Linux

Will never happen because of SafetyNet. Google does not want you running Android apps on anything other than their approved Android ROMs.

Pine64+waydroid

Came in to say this. Linux on ARM is getting so close to daily driver ready.

Yeah but I bet google's one will have lots of cool features like being harder to use and not supporting becoming root and requiring google play services for no discernable reason

Termux recently got moved off of the play store, and is now only available on f-droid/github, because Google was further locking down what they allowed on their store.

And in addition to that, they recently added a restriction in later versions of Android: "Child process limit". Although this limit used to not there, when enabled, it prevents users from truly running arbitrary linux programs, like via termux.

Although the child process limit can still be disabled in developer options, it doesn't bode well for how flexible base android in the future will be, since many times corpos like Google move stuff into the "secret" options before eventually removing that dial all together.

TLDR: Termux has been, and is a thing... for now.

Also, I want to shout out winlator. It uses a linux proot, similator to termux, and has box64 and wine inside that proot that people can use to play games. I tested with Gungeon, and it even has controller support and performance, which is really impressive.

Termux doesn't run arbitrary software. There's a pretty large set that does but plenty doesn't. A VM would resolve that.

wayDroid does let you do that, in a fairly lightweight way (uses Linux namespaces iirc, similar to lxc.

It's still not full native, which would be even nicer. I play droidfish on my Linux machines using it.

Android userland is vastly different from 'linux' ie desktop linux people are used to. While there exists unshare/proot based containers (termux is an example) it might not be suitable for privileged features of kernel except for rooted devices.

Chromeos is much closer to desktop linux (init being upstart not systemd afaik) but still the 'linux' apps run inside crosvm to keep the locked down nature of the os intact.

The reason so many people are fine with using corporate garbage is ironically the same reason they'd be just fine using something that wasn't that. Users can adapt and learn a system way better than most people think.

Steam requires it to be installed in an x86 environment, whether natively, or through emulation (and most x86 emulation has significant overhead and imperfections)

But java applications should run natively if you supply an appropriate build of java. I have an arm VPS that I've hosted several Minecraft servers on without any problems (other than those I created myself) and I also learned by accident that Microsoft's builds of OpenJDK actually work for (at least some) Minecraft versions that they aren't supposed to, so I have to wonder if that's a happy accident or intentional work by Microsoft

No, not unless you have an x86 Android device. While this will run Linux apps, it will be limited to the CPU architecture. Unless there is a x86 to ARM translation layer on Linux that I'm not aware of?

semantics

Yeah but I'm unwilling to root my device, so hopefully this will allow me to do some cool stuff too.