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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

The fact that this spins up a Debian desktop when you're in desktop mode seems to make this a much more viable option than some of the previous attempts at this, which expected you to want to use only android apps on your desktop.

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I'd love to have both, though. Debian apps for productivity, android apps for communications/games, side by side on the same screen with shared storage and maybe synchronized state. As it is, I have to manually sync state between the two devices which results in missed messages and inconsistent state.

So, it would be cool to have Debian as the base OS and Android running in a container. When in Phone mode, Android is front and center and when in Desktop mode, the base Debian host is. Could then still access the Android container.

If the UIs supported a seamless mode, that would be icing.

I'm concerned about driver support in Debian.

It's Android devices after all...

In the worst case you might have to run a kernel built for Android instead of the default debian kernel (e.g. lifted off the android OS for that type of device), depending on how it was packaged up. Hopefully those aren't built with certain useful features turned off.

For devices that support a vanilla android, I imagine the driver issue is already worked out and there would be no problem getting them to work in a kernel that you can compile yourself, even if not the default debian kernel.

Like the halium project

https://halium.org/

libhybris reuses hardware drivers from Android, as used by sailfish, ubuntu touch, plasma mobile et alia.

Does libhybris support X11 with GPU accel now? It didn't when I tried to use it in the past

I'm not sure, I thought most projects were Mir or Wayland based - not X.

I would spend a lot of money on a device that did that well.

I hope this is where Google is headed with Fuschia OS. I wouldn't want to hack together a seamless transition from phone to desktop environment on Android. With a whole new platform written from the ground up to support it makes sense to me.

True, however the way this is implemented makes it seem as though the "desktop" and "mobile" states are different computers entirely. What I would like to do is be able to use desktop versions of android apps when plugged into a display. This would have the advantage of allowing me to use, say MS Office in desktop mode if I have the android app installed.

I realize that some may have a strong preference for OSS software, which a debian desktop would be excellent for.

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