Dual Boot Android from SD Card or Why It's Not Needed

[Dlonk]

@irvinewade

My suggestion for exploration: Run Waydroid on a bigger computer, leave said computer running when you go overseas, and remote in to the bigger computer from your Librem 5 (making whatever security arrangements you deem appropriate for allowing remote access in to the bigger computer).

I have historically described that I was doing something like this as the solution to my older Android app life problem – which is to say, running Waydroid in a rented cloud node and remote connecting into it.

But, truth be told, it’s more complicated than that. I don’t know if it’s Google, or human apathy and my fault for not bug reporting and contributing to open source tools, or what. But in reality, running Waydroid indefinitely in a remote access endpoint has given me some major troubles:

• Waydroid seems to crash about once per week in that situation
• The libhandy version of the VNC client that I tended to use does not fully forward keyboard key strokes (at least in its Byzantium version), so running the terminal command waydroid show-full-ui in the remote sway window manager session to restart Waydroid literally doesn’t work when a Librem 5 is the client
• Due to the above, my daily driver Librem 5 has typically only been a “short term client” for the remote Waydroid session. Every 5th time, when I log in to find Waydroid has crashed, it is actually my Librem 14 whose VNC client has full keyboard access, that I have used to step in and resolve issues and restart everything.

And for my overseas trip, folks said they wanted to travel lean, and take only phones and not laptops. So if I was actually going to use remote-controlled Waydroid as my serious broader-scope solution to the problem when overseas, then I probably ought to be spending more time on this to figure out the faults in our software.

Meanwhile, I again wrote this entire reply from my full screen Waydroid SD-card boot, but it’s on my good daily driver here. It’s temptingly smooth to use. Remote controls for a Waydroid box, or at least the ones I have used previously, are nothing like this. I wouldn’t write a post here with them. I am not so much a masochist.

Of course, Phosh and PureOS are so good that if writing posts were all I had to do, then I shouldn’t ever need Waydroid. In my head, I’m moreso just seeing the state of this technology. But maybe I have irreparably ruined my privacy and security by putting too much faith in a LUKS password hiding the eMMC from Google, as if that meant that when I power off Google would be gone.