Linux on DeX survey

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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Samsung is demoing the the ability (chroot I assume) to run desktop Linux on a galaxy phone when docked.

They have a survey for interest and usage information.

Survey here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LinuxonDeX

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Oh interesting. Something like this could actually make Samsung my next phone depending on how they implement it.

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Take the survey.

And if it ships with only Fedora I am blaming you, lol.

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Oh I did. And I added Fedora under the other category for what distros i use… how could they miss it! :’(

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Sooo ah, why not just let me run normal linux on my phone, eh?

11. Would you pay to use Linux from your smartphone?

u wot m8?

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it is a survey, tell them no.

What they are providing is a rootless linux experience which is pretty cool imo.

This is aimed more at the corporate dev crowd and less at the hobbyist hacker crowd.

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Yeah, but I don’t like the corporate dev crowd.

I shit you not, I was changing out a computer for one of the in house devs, and he asked me “But where’s the harddrive?”

I replaced his machine with a lenovo tiny with a lenovo monitor that allows the little brick computer to hook into the back of said monitor. Which is what would have prompted him to say something like that.

That shit is barely okay for a normal user.

DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON DBA’S. THOSE SELF IMPORTANT FUCKS!

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I can sympathize with that dev. Hardware does nothing for me.

Back on topic guess it is a device that isn’t for you.

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I put yet. If they made the thing a paid app of something, if it wasn’t to expensive and went back into them supporting it. Sure. Linux isn’t free as in beer.

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I was willing to go up to $25, past that no

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Yeah I was thinking along the lines of what a good android app costs if they have a paid option $10-20, if they were going to make it something like that. They’d have to have is nicely polished though, it would have to work.

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It’s really just my frustration with the lack of control and support that android has right now. Seems like a massive loop around to get to what I think a lot of us actually want.

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Sailfish seem like a interesting idea but they refuse to sell it in the US and the company has had financial issues. They still haven’t fully open sourced their code like they promised back in 2014.

Canonical abandoned their mobile OS and Plasma Mobile hasn’t done much of anything.

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It’s funny they included Gentoo and Slackware which almost nobody uses but leave out Fedora, Solus and Mint.

Pretty sure you need root access to do lot of things in linux land. I would say that is lame.

Well they have probably learnt more complex skill than you so they feel they are more important than you.

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Librem 5 is the only thing that looks promising right now.

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

provided they can setup some auto config for displays it would work essentially the same way as DeX shows.

They can learn my foot in their ass. I could say the same thing about cashiers and grocery store workers, but that doesn’t mean I treat them poorly.

You’d think most of them would know how to actually connect to their databases themselves being an DB-Admin and all, but noooooooo.

And to bring it back again. Whatever method they’re using it’d would probably just be an allaround better experience to just run linux native. Nice feature? Yes, for android it is, but why would I want to run android?

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I am specifically referring to rooting a Linux phone which in almost all cases voids the warranty. Being able to run Linux and still have support to the phone is attactive to me at least.

Subscribed to their mailing list to keep tabs. Interesting device. Neat it is shown with Plasma Mobile.

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I have a bold and dangerous idea. How about we run Gnu/Linux as host on mobile phone and run Android in VM to use all the proprietary apps required for work. Just like shown in the video.

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I think what they’re doing is simply running a desktop session in an SELinux sandbox and forwarding the $DISPLAY to the Dex output, and like Apple claim that they’ve invented it, and call it some sort of Knox magic :stuck_out_tongue:
The tech already exists and is up for grabs for anyone to use (SELinux has been a standard for a long time now on Android), I’m still wondering why this isn’t mainstream yet.

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Baz already explained better than I could what was going on.

Either way, an actually supported and non-warranty voiding option is nice.

But if you want a GNU/Linux phone the only working option at the money to build it yourself. Purism is still in development. As someone who has backed and monitored many projects and seen them all fall through or are abandoned after a couple of years, I am skeptical we will ever see it.

Make a company source a supply and manufacturing chain, and get venture capital. I will buy it when you are done…

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You see the thing is, on Android system processes, users and apps all run in their own domains, for example all apps are labeled as “untrusted_type” which just have a different MCS range “c”.
For example some app can be “untrused_t:c50,c60” and another “untrusted_t:c20,30”, meaning they’re isolated from each other. (but on Android they have shared acces to ie. the storage). Depends on the policy.

But, the magic is that there’s nothing really stopping anyone from running say an xfce session in its own domain… it’s a process just like any ‘app’.

And if you do run, say, an xfce session in its own SELinux sandbox domain, everything you do inside it will be stripped from privs, so no root access even by some UID exploit - since MAC > DAC.

EDIT: Samsung already even uses the sandbox domain on their Secure Folder, it’s just a matter of pushing the display output to an external monitor. :wink: