A real Debian VM in your pocket, minus the screen, keyboard, and patience.

Termux helped me run an Xfce Linux desktop on a budget Android phone ...

Chris Thomas was a reporter at Android Police from 2022 until 2025. Android is, at its heart, based on the Linux operating system’s kernel. It is heavily modified in many ways, and in practice, an ...

Nathan is a tech journalist from Canada who spends too much money on gadgets. You can find his work on Android Police, Digital Trends, iMore, Mobile Syrup and ZDNET. Nathan studied journalism at ...

Google is developing a Linux terminal app for Android. The Terminal app can be enabled via developer options and will install Debian in a virtual machine. This app is likely intended for Chromebooks ...

Have you ever wanted to run a Linux distribution on your Android device? If so, your best bet is UserLAnd. In the name of science and experimentation, I decided to try running a full-blown Linux ...

The Android Linux Terminal app is now widely available for Pixel users running the March 2025 update. The Debian-based environment allows users to carry a fully fledged Linux instance with them, ...

Last time, I described how to write a simple Android app and get it talking to your code on Linux. So, of course, we need an example. Since I’ve been on something of a macropad kick lately, I decided ...

While it is widely known that Android is based on Linux, it is not a typical Linux distro in many ways. There are a lot of standard features and components of Linux that are simply not available in ...

The key to this change is a new terminal app that uses the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF). With this app, users can run Linux commands on their Android device through a virtual machine (VM).