Andronix

A while back I managed to get a fairly respectable system out of an Android tablet with a keyboard running a stripped-down Ubuntu in a chroot container. The process was somewhat involved, but despite the macguyveresque sense that it was all held together by tape and prayer, it was actually quite stable and I used it for a long time as a portable development machine.

In fact, later on I realised that it was actually the best Linux desktop environment that I've used. You get all of the standard apps and things you're used to (it even runs Photoshop... kinda), but under the hood it's still a fully functioning Linux machine that you can do Real Work with. The only problem is there's a kind of disjointedness because the two halves aren't really working together, they just happen to mostly stay out of each other's way.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that with only a little bit of rejiggering, you could bring those two halves together. You could have a standard Linux environment all the way up to running system services, one of which is the Android Runtime. Then any apps you want to run happen in the sandbox on top of that. You'd end up with something fairly similar to the current developer-friendly state of Mac OS: pretty UI up front, serious unix business in the back.

Maybe that would also be a reasonable direction for the Perpetual Year of the Linux Desktop. New attempts to remake the desktop environment are all the rage these days, but none of them come with millions of apps. It seems like if you could weld the Android frontend onto the existing Linux backend, you'd have an easy winner.

I wonder if anyone's already working towards this. Seems like a no-brainer to me.