Samsung DeX Will Soon Run Full Desktop Linux

Megalith

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Samsung has announced it will soon become possible to run actual proper Linux on its Note8, Galaxy S8, and S8+ smartphones – and even Linux desktops: the Linux on Galaxy app will give smartphones the capability to run multiple operating systems, enabling developers to work with their preferred Linux-based distributions on their mobile devices. Whenever they need to use a function that is not available on the smartphone OS, users can simply switch to the app and run any program they need to in a Linux OS environment.

Linux on Galaxy is made even more powerful because it is DeX-enabled, giving developers the ability to create content on a large screen, powered only by their mobile device. This represents a significant step forward for software developers, who can now set up a fully functional development environment with all the advantages of a desktop setting that is accessible anytime, anywhere. Samsung Linux on Galaxy is still a work in progress.
 
Hmm... Not a lot of information in that press release. The most it states is "Installed as an app, Linux on Galaxy gives smartphones the capability to run multiple operating systems". So by that definition I'm not even sure if this would qualify as a VM on your phone. This definitely doesn't sound like a virtual machine, so it will be hard to say what type of functionality it has, or how the performance is. I can assume you aren't just going to take an ISO of any distro and toss it into this environment though. So is it really an operating system at that point? Or just another application that can run applications?
 
I guess we'll have to wait until release time to see what the details are. It's probably running the distro in a chroot similar to Ubuntu for Android or running Ubuntu on a Chromebook. I wonder how many distros and desktop environments they can really support though.
 
For me it sounds as if they will be using Linux containers. They can't risk their supervisor, KNOX, to be "easily" bypassed.
 
Well Android literally already runs Linux, so saying you can run Linux on your Samsung phone is redundant...
 
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I don't get the point why don't they just leave it as is and push app development right in android?
 
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