Droidtux: Integrate your Android phone's apps as native desktop windows on Linux

Hi everyone!

Some time ago, I came up with the idea of creating a tool to integrate my Android phone's apps directly into the Linux desktop as if they were native. I had looked into projects like Waydroid, but I specifically wanted to use the apps and data from my own phone without configuring a container from scratch. I wanted the convenience of plugging in my device, working on my PC with its apps, and just taking them with me when unplugging.

Recently, Google introduced a similar feature for Aluminium OS, and Apple has its own iPhone Mirroring ecosystem. I wanted that exact seamless experience on Linux.

How does it work?

To use Droidtux, you only need to have USB Debugging enabled on your device.

1. Plug and Play: When you connect your phone via USB, Droidtux automatically handles the heavy lifting.
2. Seamless Integration: It extracts the icons from your phone (via a lightweight helper app installed through ADB; everything is 100% open-source and auditable on GitHub) and configures the corresponding .desktop entries.
3. Clean Disconnection: As soon as you unplug your phone, the shortcuts disappear cleanly from your system without leaving any clutter behind.

⚠️ Important Tip: Make sure to temporarily disable your phone's screen timeout, use a "Stay Awake" developer setting, or loop a video in the background. If your phone goes to sleep or locks itself, the stream will instantly drop and the cast will turn off!

A quick note on performance: Depending on your phone's hardware capabilities and the resolution, DPI, and bitrate settings you choose, window scaling and fluidness may vary. If you experience very small or laggy windows, it usually means the phone's processor is struggling to encode and render more pixels than its hardware can handle in real-time. Tweaking the DPI and lowering the resolution slightly does wonders!

Compatibility & Updates

• Supported Distros: It runs flawlessly on both Debian-based and Arch Linux distributions. It is currently untested on Fedora, but feedback is highly appreciated!
• Automatic Updates: To receive updates automatically, you can read how to set up the Inled repository at apt.inled.es (don't mind the "apt" in the URL, it hosts packages for the supported ecosystems).

If anyone runs into any issues or needs help setting it up, I'll be more than happy to help you out in the comments!

• Project Website: https://inled.es/apps/droidtux
• Source Code: https://github.com/InledGroup/DroidTux