Terminal app can now run full graphical Linux apps in the latest Android Canary
44 comments
·July 25, 2025sunshine-o
What is the general consensus on the usability of the Terminal app?
On two different Pixel phones (6a & 8a) I had a terrible experience:
- Very slow
- Crash all the time
- The app need to be reinitialised almost every day
But I have heard some people have no complain.
Also, since I couldn't really keep it alive long enough: what as the prospects in terms of battery usage? will it be realistic to have it running all time in the background?
carwyn
Sometimes it crashes just running regular apt-get upgrade if it has too many packages to update, or takes too long. Switching away from the app can also mean it crashes.
Nice idea, nowhere near ready for anything but playing.
kllrnohj
> Switching away from the app can also mean it crashes.
That sounds more like it's being killed for RAM reasons rather than "crashing"
mort96
Same thing. Google owns both Android and the Linux Terminal app. Some combination of Google's OS and Google's app causes the app to crash or be crashed in the background. That's something that Google needs to fix regardless of where the bug lies.
flyinghamster
Pixel 7a: slow to start, and you must wait for it to finish shutting down (or crashing) before you try to launch it again. Lord help you if Debian pushes a systemd update, since updating systemd is a reliable crash.
soupbowl
I had pretty good speed on pixel 6 but the reinitializeling randomly made it useless.
flohofwoe
Instead of running in the terminal, this "just" seems to launch a full Wayland session from the terminal.
Anybody know if the actual terminal supports pixel graphics via Sixels, or better Kitty Graphics Protocol?
IshKebab
You aren't going to get good performance for apps that are sending their graphics via Sixels or Kitty Graphics, unless they are specifically designed for it.
Anyway that's not really what this is about.
tetris11
So we'd still need to run X11 apps via a separate server app then?
yjftsjthsd-h
I would assume that once you have Wayland you can just use XWayland?
ndom91
Is there any way to install this on non-Pixel phones yet?
transpute
AVF is supposedly available on a number of non-Samsung, non-Pixel phones.
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-15-virtual-machine-...
xeonmc
The absolute killer feature for this is the ability to finally play Minecraft Java Edition on phones.
lawlessone
There's another app out there i've seen people use to run Fallout 4 an Samsung phones.
And with decent performance.
It's emulating windows and an x86 cpu though. Could probably run minecraft java too
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1divvyo/samsung_ga...
piperswe
Amethyst (formerly Pojav) has made this work for years: https://github.com/AngelAuraMC/Amethyst-Android
politelemon
This is obviously very cool and how I've always wanted my phone to work. But what does chocolate factory gain out of this? I appreciate it, but I don't have the savvy to figure out how this advertising supported business profits from it.
transpute
Nested virt with AVF can balance the competing goals of security, usability, freedom, individuals, and corporate supply chains. It can reduce the size and attack surface of the most-privileged code which runs in a system.
Nested virt has been available on x86 for a decade (KVM, Bromium vSentry / HP SureClick, Microsoft Defender App Guard), on Apple Silicon since M2, MacOS since M3 and iPadOS since M4 (Secure eXclave VM). On mobile, it can sidestep some business model conflicts which torpedoed Nokia, RIM, Maemo, Meego, Tizen, etc.
"Virtual Machine as a core Android Primitive" (2023), 160 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38538100
runjake
Why does this run in a virtual machine (per the article) and not a container?
seabrookmx
Two reasons I can think of:
1) security. Container breakouts are much more common than VM breakouts
2) compatibility - the Android kernel is known to be heavily modified and Debian may benefit from being run on a more vanilla kernel as it does on desktop/server
transpute
Development independence of guest VM from host kernel, security policy, attestation, etc.
ajross
Presumably because container breakouts are fairly common and "external Linux software downloaded by the user" is at least as presumptively malicious as an app from the store. Modern consumer systems need to be safe vs. the user being tricked to run terrible things. A docker or whatever isn't quite up to the standards[1] required on its own.
[1] Though I'm very much not one of the pedants who refuse to see any security value at all in container isolation. Containers isolate software access (e.g. limiting access to libraries with vulnerabilities) and network communication (writing firewall rules for a container is a lot easier than it is for an app) really well, for example. Use them! But not for this.
VadimPR
This is great. We build a graphical MUD client (Mudlet) that's available for Linux/macOS/Windows, but Android support has (so far) eluded us. Would be amazing if this ran a native Linux binary.
Of course, UI adjustments would be the next step!
devinprater
We'll see how well, or not, it works with the TalkBack screen reader.
nsonha
So what phone that I can get right now that runs linux with external monitor and 12+GB of RAM?
figers
This is my dream coding machine with a 10" tri-fold screen and Bluetooth keyboard when on the go and connected to a monitor / real keyboard when home.
transpute
Pixel 8/9 have USB-c external display.
Pixel 8/9 Pro have at least 12GB of RAM, with some models (256GB unlocked Obsidian?) having more.
jharohit
So...can we run SteamOS then on android?
pjmlp
What about Valve actually getting the studios that target Android NDK[0], to care about SteamOS exists, instead of having Valve translate their Windows deployments via Proton?
[0] - Meaning the OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenSL, OpenMAX, C and C++ that also exist in GNU/Linux.
bigyabai
What about it? Steam Deck didn't do any of that stuff, and half of YouTube is saying it's a better value than the Switch 2. Same goes for the Game Porting Toolkit derived from Proton's code, it's just about the only reason the Mac supports real games right now, not just Monument Valley and Laura Croft.
We've already seen the whole "corporate sponsor courts game publisher" thing with Eidos and Capcom at Apple. Let's just say that Apple's commitment to native experiences didn't put them in contention with Sony or Nintendo in the way Valve did.
pjmlp
Where are the sales to match that supposed half of YouTube, one would expect it to outsold Switch 2, yet....
"Nintendo Shares Have Breakout Year as Switch 2 Sales Smash Records"
https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/nintendo-shares-have-bre...
Consumers really should pay more attention to those YouTube influencers, buying the wrong stuff. /s
Apple is doing just fine across iOS, iPadOS and TV OS, which apparently people like to ignore when discussing numbers and monetary figures in gaming profits.
yjftsjthsd-h
AFAIK SteamOS doesn't run on ARM, but I can't see any reason why you couldn't install just Steam itself with the appropriate binary translation
ferociouskite56
Steam can be installed on Winlator https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator/releases
westurner
Does `ls -Z` work in Android Terminal?
(SELinux has run in enforcing mode on Android devices since Android 4.4, which was released in 2013. But Android in ChromeOS only runs SELinux in the guest VM FWIU)
yjftsjthsd-h
It's a virtual machine, so its SELinux support should be separate from what the host is doing
noisem4ker
Since I had to look it up:
-Z, --context: print any security context of each file
Standard Debian-with-root Arm package repo in pKVM hardware-nested VM with OpenGL (v)GPU remoting! So many years of upstream work across Linux, Android and ChromeOS to make this possible. Now we need phone/tablet OEMs to support Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and OpenTitan-derived enclaves, so this feature can move beyond Pixel hardware.
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2025/01/15/the-...
> GFX virtualization aims at providing support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics in virtual machines. Unlike GPU-passthrough, with GFX virtualization the host and all VM guests can access the host GPU simultaneously. Vulkan and OpenGL are supported by virglrenderer using various approaches.. vDRM is a much thinner layer.. able to achieve native GPU performance, where VirGL and Venus may struggle to overcome expensive host/guest synchronizations..at the beginning of 2025, vDRM is partially supported by crosvm.
Hopefully Google's phone-tablet-laptop-desktop convergence of Android, ChromeOS and developer-targeted Debian Linux will motivate Apple to restore iPadOS 16.2 (2022!) virtualization support, https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/discussions/5748.