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.
The app ran super smooth as if it was running natively
That’s because it is native! Waydroid runs an android container on top of your existing kernel. You will notice that you can even see the Android processes while running Waydroid in a top utility.
You must use a kernel with the android-specific modules compiled in, or use the binder_linux-dkms module. I’ve noticed using a kernel with them built in is generally easier to get working.
some android kernels are, but AOSP itself can run perfectly happy on a vanilla kernel, just make sure your kernel was compilled with BINDER enabled, which yes, is upstream
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.
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 think this is “temporarily” true as we get more kits that make wayland development trivial I think it wont be so bad, right now wayland is still very immature, and will be for a long time.
I wonder if it might be an unreproducible moment in history.
I suspect the Cambrian explosion of X11 window managers came from two things:
Propriatery and former-propriatery systems with unique look and feel (see, for example, Open Look/olvwm) There was also a tendency to copy any style you could (WindowMaker copied NeXTStep, IceWM mocked OS/2, and when those cute QNX demo discs came out, within days there were lookalike themes). It feels like the last major outside inspirations, MacOS and Win1,1 are converging on almost intrrchangeable insipidness.
The 1990s/2000s customization era. Machines were finally powerful enough to do mildly nifty things, but still attainable by hobbyists gluing together pixmaps and this bred stuff like Enlightnment E16 or Afterstep
Do these forces still exist in 2024? It seems like Unix Porn today is a bunch of neokvetch windows without even a titlebar to provide a personal statement.
for many people YES! Both wayland and x11 can work very nicely when nested. For many people wayland will be remain unusable for a very long time, and for many other they are finding that now x11 is unusable for them.
It’s not a great situation, but with xwayland and running wayland compositors nested (really wish we had an “way11” too, but per app cage works for me) many people’s usecase will remain to be covered
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
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.
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.
most android apps are architecure agnostic “java, kotlin etc” and even apps that are often ship “Universal binaries” which include x86, or split builds for arm and x86
google play games is still really good, it’s more or less just android inside of crosvm, usually android emulators are based on virtualbox, some are based on qemu
this is not really quite true, we have always been able to run androidx86/BlissOS in qemu which works about “as well” but with less integration, IE no “native like” windows
ah my bad, I misread, I thought you had tried sudo waydroid app install.
Failed to get service waydroidplatform usually happens when something fails when communciating to the container, this usually means the container is partially loaded so you will need to stop it and start again, you may even need to do a full reboot
can you report your issues to the waydroid github or check on the fedora forums? the matrix and telegram chats are always open to help too if you have a bit of patience.
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.
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