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by benj111 2711 days ago
I suppose it depends what you do with your phone?

Even with a slower processor I have no problems believing it may be better for certain workloads because you won't have a load of background tasks running, that don't need to etc. Will probably be worse for games though.

So the same situation that desktop Linux was in, in the naughties?

Thinking about your Android emulator. That should be fairly easy? Android is already basically a VM running on Linux. I'm sure Google will be working hard to prevent this use case though.
2 comments
john61 2711 days ago
Jolla Phone already had a Android emulation for Sailfish OS
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solarkraft 2711 days ago
Alien Dalvik is a great idea and theoretically works well, but it's proprietary software and its developers don't seem to have any interest in anyone actually using it.

There doesn't seem to be any free software effort in prong porting ART to a real linux system (which shouldn't be hard at all), which could've happened for years and I'm not sure (though shyly hopeful) the Librem 5 will change anything about that (so the only realistic option would be full emulation, which would require a good bit of power).

Edit: Just realized that you could theoretically run Android apps via Chrome. But shit, that'll be slow.

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joshumax 2711 days ago
You should check out Anbox. It's basically a containerization platform for Linux that hosts an Android userspace and shares your host kernel a la docker. All you need to do is load the ashmem and binder kernel modules or build them statically into your kernel.

So far I know that there's an Ubuntu touch port of Anbox that works. It's a pretty good all-around solution considering the low container overhead and support for OpenGL ES 2.0

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solarkraft 2711 days ago
> I'm sure Google will be working hard to prevent this use case though

They can't do much about the runtime. ART is part of AOSP so theoretically anyone can come along and just port it. It hasn't happened so far though, for reasons I don't quite understand.

What Google can do (and is doing) though is increase developers dependence on Play services, which they guard well.

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