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Linux On Android Provides Inexpensive, Powerful Computing
Quoting: Linux On Android Provides Inexpensive, Powerful Computing —
In some parts of the world it’s common for cell service providers to sell new phones at a price significantly below market value, with the caveat that these phones are locked to that service provider alone. It’s questionable whether this practice is good for consumers, but as [Gabriel Broussard Korr] notes, it’s an opportunity for hackers: since it’s possible to run a Linux environment on these phones, they make an inexpensive source of quite powerful computing hardware.
In this case, [Gabriel] was using the Moto G Power 2024, which has 128 GB of storage, 12 GB of RAM, and costs less than $50 when carrier-locked. Rather than trying to install a mobile-oriented Linux distribution (such as postmarketOS), [Gabriel] installed Termux, a terminal emulator which provides a Linux environment within Android. Before doing this, he set up the phone and configured a number of settings for a better Linux experience. Since automatic updates can interfere with these settings, and since none of the provided settings effectively disable these, he used NetGuard to block Internet access from the updater app and from Google Play services.
The next step was to actually install Termux, as well as an X11 extension and an app which exposes an API for Termux. The desktop environment (XFCE in this case) was installed through Termux, and [Gabriel] wrote a shell script to go through the steps of starting it. XFCE worked well on mobile devices because of its full-desktop zoom capability. Even running Linux indirectly, the experience was smooth; [Gabriel] found that GIMP, Shotcut, and VS Code all performed well.
XDA:
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Someone turned a $50 smartphone into a Linux laptop, and it works better than you'd think
Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but PC and laptop prices have been pretty terrible the past few months. With the great AI rush causing people to vacuum up RAM sticks and storage by the dozen, there isn't much left for folks who want to build or purchase a new computer.