With Motorola ReadyFor and Samsung DeX, is it now possible to plug your phone into a dock and use Linux (while still running Android on your phone)?

[alshdavid]

With the proof Apple have given us showing that a mobile SoC can deliver decent performance capable of running a desktop operating system - I am now looking at my flagship phone and thinking "even if you're a third as fast, I could do a fair amount if you could also offer a desktop mode"

 

I see Motorola rolling out their ReadyFor mode, Samsung have Dex - the issues with these is they are still running on top of Android. This limits the usefulness because we rely on Android apps which don't translate well to desktop use cases.

 

It would be amazing if you could plug your phone into a USB-C dock and have a monitor, keyboard and mouse power on with a nice Linux DE (like Gnome 4 or something light like xfce). Given Android has a Linux kernel - it wouldn't be crazy to see that environment sandboxed within a kernel container, allowing for Android on the handset while running a Linux DE on the screen (without additional overhead)

 

Is such a thing possible or if I buy a Moto or Samsung phone, am I stuck with their desktop Android mode?

[Arika]

1 hour ago, alshdavid said:

the issues with these is they are still running on top of Android. This limits the usefulness because we rely on Android apps which don't translate well to desktop use cases.

i beg to differ. the only apps that i would say "have issues" in DeX is games. everything else works just like you would expect it would.

 

they serve a very general purpose, if you're wanting a "full customizable" desktop experience, then you're going to be disappointed, but it's also not their use case.

[Kilrah]

You can cheat by using an app like andronix to install/run a linux distro (with some caveats since it's a chroot on top of the existing kernel), that will expose a vnc interface, then you run a vnc client in desktop mode and access your linux distro, but that's about it.