Android Authority Doesn't Understand Linux or Android

You'd think a website called Android Authority would understand some basic things about Android and I'm sure they do but not when it relates to the Linux aspects of the system

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#Linux #Android #OpenSource #FOSS #bootloader

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[thisday]

So, the point the author of the article made is, that android is a linux distro, but a very annoying one? :D As a long time linux user I have to agree.

[Jazztache]

One thing that got brushed over; Custom Android ROMS. Graphene, Lineage, and /e/OS are all Android Distros that strip out a lot of the proprietary software, pulling it more in line with the philosophy of Linux. On top of that, they aren't using the Android name, but some include it in their websites and assets, which means the point AA made about being forced to liaison the Android name from Google is either diminished or can otherwise be easily sidestepped.

[kelvinnkat]

I can't help mentally replacing every time you say "authority" with Cartman saying "Authoritah"

[cluesagi]

This reads like it was written by someone who's never actually used Linux and just spent 15 minutes reading about it on Wikipedia

[JonWest]

I would like to share my $0.02, as a developer of an Android-x86 based distro, I would say that Android is just an immutable Linux distro with it's own custom selinux rules, hardware definitions, compositor, and user access control. Various members of BlissLabs have spent years on Bliss OS, Maru OS, and most recently Waydroid, trying to blur the lines between Linux and Android as much as possible, and this video points out that we could still be doing a better job at educating the public on the differences.
Thanks for the shoutout to Waydroid BTW ;)

[csteelecrs]

The article has a 5 year old video embedded in it by Gary Sims that explains the similarities and differences between Android and Linux. Ironically, the author of the article did not watch the video. The author states "by default you cannot run Android apps on any platform other than Android." In the embeded video, Gary Sims explicitly states that Chrome OS can run Android apps. Also, Windows 11 includes the Windows Subsystem for Android that can run Android apps in Windows. According to the author's argument then, Android is actually Windows.

[rhekman]

I used to follow a lot of Linux development years ago, including engaging on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.
Later when custom Android development became a thing, on sites like xda-developers, I tried to follow and participate as well.
Frankly I found the differences in culture and approach tough to deal with and ultimately I lost interest. Things like custom ROMs being assembled by anonymous devs known only by their screen name just felt weird to me. Yes, there are Linux devs who work anonymously or who go by an online username, but Android always felt way more "black-box" to me, even with projects outside of Google.

[alexanderstreng]

"You need to root your device if you want to customize it"

Me deleting system apps with adb shell and universal android debloater(basically a gui for adb shell)

[wallyhackenslacker]

My notes:

1. "Android doesn't use the standard kernel distros use." IIRC most modifications Google makes to Linux is some changes to power management, process scheduling and how the OOM killer works. That's relatively minor stuff.

2. "You cannot run Linux app on Android and viceversa." This is his strongest point, imho. If we consider an OS as the sum of the kernel and the userland frameworks and components, then a dramatically different userland like Android's in comparison to desktop Linux would then make them different OSes. It would be like arguing if the PS3, 4 and 5 OSes are distros of FreeBSD or not. They are based on FreeBSD, but they have so wildly different userlands and system call interfaces that they are effectively different OSes.

2.1 And even then, every single Android device ships with the bog-standard Busybox from traditional Linux distros AFAIK. You can run it with any terminal emulator for Android, or even with the ABD debug shell, no Termux needed. And that Busybox can launch any shell script or command line app that can be compiled with the NDK, which is bog-standard gcc for ARM under the hood!

3. "Android is a Google product." This one is so nonsensical I can't even! That's like saying that since most cars are made by big transnational corporations, then that DIY go-kart you built in your garage is not a kind of car at all because no big corpo had anything to do with it's construction. I don't even know where to start.

4. "Android's FOSS status is up for debate." Linspire was also heavily propietary and no one disputes that it was a Linux distro, for example. This one is quite a reach.

5. "You cannot customize Android by default." In that sense, then you could argue that un-activated Windows is not Windows because you can't customize it either. Also, using "customize" as a synonym for "rooting" is quite an egregious abuse of notation if you ask me.

[iodreamify]

I know you generally touched on this from a technical perspective but i've always found the whole debate moot because practically none of the huge android userbase even know what linux is or care about it. They don't participate in the broader ecosystem, do not care that you can run terminal apps and definitely won't be considering to use it as a desktop os on their pc. Same thing with Chrome os.

[autistadolinux]

Being the devil's attorney, android indeed have some changes that actually affects userspace in the shell. For example, the kernel has some "builtin" groups to allow the user to something that would be trivial in a "desktop" version of the kernel, and its not like normal groups and then you just change the group of the device file, its actually internal permissions to allow certain features of the kernel to be used, e.g. you cannot open sockets even in a separate namespace or even in local context with socketpair(), i know that because i had this problem with a container that i've made with root permissions, i had to map the groups and assign them for all users (even for the root) in the namespace to allow socket creation.

[vaisakh_km]

Think about a Enterprise distro with strict policies in place and proper account speration, where a user cannot access root, but also every apps are running in a CHROOT env or in a docker container.... seems like a android to me

[Peepofangirl]

No way people still watch their videos or read their articles💀

[ensnep]

To be fair rooting on Android is practically injecting a daemonized rootkit to the system boot chain so it's pretty different. Though the concepts still pretty much map between Freedesktop Linux (that's what I'm going to call it from now on) and Android.

[didikohen]

I was (a small) part of the CyanogenMOD development back in the day, just like the writer of this article can have no idea what they are saying and still be called a writer, all the items in the article make Android a bad Linux distro (from a free software and software ecosystem POV), but being bad at something doesn't make you something else.
The most absurd thing, that none of the arguments that may be valid against the definition of Android as a Linux distro, are not in the article.

[ruirosado]

Android isn't POSIX standard compliant. I think that's a big difference and probably the main one. As a final note, i don't see virtualization, containerization and emulation arguments for or against system differenciation because all of them can exist in both systems.

[ocsanik]

The ChromeOS's kernel diverges more from mainline than Android's lmfao

ChromeOS has all of Android's patches because Android emulation on ChromeOS is basically a Android chroot, but ChromeOS also uses it's own swap manager called kstaled instead of kswapd and it has a modified KVM.

Of course ChromeOS is still crap, But it does diverge more from mainline.

[alexstone]

I wish android was more linux, termux works suprisingly well when you realize how hacky the whole project is cause google makes it harder and harder to make it more linuxy by locking it down further

[maxpoulin]

Apart from Termux, there's also X servers on the Play Store, which you can use along things like UserLAnd to basically run whatever distribution you want.

Android is a Linux distribution the same Debian/Fedora/Arch/Alpine are. They're all a distribution of software running on top of the Linux kernel. They just ship wildly different software by default.

Them there's the Steam Deck. You also don't have root on that by default thanks to the immutable filesystem. It's awefully similar to Android's `/system` and `/data` partition design... It does include KDE, but even if it didn't, it'd still be called Linux. And yet it has its own display server (gamescope), its own UI (Steam client).

Is my router not Linux because it uses BusyBox and doesn't come with SSH by default?

Heck, there's even Linux servers with no userspace, they boot directly to a single Go application via gokrazy. Or servers that boot directly to Docker.

Linux is the kernel, and if it uses the Linux kernel, it's Linux.

[Aras]

"You cannot run Linux apps in Android"
Me who started using Doom Emacs, because I needed an extendable editor on my tablet for school, and since VScode wasn't an option and there were no adequate apps, forcing me to use it through termux: °_°