Native XFCE on android

[monr0e]

I found something interesting. Apparently you can install a full xfce environment (or LXQt or MATE for that matter) in Termux, complete with Xorg and Pipewire. It even permits installing a debian container for full-fat linux applications.

I haven't quite gotten it to work yet. I'm playing around with hardware acceleration, but Vulkan on Adreno is a bit hit&miss. I'll post an update if I get it working.

[JollyRgrs]

huh, that's really interesting. might be especially useful in projects trying to convert old phones into some project thing

[monr0e]

Et voila!

Running Audacious, which bypasses the utterly awful Android audio stack:

I did get a handful of other audio players installed in the Debian container, but there's some display iffiness. GTK isn't available, or at least doesn't run on Arm, so only applications built for Qt (or perhaps SDL) will function, plus there's the limitation of requiring a separate X server running. But, all said and done, it's surprisingly usable. It's super smooth, which I suppose is to be expected given its running natively, but what I didn't expect is how smooth the Debian apps are. I might try LibreOffice next.

What's super cool is that it uses Pulse Audio, and has the option of Pipewire for the Debian container. I haven't figured out how to get PulseEffects working yet, but so far the built-in equaliser in Audacious has demonstrated a vast improvement in sound quality.

I'm actually thinking about how I might make a mobile application with PulseAudio and Calf plugins next. It would be cool to have an audio player that doesn't compress itself into nothing when the EQ is set even slightly above +1 threshold.