Since Android uses Linux, you’d think it would be easier to run Linux apps on your Android phone or tablet. There are some solutions out there, but the experience is usually less than stellar. A new player, Lindroid, claims to provide real Linux distributions with hardware-accelerated Wayland on phones. How capable is it? The suggested window manager is KDE’s KWIN. That software is fairly difficult to run on anything but a full-blown system with dbus, hardware accelerations, and similar features.

There are, however, a few problems. First, you need a rooted phone, which isn’t totally surprising. Second, there are no clear instructions yet about how to install the software. The bulk of the information available is on an X thread. You can go about 4 hours into the very long video below to see a slide presentation about Lindroid.

While it appears Linux is running inside a container, it looks like they’ve opened up device access, which allows a full Linux experience even though Linux is technically, in this case, an Android app.

We are interested in seeing how this works, and when the instructions show up, we might root an old phone to try it out. Of course, there are other methods. Termux seems to be the most popular, but running GUI programs on it isn’t always the best experience. Not that we haven’t done it.