The work profile seems like a better place for that, and it was available since Android 5

I do not know of any such dongle, but I'd like to ask you a question if you don't mind: are you looking for a dongle with open-source firmware, or would a dongle that has its (proprietary) firmware stored in some onboard memory be acceptable?

The second option wouldn't require you to install any proprietary firmware on your computer, but you'd still rely on the proprietary firmware for the device to run. And it might also exist, unlike a dongle with FOSS firmware.

new Pixel

Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL and both Folds. Not the base variants, and especially not the a series. Just in case anyone actually wondered.

The bigger issue is that you can only cast from the tablet to the phone, not the other way around, at least if the Feature Drop page is to be believed

Soon, you can easily transfer media from your Pixel Tablet to your Pixel phone with the new casting feature coming in the next few weeks. All you have to do is bring your phone close to your tablet and what you’re playing on Spotify or YouTube music will seamlessly move over without the extra steps of tapping the cast icon.

Maybe developers will finally start implementing predictive back now that it's not hidden behind developer options. It's kinda nice when you can just peek at where the app wants to take you when you go back, and it currently ironically tends to be implemented only by apps that already have decently made navigation.

Also private space seems nice, finally a way to use the work profile sandbox natively without having to install third party apps that pretend to be work profile managers.

I know this isn't Reddit, but r/peopleliveincities... When 90% of desktop users use Windows, it's going to both be the most targeted by malware developers and have the highest chance of being operated by someone who doesn't understand enough about computers to recognize that the shiny calculator app that just popped up after visiting a very legit Nigerian prince's crowdfunding page probably shouldn't need admin access.

And speaking of user error, I'm willing to bet that basic security practices like using full disk encryption, SecureBoot, some MAC layer (provided by antivirus on Windows, AppArmor/SELinux on Linux) and regularly applying security updates are way more common over in the Windows land - if I was in a situation where there was one completely randomly selected Windows PC and one also completely randomly selected Linux PC, and my life depended on being able to gain access to either of them (some kind of really messed up Saw trap? idk), I would definitely bet my life on the Linux one being misconfigured.

Don't get me wrong, Linux can make for a very secure and private OS, but most installs most definitely cannot be described as such - just look at the popularity of random unverified PPAs on Ubuntu derivatives or AUR packages on Arch.

The biggest friction point for me is the fact that files can only cross the work profile boundary by using the Android's share sheet (or with cloud storage, I guess), and some apps (cough cough Meta crap) didn't like it when you shared a file they couldn't directly access with them. I didn't encounter any such issues recently though.

If you pause the work profile (there's a button in the launcher to do that), all apps in it get killed and their icons and widgets in the launcher get grayed out. If you tap a grayed out icon, you get a dialog asking you if you want to unpause work apps. I think there are ways to automate pausing, but I don't use anything like that and literally only have the pause/unpause button as a toggle for the intrusive apps.

I wonder if Private Space apps can be turned off the same way work apps can. If so, I could ditch Island and stop abusing the work profile as a way to implement a light battery saver.

A reasonable build of the kernel optimized for virtualization won't take more than a few tens of megabytes of RAM (and it will have support for memory ballooning, so the virtualized kernel will give the memory it doesn't need back to the host), and the userspace will need to be separate anyway due to how different Android is to normal Linux distros.

Containers are nice when you want to run dozens of separate services on the same server or want to get the benefits of infrastructure as code, but in this case they would provide minimal benefits at the cost of having no way of loading any kernel modules not built into whatever ancient kernel version your SoC manufacturer decided you have to use on your phone. Also, container escape vulnerabilities are still a bit more common than full VM escape, so this is also good for security on top of being more useful.

box86/box64, and there's also FEX-emu which is used by the Asahi Linux project (Linux on Apple Silicon macbooks).

I can't speak for these specific laptops, but unlike x86, ARM generally doesn't have a way for an OS to discover the available hardware, and most ARM platforms historically didn't do anything to help. There is a standard for UEFI on ARM where the UEFI is supposed to tell the OS about the hardware, but as far as I know this is only a thing on ARM servers and these laptops might not support it.

Without any way of probing for hardware or getting the information from UEFI, Linux has to somehow be compiled with all the info about the hardware built-in. And the build will be model-specific (there's a way to pass a file describing the hardware to Linux from the bootloader which enables a single kernel to be used on multiple models and have just a small part of the bootloader be model-specific, but somebody still needs to make that file and the manufacturers clearly don't intend to do that).

If it is an Arch-based distro (sorry, I don't recognize the package manager), then this might just be the recent Wine update that made it 700 MB smaller (which would mean the rest of your system grew 300 MB)

I made a post here about it: this one

Btw, is there a way to link to a post in a way that resolves on everyone's separate instance instead of hard coding it to my instance?

Does UEFI initialize all the cores? I know the OS always starts with only one core available, but I'm not sure if UEFI just disables the cores after it's done its thing, or if it doesn't touch them. Because if it stays on core 0 and never even brings the other ones up, then this issue with core 2 could let it boot this far just fine.