A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

Android now features a Native Linux terminal app, running a genuine Linux VM within the OS. I enabled it tonight and SSH'd into it from my machine- so long Termux.

Soon google replaces ChromeOS in Chromebooks with Android and not too far into the future we'll see more people using Android as their main workstation OS

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https://github.com/o-az

To be honest, there have been many unofficial desktop ports of Android, even ox x86, an official Android that is dual-purpose sounds good.

Though much must change in Android to be able to be a full desktop OS, mobile OSes are much more restrictive, with security and long tasks, they limit the developer much much more than a Desktop OS, and there are also considerably worse on privacy than any desktop OS.

But Windows had a least in the past dual-purpose variants, as a single installation, I haven't checked if they do that anymore now.

Software developer, open source enthusiast, privacy advocate.

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Correct it's not shared like WSL1 was, WSL1 actually had much better performance(at least at the file system) than WSL2 which uses docker and is virtualized, but it was too hard to rewrite all syscalls through native Windows and that's why we have WSL2 which has 100/100 compatibility with any distribution + some access to windows stuff.

I saw that the news is just for a terminal but still, the Android system will virtualize the whole Debian distro, so at some point, I don't see why you could not run UI on that instance. 

With WSL2 you can run Linux UIs on Windows.

But that's beside the point because what I want, is more like a wish. 

With Android, it's much simpler to convert to a dual-purpose OS because Android natively runs on Linux, and is just a modified Java VM(DVM) with a set of APIs on top of Linux. 

If they ever want to make a variant of Android optimized for Desktop, they don't need to implement kernel level code, just reimplement some stuff mostly in the userspace which should be easier. 
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Also, I want to clarify by dual-purpose I didn't mean dual OS, or anything related to WSL, by dual-purpose, I meant the same operating system optimized for two types of devices, and the optimization can switch by using a setting, some specialized windows 10 versions had something like that meant to run both on mobile and on a PC, and the mode was controlled by the user.

Android is an easy target for that because it uses Linux kernel and in order to optimize for desktop there are only a few areas where you need to work.

Again is not super related to the virtualization of Debian on Android, only if they expand that virtualization to run as a full-fledged system which is super possible since you already virtualize the whole OS, in that case, it would be more akin to WSL2. 

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this is different in the same way Linux (WSL2) on Windows is different from previous attempts to run linux on Windows. It's not necessarily dual purpose, it's more like expanding the capabilities of Android