This would be very interesting. Imagine plugging your android phone into a dock and getting the ChromeOS GUI instead of Android but having access to all the same data and services. Now imagine we could run crouton and get full access. You could really turn your phone into your main device/dev machine (at least for light workloads).
Kind-of-sort-of like what Microsoft demonstrated with the new windows 10 phones, but a souped up version.
Motorola did come out with a 'Webtop' in 2011 before they got acquired by Google [1].
The laptop dock gave you an Ubuntu desktop to do work in. They even ended up opening up the code (but it was pre-ICS so good luck making that up to date).[2]
'ubuntu desktop' meaning a very crippled system that only allowed access to Firefox. Which was rarely updated and even then not for long. There were some efforts to patch it up to make a more full system but I don't believe anyone was ever successful.
I think that was the general idea, but as I recall the phones did not review very well which is a bummer since you can't just pick a device you want and install ubuntu phone on it.
No. Canonical held a crowdfunding campaign to produce one but did not meet their goals. As I understand it, Ubuntu's desktop environment, Unity 8, isn't ready yet either.
You can run linux/gnu concurrently with most android phones today, just not so easily[1] and not as polished and with the caveat that there is no GPU acceleration[2]. There are a few apps that do it but AFAIK Linuxdeploy is the best.
1. meaning rooting and flashing a 3rd party kernel for starters.
2. intel's next atom version for smartphones due 2016 could well solve this-- currently they use powerVR GPUs in smartphone atom chips, which like all current smartphone GPUs lack OSS drivers. (And being x86 sublimetext would actually work too-- where is the ARM bulid!!.. it would make this so useful)
No chance. The whole idea behind both Android and Chrome OS is to push the user away from root access and leave Google as the one with root access on your device.
> The whole idea behind both Android and Chrome OS is to push the user away from root access and leave Google as the one with root access on your device
Except that you already can "have root access" and can "potentially run any linux app that compiles to ARM" today with ChromeOS and Nexus devices. In this very thread people are talking about running Crouton on chromeos devices and running Ubuntu Phone on nexus devices. In neither case do you need some kind of jailbreak to do so.
All that's needed for the GP's idea is for Android to take a page out of ChromeOS's playbook and allow a devmode that can run alongside of official Google Android.
There isn't a very meaningful distinction between "has root access" and "can get root access at any time by pushing out a binary update that your device will automatically install".
Nexus devices (i.e. the one with the most Google backing) can be completely re-flashed with a firmware that won't accept updates from Google's servers (e.g. with CyanogenMod). If you want an Android device free from their "imperialism", they've always offered one.
Kind-of-sort-of like what Microsoft demonstrated with the new windows 10 phones, but a souped up version.