I think a part of your positive experience is also thanks to Linux. Android emulation works better on it because the difference between Linux and Android is not that big and definitely not as big as between Windows and Android. Though Waydroid rocks anyways
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It took a long long time until Android emulators on Linux worked even close to what has been available on Windows.
The documentation says:
Waydroid uses Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc) to run a full Android system in a container and provide Android applications on any GNU/Linux-based platform.
To my understanding this isn't even emulation but regular container technology.
Wouldn't some Android Apps require specific builds for x86 architectures? Does Android take care of that?
If you need arm, then you probably have to install libhoudini https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script
A lot of android apps are built using Java/Kotlin, so you don't actually need to care about architecture since the JVM supports both x86_64 and arm64.
There are exceptions to this though, since some apps need to run native code. Those apps would need some sort of emulation/translation layer for the arm instructions.
Android emulation works better on it because the difference between Linux and Android is not that big
To be clear, the difference between Linux and Android is about the same as the difference between Linux and Fedora, in that they are both Linuxes. That's why this works, and why the reverse (running GNU/Linux apps and even entire systems on Android) is possible as well.
I meant a desktop Linux distro, not the kernel itself. And Android has a ton of bloatware on top of it so it's not really the same thing. Android has like a double decker kernel
I just tried it 3 days ago on Fedora 40, Did not run for me.
Followed their wiki
How did you setup?
I don't remember tbh. I installed it a couple of years ago but used it for the first only recently.
At what point did it not work for you? I just got it running on Fedora 40 following their wiki.
Failed to get service waydroidplatform
on doing waydroid app install myapk.apk
ERROR: WayDroid container service is already running
IT says already running on doing sudo waydroid container start
I got it into android "desktopt" previously, but now after rebooting and trying to install an apk it seems to no longer be opening at all. Sorry :/
Edit: I just uninstalled and reinstalled via the software Center and now it works and I could install F-Droid.
You need a custom kernel, or a kernel module plus DKMS and kernel headers for your current kernel.
You also need the package that handles whatever filesystem they use for their containers.
Then, you need to be running it on Wayland or else it doesn't work.
The part that I'm stuck on is running games, which gives an error about not being able to find libmain.so, which might be an architecture mismatch problem. Maybe I can virtualize that part? But at that point I might as well just buy a phone.
I had a similar positive experience with Gamescope, which tamed a game that freaked out every time I moved the moude onto the other monitor.
Maybe Wayland's healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.
Maybe Wayland’s healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.
Yeah you've got that perfectly backwards.
Wayland allows X11 apps to open using XWayland. Not the other way around.
Xorg's life is running short and will be largely abandoned in the near future.
I think I'd be a lot more excited about Wayland if I felt like I can get a compositor that matches my tastes.
I want to iconify things to the desktop, not relying on a taskbar-alike. Nothing seems to offer that. Hell, the taskbar is often a third party program.
I want to double-click to shade. Labwc just added this, a feature that X11 window managers have been offering since the 90s.
I want an aesthetic that's got real depth and skeumorphism, rather that flat and featureless. Maybe something offers that, but there are plenty of X11 choices that have beveled buttons out of the box.
The charm of Unix systems used to be flexibility, buy Wayland seems to be an extinction-level event for traditional window management. Nothing fills the gap of FVWM or WindowMaker. But gosh, I can get 92 flavours of tiling compositor and windows that ripple when dragged.
I admire your optimism but some governments are still using floppy disks.
I don't see how this matters lol, as govt will happily used abandoned media and software.
We're here talking end users and homelabs, not IBM mainframe maintainers 😛
Used it but couldn't play any media on it, which was going to be my use case. Nvidia!!!!!. But the devs and the community are quite patient and helpful in their telegram channel.