the one thing linux really hasnt been made on par with winblows yet is the dreadful amount of options for android simulation -the most popular choice seems to be Waydroid, but its such an unneeded hassle to set up at all -genymotion is just slow -and than you have things like android x86 which entirely defeat the point of an emulator
Waydroid works at native speeds for me and on NixOS installation constituted adding virtualisation.waydroid.enable = true; to my config, running waydroid init -s GAPPS and then registering it on Google’s website with the code it gives. Might be able to do it with just the nix package manager and not full blown NixOS but not sure about that
Unsure of the difficulties installing it but when it works it works flawlessly
you can make a lot of stuff work with all the work you want
but some people are crazy enough they like to have it a little easier you know, linux doesnt always have to be about making things work
I use Waydroid on EndeavourOS just to run Apple Music. Waydroid basically virtualises an x86 build of Android and uses containers rather than emulating an entire ARM device. The most difficult thing was getting firewalld to let Waydroid access the internet.
as far as i could find out the app i tried to run needs an arm environment (dont quote me on that cause im not a rocket scientist), so waydroid is out of the window now too
Man! I was super excited about this, being a big NixOS fan, but then I realised that the “Way” bit is going to kick me in the nuts. I haven’t made the switch to wayland yet; I keep thinking about switching, but last time I checked being tied to i3 and nvidia hardware scared me off (although I’m aware sway is a drop-in alternative to i3, but it’s an extra complication). Another reason to make the switch when I can though!
Out of curiosity, how do big media apps treat something like Waydroid? Like, I imagine Netflix and co being awkward with anything like this in a misplaced attempted to prevent “piracy”. Do you find apps treating you like a second class citizen?
I’ve not found this yet but I’ve only used it for a few things so far, haven’t tried Netflix. Will give it a go for you in a moment
The apps I have used (plato, teams, office) have worked without a hitch so far (once I figured out I needed to install it with play services enabled)
Can’t imagine banking apps would work at all though
Wayland with Nvidia is patchy. I’ve managed to get around the issue by running integrated graphics with offloading for intensive stuff, at least with Wayland gnome I’ve found integrated is indistinguishable performance from using the GPU anyway
Just installed NixOS with Wayland and Gnome the other day on my laptop with Nvidia card. I had to tune the config a bit, but it works flawless now – notably also with the offload command. That’s fine for me though because it saves considerable energy if the GPU only runs on request.
