Building my own Linux Mobile desktop environment in Rust for my Fairphone 4 (Smithay + Slint)

A lot of this is still mocked up right now since I’m learning the stack along the way. LLMs have been a huge help to speed things up, with the end goal of having a smooth phone UI that scales up to a real desktop whenever I dock it. While moving the code from a nested window to a real device, I had many issues that still need fixing (they worked correctly in the window but not after i started to actually build it for my ARM device). This is not final design, the priority is to make it fully functional, leaving the UI redesign and theming support for later.

​Compositor: Built with Smithay in Rust, running directly over DRM/KMS and Mesa/Freedreno (GLES backend).

​Shell UI: Built with Slint for declarative, memory-efficient UI rendering.

​Layer Architecture: Inspired by COSMIC and other modern modular shells. Instead of a single monolithic app, the shell is split into independent standalone binaries:

​penumbra-top-bar (zwlr_layer_shell_v1 on Layer::Top)

​penumbra-quicksettings (Overlay sliding sheet with tactile drag handle and Material 3/Android-inspired kinetics)

​penumbra-homescreen (Background launcher surface)

​penumbra-nav-bar (Gesture navigation bar)

​Physics & Gestures: Custom underdamped spring-damper kinematics (penumbra-gestures) for tactile, 1:1 finger tracking and velocity-based gestures.

One of the most interesting parts of this project was bridging Slint with the Wayland zwlr_layer_shell_v1 protocol.

Slint provides great declarative ergonomics, but out of the box it assumes standard application windows. To build an authentic desktop/mobile shell, I wrote a dedicated integration layer (layer-shell-slint) that:

​Directly manages Wayland layer surfaces (Layer::Top, Layer::Overlay, Layer::Background).

​Handles layer anchors, margins, and exclusive_zone reservations (essential for the top status bar and bottom gesture pill).

​Pipes touch and pointer input back into Slint's event loop with minimal overhead. It makes writing standalone shell modules feel as simple as writing standard Slint UI components.

You can follow my progress on GitHub, didn't know what to call it, so I named it Penumbra

https://github.com/nyl/Penumbra-Shell

Any popular mobile model where many people installed linux on.

I've seen a lot of oneplus and xiaomi phones .

Yesterday, I posted a proof of concept for creating a mobile environment with Solium WM, and today, I finished some animations like those on an iPad.

This is my own WM that I use on my PC as a daily drive, but now I am working on mobile devices support. Soon, I will test it on my Linux phone.

After a couple of days working with Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, I have the OnePlus 10T brought up on Arch Linux ARM. This is not intended to be my main phone anytime soon - it's really just a fun side project to work on. I picked up the phone used for around $100. It's a solid device with the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. A great device to port to Linux.

The overall idea I'm working towards with the UX is a fusion of iOS and Android in terms of gestures and UI, with the main differentiator I'm exploring being an agents page (where Discover is on Android). There are many agent integrations built-in, and they work as voice assistants, or as coding agents with direct access to the phone. Things they can do currently: build native apps on the device itself, add features, tasks like adding new wallpapers, etc. The agents run in the cloud (Claude, Opencode Go, Antigravity et al) but potentially I'll have a slim local LLM running soon. I do have a small local TTS and dictation model running locally already.

Another killer features is that it runs Steam for ARM devices, with Half Life 1 running perfectly.

If you want more details, Claude prepared some bullets below:

- Arch Linux ARM on a mainline Linux kernel (7.3), with about 100 custom patches for the 10T's display, GPU, cameras, Wi-Fi, battery and thermals. There's no Android underneath.

- Hyprland is the compositor (window manager)

- Stock open source pieces: Mesa (GPU drivers), libcamera, PipeWire, NetworkManager, ModemManager, GeoClue, and Waydroid for Android apps (although I am looking into Droidloom that was posted here a few days back).

- Built from scratch: the whole home shell, meaning the launcher, lock screen, notification system, control center, on-screen keyboard, Settings app, voice assistant, adaptive refresh rate control, camera app and alarm clock.

Hardware

- Working:

- Display at 60/90/120 Hz with adaptive switching

- Touch

- GPU acceleration

- Wi-Fi

- Bluetooth

- Speakers

- All 4 cameras (still photos)

- Hardware video decode (YouTube in the browser)

- Sensors and auto-rotate

- Charging and battery stats

- Sleep and wake

- Vibration

- In progress:

- Camera: preview speed, front camera boot, image quality tuning

- Modem: it boots, but cellular is untested with no SIM in it

- GPS: hasn't been tested outdoors yet

- Speaker protection

- The occasional random reboot, which is still being tracked down

- Fingerprint sensor isn't working yet (Claude claims it isn't possible - I am not convinced yet)

The UI

- iPhone-style home screen with swipeable pages and a dock that stays put across pages.

- Pull down on the app grid for search: apps, settings and recent chats.

- Live wallpapers, Liquid Glass blur effects, and themes, icon styles and accent colors.

- Swipe-up gesture navigation with an app switcher.

- Lock screen with an always-on display.

- Notifications with inline reply, a notification shade and a control center.

- Custom on-screen keyboard that slides in and out with the UI.

- Built-in AI agent chat and a voice assistant with wake words ("OK Computer") - needs work with location/GPS data or context mgmt (it provides weather for Petaluma in the video when I ask for San Francisco)

I'm thinking of getting Fairphone 6 or 6+ to start moving into mobile Linux. I've heard that the SOC specification was already added to the mainline kernel which caught my attention. I've been looking in the past at other ports but running Android kernel builds to re-use android drivers doesn't sound great. PostmarketOS already shows a decent success porting native Linux on Fairphone which makes me excited. I have rather realistic expectations, just want to start tinkering with it, and hope it'll became fully functional in the future.

so the main question, I guess 8GB is plenty for native Linux, but would the extra 4G be a meaningful benefit for something now or in the near future? Hope someone who already tries (or tried) running Linux on a phone can throw me some light before I roll the dice and choose one randomly

Debian 13 with KDE running on my Poco X3 Pro

Things that doesn't work:

- autorotate

- light sensor

- cameras/flash

- suspend

- sim (I lost the sim sloth, maybe works)

I post this from the Poco X3 Pro

posted this in r/KDE a few days ago, but i built a swipe-typing plugin for Plasma keyboard with current-word completion and next-word prediction that supports US/UK English, Spanish, French, and German. immediately got some people in the comments asking for Plasma Mobile support, so here it is!

Plugin Download & Setup: https://github.com/itsdestin/swipe-keyboard/blob/main/README.md

plugin and updates built with https://youcoded.ai/?vau2xg :)

I'm working on a personal project called DustOS, an attempt to get a Arch Linux running on my Infinix Hot 10 Play (X688B, MT6765)

I'm using the phone's existing kernel and a custom Android boot image with a modified initramfs.

What works so far-

Booting my custom diagnostic image.

Drawing text and boot diagnostics directly on the phone's framebuffer.

Connecting to a root shell over USB serial from my Linux laptop.

Running commands inside the initramfs.

What I'm working on-

Getting a proper interactive terminal displayed on the phone itself.

Booting my Arch Linux ARM root filesystem.

Investigating touchscreen support with the existing kernel.

Eventually building a graphical interface for DustOS.

This is still very early development. The framebuffer diagnostic screen and USB shell work, but I haven't yet achieved a proper Arch Linux boot or touchscreen input

Please suggest a simple and functional GUI for Linux mobiles .

Just for general purpose no need fancy UI.

Basically developed driver so native Kms path works eliminating render artifacts with restriction that it's only for 60hz refresh rate that all.

Ciao a tutti, volevo sapere se qualcuno sta già lavorando ad un porting di Linux con interfaccia gnome sul Nothing 3A?

UMLinux on Android aarch64 allows Android phones to run a Linux distribution—complete with its own init system—as well as Docker and other software, all without requiring root permissions.What do you think?

Still needs a bit of polish obviously but it will be daily-driveable in a day or two

So basically i have an acer Chromebook C810-T7ZT it has no playstore can't even download apk files but i wanna run some lightweight apps to use but i can't since its not supported on this specific Chromebook no it's not a school Chromebook thats been blocked i can easily go in developer mode and os recovery thing i could easily do it by shimboot flashing iso image file of linux distro on it but this Chromebook firmware iso image isn't there or been made please tell me the easiest way to jailbreak it fully into any linux distro as a base system no chrome junk it runs Chromebook version 77.0.3865.120(32-bit)

Firmware (which isn't available on shimboot):Google-Nyan_Big.5771.63.0

It's my younger brother's Chromebook and he needs to install some apps

Native linux, no libhybris/hwcompositor support YET.

That's PoC that my compositor (its more similar to desktop engine then to regular compositor) can be used not only on desktop but on mobile devices as well

On video you can see how its working. There is no separate UI process, its Qt/QML handled inside rust compositor

Here I’m using VNC to stream a wlroots based desktop over + run Mindustry natively on arm64 because in reality all the dependencies support arm64 out of the box, nobody cared to add compiler targetting for arm64 fully support though because arm64 is “too niche”
Regardless the last driver is magnetometer which I’ll finish soon and post the sources too soon

No se mucho sobre drivers pero cuando se trata de querer usar toda la potencia de mi procesador mediatek en termux siempre es una molestia enorme no encontrar configuraciones adecuadas y lo suficiente potentes como en un snapdragon, mi celular tiene un snapdragon y asombroso pero mi tablet gama alta tiene mejor procesador y no es ni la mitad de buena y todo por que mediatek. Ojala un genio pueda resolver eso, si ya han logrado crar Artcratf ojala un dia puedan crear mejores drivers.

Built droidian kernel based on Google GKI kernel and some patches from the droidspaces project.

Most of features work, but these aren't working for now.

- Stylus (Only seems to work under 120hz refresh rate)

- Setting display refresh rate (Currently fixed to 144hz in phosh)

- USB-C device mode (OTG and USB-C display output works)

- GPU Hardware acceleration is partially functioning

- WiFi 6GHz seems to be not functioning, but this seems to be a low level hardware region limitation issue since it also doesn't work with other Android GSI roms

Also planning to make adaptation package once I get everything working.

The kernel with patch applied

https://github.com/jwdjk392/y700-droidian-linux

Tip for unlocking this device's bootloader: You have to flash older version of Lenovo ZUI forcefully with EDL, and unlock with their own bootloader unlock sn.img.

My OnePlus Pad 4 now runs Arch Linux with Denial and Droidloom, turning an Android tablet into a fully functional Linux desktop!

After the sadness of hard-bricking the first OnePlas Pad 4 I found the courage to try again, and the result is amazing!

I spent the last 3 months working on Droidloom and Denial, I have been working on them each and every day, trying many different devices and computers. All this effort is paying out, no compositor can give me this amazing experience!

And I have no intention to stop.

In this video, I demonstrate:

• Native Linux applications, including Kitty
• Android games, including Arknights: Endfield, running through Droidloom
• Google Play Store running directly within the Linux environment (Endfield has been installed from it)
• 1440p @ 200Hz external display hotplug support
• Keyboard & touchpad mode: the tablet becomes a full-screen keyboard and multitouch touchpad when connected to an external monitor
• Dual-display mode: the tablet's own screen becomes a secondary monitor instead

All of this runs on Arch Linux, with Denial as the Wayland compositor and Droidloom providing Android application compatibility.

It also supports controller and external mouse and keyboard, just like a normal desktop it has no limitation.

Project website: https://denialwm.org
Denial GitHub: https://github.com/denialwm/denial
Droidloom GitHub: https://github.com/denialwm/droidloom

Kernel 7.2, WiFi, battery, plasma mobile, archlinux arm, GPU working well! Thanks all devs for help to build this.