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Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android

(holdtherobot.com)
744 points mikenew | 3 comments | 14 May 25 15:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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transpute ◴[18 May 25 04:59 UTC] No.44019103[source]▶

  There's roughly 4 different approaches to Linux on Android:
    • virtual machine emulating x86_64
    • Termux
    • arm64 binaries running in chroot
    • proot..  Same idea as chroot, but doesn't use forbidden system calls
Fifth option: arm64 pKVM VM from Android 15 on Pixel 7+ phone/tablet hardware using nested h/w virtualization. Shipped in 2025 under the uninformative name of "Linux Terminal" via Development options, Android now has full Debian Linux with VM root, no emulation, compatible with USB-c desktop display.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43973395 & https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-purp...

> The main purpose of this Linux terminal feature is to bring more apps (Linux apps/tools/games) into Android, but NOT to bring yet another desktop environment.. Ideally, when in the desktop window mode, Linux apps shall be rendered on windows just like with other native Android apps.. GPU acceleration is something we are preparing for the next release.

Hopefully Android 2025 Linux VMs will lead to iOS 19 VMs at WWDC, since Apple wants to sell smart glasses to compete with Meta glasses.

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anonzzzies ◴[18 May 25 05:49 UTC] No.44019250[source]▶
I use NOMone; works really well. Runs everything I need including vscode/cursor, node and anything else I need without any fiddling, it just all works. Obviously the new linux vm is likely nicer, but this works really well so far.

0] https://desktop.nomone.com/

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1. transpute ◴[18 May 25 06:12 UTC] No.44019349[source]▶
Thanks for the pointer, seems to be using VNC, https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/18psg3p/linux_o...
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2. cma ◴[18 May 25 06:21 UTC] No.44019379[source]▶
It says it doesn't use VNC while others do:

     While current solutions depend on VNC to display the Linux interface, we got rid of VNC altogether along with the problems it causes.
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3. transpute ◴[18 May 25 06:41 UTC] No.44019461[source]▶
It's doing VNC-alike "graphics remoting", but with less isolation/security in the name of efficiency/performance:

> We thought this is too inefficient. So we decided to combine both into a single application, to eliminate most of the interprocess communication, and avoid having the Linux server run in the background, and thus suffering from power optimizations. We still have a framebuffer, but we do the scrapping and updating directly. We have reduced all the hassle to mere memcpy and texture update operations. This turned out to be huge! In the future, we hope to reduce this overhead even further by rendering directly to the texture, and this saving the need to scrape and copy memory.

When the next release of Android Linux Terminal ships vGPU with virtio, it will provide better graphics performance than VNC, while retaining strong security isolation between Debian guest VM and host Android.