microsoft (or perhaps another service, not sure how open the system is), and then you can use any other computer to connect to your system via GitHub or Microsoft (as a proxy, I think). The other computer can either run just a browser, or can run a vscode (which is basically also a browser in the end).

See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/tunnels

Yes, the nice thing about the tunnels is that the computer you want to develop on doesn't have to be reachable from the internet. It only has to be able to reach the internet. GitHub (or Microsoft) play the man-in-the-middle.

It's really convenient. I often use it to develop from my laptop on my desktop, even when they are on the same local network: because it's basically just as fast, but I don't have to worry about which network I'm on, it just always works (as long as I have Internet access on both machines. But if that ever stops, I'm not really going to develop much anyway.)

This is instantly where my mind went as well.