>not very up to date on what's going on in the Android ecosystem

I've run various terminals and even cut down distros on Android since all the way back in the Android 2.1 era. Maybe people have simply forgotten, maybe they don't care because they're stuck inside Apple's ecosystem, but there's nothing new here.

The biggest news is that Google is actually trying to cut down on running downloadable executables for security reasons, which is one of the reasons why the Termux release on Google Play can't be updated anymore. The devs would be required to target modern Android, which would drop all compatibility workarounds, which would break running most executables these tools provide. Luckily, the F-Droid version still remains usable.

That's actually how I got started with Android, running a full Debian off an ext4 partition of which I had to compile the module, I went the route of 'setprop ctl.stop zygote and media' and ran on the FB, it ran surprisingly well, a slight bug in the MSM FB driver with color formatting though that I found and fixed. ( I think it was my first post on XDA actually, https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/howto-install-gnu-linux-o... ) pictures are now gone but I have the web server archived somewhere so maybe one day. But i got to use and maintain a lot of my Linux knowhow I'd not really maintained because of life, 12 years later and I'm still messing with Android phones. New and old. On f-droid there is AnLinux (Run Linux On Android Without Root Access) https://f-droid.org/packages/exa.lnx.a/ that straps around Termux, and using xsdl-xserver (sourceforge) you have a pretty decent desktop, using a usb/hdmi/vga adapter and all is well.

HN audience, despite being overrepresented by Americans, is a global board, and the rest of the world iOS vs. Android is 50/50 (boy do we need to break up this duopoly though).