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Comment by aspyct | Hacker News Reader

I really like Dex, at least the idea of it. I've been trying to work off my phone for a few years now, my first attempt was with the Galaxy S6, some version of container linux, and a raspberry pi with X11 forwarding as screen. It was brilliant, though a little underpowered.

My main issue with Dex is the perennity of the system. Is Samsung going to keep pushing this, or will a native android version takeover? Or maybe at some point they'll say "well that didn't work out" and abandon it completely?

I want to believe!

Every year I get closer to being able to do my work completely off a phone. I also think 8GB of RAM is plenty. Most administrative tasks can be done on that, and for the heavy tasks, you could always leverage a remote server. Think of github codespaces, or modern virtual machines in the cloud. Sure, you need internet, but don't you always, for this kind of workload?

Yeah, yeah, I want to believe :)

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> My main issue with Dex is the perennity of the system. Is Samsung going to keep pushing this, or will a native android version takeover? Or maybe at some point they'll say "well that didn't work out" and abandon it completely?

Agreed, this is also a worry of mine. In fact they did exactly this with Linux on DeX.

> Every year I get closer to being able to do my work completely off a phone. I also think 8GB of RAM is plenty.

Remember that Android devices don't do swap. What I see with DeX is a LOT of tab refreshing when it starts running out of memory. Which is really annoying when you're trying to do actual work (e.g. going to an Excel sheet to look up something, but then going back to the browser to continue filling in a form, but in the mean time this has reset due to a forced page reload).

Ah yes, linux on Dex was looking sweet!

Right now I'm using termux, which is working really really well. I'm amazed! I have this big PHP app wich runs perfectly fine on it, with dependencies and all, I honestly expected trouble, but it just worked.

As for the swap: yeah that sounds annoying :(

Yes Termux is great. It can even do SSH key authentication on a Yubikey with OKCagent, with key forwarding which other options e.g. Termbot can't do.

Unfortunately the restrictions in later Android versions make it more and more difficult for Fredrick to continue supporting it. I'm currently using the F-Droid version which targets an older Android version but eventually that will become impossible too because newer android versions will eventually drop the older APIs altogether.

In particular in later Android API versions it's no longer allowed for an APK to load binaries from other sources and execute them there. Which makes the apt repository impossible. So what should it do? Include all binaries in the APK? Or distributute each app inside termux as a separate APK? Neither option sounds very appealing.

Well that's a shame. Termux is fantastically useful and a great addition to the android's ecosystem, at least for us techies. It would be sad to see it go.

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