Coding Without a Laptop – Two Weeks with AR Glasses and Linux on Android

Summary

I recently learned something that blew my mind; you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone. Not some clunky virtual machine and not an outright OS replacement like Ubuntu Touch or postmarketOS. Just native arm64 binaries running inside a little chroot container on Android. Check it out: i3, picom, polybar, firefox, and htop That's a graphical environment via X11 with real window management and compositing, Firefox comfortably playing YouTube (including working audio), and a status bar with system stats. It launches in less than a second and feels snappy. Ignoring the details of getting this to work for the moment, the obvious response is "okay yeah that's neat but like, why". And fair enough. It's novel, but surely not useful. Thing is, I had a 2 week trip coming up where I'd need to work, and I got a little obsessed with the idea that I could somehow leave my laptop at home and just use my phone. So what if we add a folding keyboard and some AR glasses? Here's a CRDT-based ebook/audiobook reader I've been working on, running a desktop Linux app and connected to the Flutter debugger. What's kind of amazing here is that both the glasses and the keyboard fit comfortably in my pockets. And I'm already carrying the phone, so it's not that much extra. The Hardware​ Keyboard: There's plenty of little folding bluetooth keyboards on the market, and I only had to go through 5 of them before I found one that was tolerable. I tried some with trackpads, but they were either too big or the keys were squeezed together to make it fit. The Termux:X11 app that displays the graphical environment is able to function as a trackpad to move a mouse pointer around, and that turned out to be good enough for mouse input. I'm very keyboard-centric anyway, so I'd often go for a while without needing to touch it. The Glasses: Believe it or not, "augmented reality" glasses are kinda good now. The AR part is almost entirely a misnomer; they're just tiny little OLED displays strap...