Comment by arend321

4 months ago

I'm waiting for Android Virtualization Framework to run a full Linux distro on my smartphone with portable monitor (glasses). Already using Termux but AVF is hopefully much more performant. Maybe the Samsung S26 Ultra will have full support. I might ditch my miniPC if this works out.

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arend321

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flyinghamster  4 months ago

I've been playing with it[0] - it still has a few rough edges. It's rather slow to start up compared to firing up a VM in virt-manager, and when you shut it down you must wait for it to finish shutting down before trying to restart it.

Woe to you if Debian pushes a systemd update. It took repeated incantations with apt to get that update to take, because updating systemd would crash the VM Every. Damn. Time.

[0] The current console-only incarnation.

  • arend321  4 months ago

    Thanks for sharing. I hope with Android 16 and Samsung implementing AVF for DeX these issues will be ironed out.

yjftsjthsd-h  4 months ago

> Already using Termux but AVF is hopefully much more performant.

I'm cautiously optimistic about AVF, but I don't see why it would have any better performance than native code running directly on the host system?

  • arend321  4 months ago

    I thought AVF has hardware virtualization where proot is user-space.

    • yjftsjthsd-h  4 months ago

      Oh, sorry, I missed that you meant running another distro under termux. Yes, that probably will be faster, I agree. (I thought we were talking about native termux, which doesn't have the proot perf hit)

boomskats  4 months ago

I'm waiting for one of the headset vendors to support IMU-based HID mouse cursor control in hardware, with the same end goal in mind. In the meantime I'm stuck on amd64 with my little libinput driver[0].

[0]: https://github.com/boomskats/woahland

  • TechDebtDevin  4 months ago

    How long can work on one of these for?

    • boomskats  4 months ago

      I find it extremely comfortable. Considerably moreso than with my desk and monitor setup. I'm long sighted and the projection distance means I don't need glasses to see, and they don't get overly hot (nothing compared to a VR headset). Most significantly though, I can change the position of my head whenever I want without changing what I'm looking at, which makes a difference for my neck comfort, posture, etc.

      To answer your question directly, I've done multiple 2-3 hour sessions at a time without taking the glasses off and have done 10+ hour days in them when away from home. At home I typically tend to use them for a couple of hours in the afternoons when I'm tired and more willing to sacrifice screen real estate for comfort.

      The detail isn't the same and you have to plan your screen layout a bit (i.e. looking at code near the edges of the screen is annoying). But I think they're the future - a much bigger deal than VR or AR.

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