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Android does a thing where it has its own display stack and very strict sandboxing so X11 isn't really a thing :) And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which

Android does a thing where it has its own display stack and very strict sandboxing so X11 isn't really a thing :) And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which is available on desktop as well. It's just a royal PITA to configure. This is why many people don't bother with it. But in a highly restricted environment like a smartphone it's a lot easier. I wouldn't call that a 'hacky' thing, it's just using it in a very different environment.

ragnese 6y ago
The Android thing was a bit of a tangent. I did know that it doesn't use X. The point was intended to be that Linux is becoming more and more lacking as a personal computing platform, relative to the gains elsewhere in the space. The display server is one part of that- the entire user/group permission model is another part. The part of Android that is "hacky" is using a separate user for every app. That's obviously not what the Linux/Unix guys had in mind for the user mechanism, thus it's a "hack". It's not necessarily a bad thing and it's totally hidden from the UX of your typical Android user, so it's fine. Just interesting.
rkangel 6y ago
> And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which is available on desktop as well I used to think that, and then I started using Fedora. They have put a lot of effort into their SeLinux policies. I do all sorts of things with my workstation and very rarely have to care. In the last 6 months the only thing I have had to do is add ":z" to a bind mount running a podman container so that labelling happened correctly.