Why would you want to, though?
It’s not like the Switch is a powerhouse; you’re better off just buying a Deck and emulating.
A Steam Deck is also double the price and not something that a lot of people might have just lying around.
I just don’t get what the purpose is though. You’ve lost access to the proprietary primary library, which was the original reason to buy a Switch. If you want an emulation console there are cheaper alternatives as well other than the Deck, I was just using it as the de facto standard handheld.
There’s no benefit to nuking the OS and replacing it on a Switch. At least with something like a ROG Ally, you can make the argument that flipping over to Linux would make the handheld more performant and energy efficient. That cannot be said about flashing Lineage onto a Switch which functionally makes the system considerably less useful.
The Switch OS is already optimized and designed for the hardware. It’s as good as you’re going to get, and it’s also already Linux. I would much rather suggest cracking it to put custom firmware on the device based on the Switch OS; you would get more use out of the device because it could still play the games and be rigged to emulate the older ones.
It’s cool Lineage did this or whatever but it’s kind of a pointless and weird flex.
The time it took you to write this would have been better spent reading the article:
Because Android isn’t technically “installed” on the Switch, but rather an external microSD card, you can switch between the default system and Lineage at any time.
Running Lineage is a big deal for those of us who have a switch laying around that no longer have a use for it.
- It can be an android tv device replacement
- Buy a $20 goose neck tablet mount, and now it’s a way to play streamed steam games or use the android tv jellyfin client to watch/play stuff without using the main TV
- Bedside clock/radio with loads of extra features
- Dedicated HomeAssistant remote
Or, the basic use case - Play emulated games on a neat handheld package with a decent screen on a plane or something, without needing to carry or buy another device.
If you’ve got a switch gathering dust and have no interest in using it for gaming again (e.g. if you’ve got a steam deck), it’s nice to have the option to convert it to an Android tablet for the multitude of use cases the stock OS doesn’t support: streaming, a proper web browser, chat apps, …
With the model of the switch I have, modding it like this is only a softmod. Restarting the switch returns it to its normal nintendo switch interface and OS.
Why do this? Its fun, and besides if nintendo doesn’t want you playing its old games on new hardware then I’ll makr the new hardware play the old games.
Correct, however rooting and installing lineageos for…? It will probably not let you play Nintendo games from their cloud. Might be cool as a emulator gamepad, but there’s plenty of great options out there for less now.
Don’t know if it applies here but I saw a video where the native version of Minecraft ran slower than the emulated version… on a Switch!
Taki Udon demonstrates a Switch emulating a Switch running Minecraft with better performance than Minecraft just running on Switch stock firmware.
Yup. That was the one. Quite sad, but possibly the native system throttles to improve battery.
It makes a really really good android tablet in my experience and breaks in half every other android tablet I have used as of recently and I can’t get rid of it.
Like sure battery life isn’t the best. But the amount of things that you can do with a generic android device is astounding and is well worth the investment and it has more ram than any other tablet in its price category when bought used on eBay. Such that it actually functions really well compared to the shittastic tablets you’d be buying for its price point.
That and you can just run Linux on the Nintendo Switch anyway and have a fully functional computer that mogs any single board computer out there including the raspberry pi. Like having better hardware decoding and actual vulkan and opengl support that isn’t gimped due to laziness surrounding drivers that surrounds these computers.
Cool. It still supports none of the phones I ever bought in my life.
Web sites like that are so annoying, they couldn’t even be bothered to find an image or video of LineageOS running on a Switch?
Oh neat
Good bye Nintendo
