Recently, I installed Debian on my phone with Termux. The intention was hosting a Minecraft server on my old Android phone. It has a Snapdragon 835 and 8 GB of RAM. The server was just perfect and now, I can play Minecraft with my friends whenever I want. How COOL is that?! Phones are now so powerful to even compete with a laptop computer.
I did lots of setups and installed many things. Now, I have a Linux system ready in my pocket. Apple’s transition to M1 is a good thing because now, many softwares started supporting ARM64. I managed to install VSCode and with a VNC connection from my computer, I could do some intense C/C++ programming.
With better chips in the future, Android tablet could replace a laptop because you can connect to your tablet locally with VNC, no extra computer required. Samsung S6, S7 and S7+ are some good tablets to start with. Snapdragon 865 could probably compete with an Intel i3 and that’s powerful enough for daily tasks.
However, this is not for average users because the setup requires some skills. Samsung used to offer Linux on Dex for flagship devices, but the support ended a while ago. It was a lot easier to use and setup. You can connect to a monitor with HDMI so no VNC connections needed. However, instead of using Termux, UserLAnd could be another choice. It is relatively simpler, but I ran into some issues with it, so I switched to Termux.
Overall, I see many potentials with Linux on Android. I hope one day, Apple could support something similar for iPad Pros. Currently, you have MTU and ISH. They are great but still have a long way to go. Apple is all out pushing ARM, but the software is limiting what users could. Imagine running Linux on iPadOS. That’s world-changing. Apple is unifying iOS and macOS, so I believe the future I am waiting for is near. One day, phones, tablets and desktops will become ONE device, just like what he did before to iPhone.
This was written 100% on my phone :)