Running Linux-based operating systems on smartphones has come a long way. We now have several Linux-powered smartphones on the market that cater to different use cases. Some pack in flagship-level performance, while others try to be a value-for-money proposition.
Sadly, these devices are out of reach for most people around the world due to excessive taxation from their countries and shipping charges. Of course, many do have an older spare Android smartphone laying around.
Why not make good use of it? In this article, we will be taking a look at a very cool project that turns an Android smartphone into a Linux machine with a simple APK file and no root access.



Yeah, doesn’t work on GrapheneOS either, bummer
Did you find any solution to this? Or issue to bump up?
There’s also a native desktop mode for grapheneos now, you can activate it in dev options
Not what you want. And it only works on Pixel 8 and above
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/grapheneos-desktop-mode/28826
Nothing in android remotely compares to a full gnu/linux desktop
Yeah but dont expect feature parity with samsung’s dex. Dex’s a mile away in small quality of life features. Android’s baked in desktop is so barebones I cannot fathom it took google 9 years to get this out. Its embarrasing.
I sold my samsung and moved to grapheneos, but I really miss dex. And gallery.
What about the gallery do you miss?
Simple cropping, drawing and blurring are something I now know I used nearly daily basis earlier. Tried to find a gallery viewer that had simple pixelize and cropping, couldnt find one.
Installed aves libre for pictures, and now using signal’s inbuilt pixelize function.
I didn’t, but I didn’t look too hard. I wasn’t really expecting it to work
Yup, same thing with pixel8pro and grapheneos