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I used to use Android on an old netbook --- a Toshiba AC100, ARM-based with 512MB of RAM. The netbook originally shipped with Gingerbread and was practically un

I used to use Android on an old netbook --- a Toshiba AC100, ARM-based with 512MB of RAM. The netbook originally shipped with Gingerbread and was practically unusable, but after I upgraded it to Honeycomb it was a really rather comfortable thing to use. I had Debian running in a chroot on it, so I got a combination of the Android UI with a proper Linux environment underneath it. This meant that stuff like wifi and quick wakeup and sleep all worked fine, together with Android's lightweight web browser etc. But if I wanted it, apt and all the build tools were available. Unfortunately, since Honeycomb, each successive Android release has been steadily worse to use with a touch pad --- the Honeycomb status bar was great, the ICS action bar isn't. These days I use a Chromebook.

digi_owl 11y ago
Seems that Android may be heading back towards Honeycomb, given that the 6.0.1 release put the buttons in the screen corners (back and home bottom left, switcher bottom right). Never mind that 5.0 or something put in a notification shade that was more useful on larger screens. The biggest problem with Android right now is perhaps the release cadence, and that Google sticks to it even if it means shipping half baked functionality.
- david-given 11y ago
  For my purposes, the current biggest problem with Android is that it's diverging more and more from desktop Linux; the security model is now sufficiently different that a Debian userland basically won't run. (selinux errors when doing anything with apt.) I used pchroot for a while, which was magical --- it fakes a superuser chroot in a normal user account --- but there's something about recent Androids it doesn't like and it's stopped working for me. The switch to a Chromebook was partly because of this. Crouton seems at least semi-blessed, although recent Chromebooks with Freon no longer support running X in a new VT. (You instead pass through X to a Chrome tab.)
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Theodore Ts'o praised GNURoot the other day. https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/chfKCGTSz3m https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/chfKCGTSz3m
    - david-given 11y ago
      GNURoot is based on pchroot. I spent some time trying to make it work.
nextos 11y ago
I was also chrooting Debian on top of Android for some time. I really like Linux, but desktop GUI software has become quite stagnant due to excessive framework fragmentation. I have long thought that Android converging back with regular Linux is a very real possibility. It might be the case that we end up having Android as a standard desktop instead of Gnome or KDE. I'd rather have the latter, as I don't think Android will easily get rid of Google stuff like GCM, but some competition will be good.
- notalaser 11y ago
  I've used Linux for a very long time. "Excessive framework fragmentation" hardly describes the current GTK & Qt/KDE almost-monoculture. In fact, I can't remember the last time when Linux (or any Unix derivative) was so quiet in this regard. Desktop Linux was anything but stagnant ten years ago, when there were at least three frameworks in current use (Gnome & co., KDE & co., wxWindows -- although that's not a full application framework) plus a lot of other UI frameworks that still weren't dead (Motif, Jesus Christ...) or we had not yet given up on (GNUStep, which is an entire application framework). And there were the people writing GTK software not intended to necessarily run under Gnome (which is being increasingly discouraged by the Gnome team now), as well as people writing Qt software without KDE's framework. Ooh, and Tcl/Tk wasn't dead and buried yet. If anything, GUI software on Linux appears stagnant because we're in one of those CADT rewriting phases that jwz was writing about twelve years ago ( https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html ). There hasn't been much improvement in the last three years, indeed; that's largely because Gnome 3 is struggling to come on-par with Gnome 2 in terms of features and flexibility, and as KDE finally emerged from 4.x's perpetual beta, it got into 5.x's. And, between KDE's increasing lack of relevance after everyone ran away from early 4.x releases, and Gnome's agenda for world domination, there's hardly any room left for developers who have neither a passion for architectural astronautics, nor a taste for political partisanship, so very little desktop software gets written outside these two.
  - frik 11y ago
    They should have stopped with Gnome 2 and KDE 3. All these rewrites to make it look more like OSX or whatever... no words. KDE2/3 with Win95 style themes was pretty good back then. Gnome2 was ok too. Nowadays Ubuntu is ok too.

digi_owl 11y ago

Seems that Android may be heading back towards Honeycomb, given that the 6.0.1 release put the buttons in the screen corners (back and home bottom left, switcher bottom right). Never mind that 5.0 or something put in a notification shade that was more useful on larger screens. The biggest problem with Android right now is perhaps the release cadence, and that Google sticks to it even if it means shipping half baked functionality.

david-given 11y ago
For my purposes, the current biggest problem with Android is that it's diverging more and more from desktop Linux; the security model is now sufficiently different that a Debian userland basically won't run. (selinux errors when doing anything with apt.) I used pchroot for a while, which was magical --- it fakes a superuser chroot in a normal user account --- but there's something about recent Androids it doesn't like and it's stopped working for me. The switch to a Chromebook was partly because of this. Crouton seems at least semi-blessed, although recent Chromebooks with Freon no longer support running X in a new VT. (You instead pass through X to a Chrome tab.)
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Theodore Ts'o praised GNURoot the other day. https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/chfKCGTSz3m https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/chfKCGTSz3m
  - david-given 11y ago
    GNURoot is based on pchroot. I spent some time trying to make it work.

nextos 11y ago

I was also chrooting Debian on top of Android for some time. I really like Linux, but desktop GUI software has become quite stagnant due to excessive framework fragmentation. I have long thought that Android converging back with regular Linux is a very real possibility. It might be the case that we end up having Android as a standard desktop instead of Gnome or KDE. I'd rather have the latter, as I don't think Android will easily get rid of Google stuff like GCM, but some competition will be good.

notalaser 11y ago
I've used Linux for a very long time. "Excessive framework fragmentation" hardly describes the current GTK & Qt/KDE almost-monoculture. In fact, I can't remember the last time when Linux (or any Unix derivative) was so quiet in this regard. Desktop Linux was anything but stagnant ten years ago, when there were at least three frameworks in current use (Gnome & co., KDE & co., wxWindows -- although that's not a full application framework) plus a lot of other UI frameworks that still weren't dead (Motif, Jesus Christ...) or we had not yet given up on (GNUStep, which is an entire application framework). And there were the people writing GTK software not intended to necessarily run under Gnome (which is being increasingly discouraged by the Gnome team now), as well as people writing Qt software without KDE's framework. Ooh, and Tcl/Tk wasn't dead and buried yet. If anything, GUI software on Linux appears stagnant because we're in one of those CADT rewriting phases that jwz was writing about twelve years ago ( https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html ). There hasn't been much improvement in the last three years, indeed; that's largely because Gnome 3 is struggling to come on-par with Gnome 2 in terms of features and flexibility, and as KDE finally emerged from 4.x's perpetual beta, it got into 5.x's. And, between KDE's increasing lack of relevance after everyone ran away from early 4.x releases, and Gnome's agenda for world domination, there's hardly any room left for developers who have neither a passion for architectural astronautics, nor a taste for political partisanship, so very little desktop software gets written outside these two.
- frik 11y ago
  They should have stopped with Gnome 2 and KDE 3. All these rewrites to make it look more like OSX or whatever... no words. KDE2/3 with Win95 style themes was pretty good back then. Gnome2 was ok too. Nowadays Ubuntu is ok too.