4.26 Hours of Rootless Debian 13 on Samsung DeX: Thermal, Battery & Compiler Telemetry
When Samsung discontinued the official Linux on DeX project years ago, running a real Linux desktop on Android mostly became an exercise in compromises: sluggish VNC sessions, software-rendered UIs, broken audio, or background processes silently killed by Android's memory management. I wanted to see how far modern flagship ARM64 hardware can push a completely rootless, user-space Debian 13…
Samsung discontinued its official Linux on DeX project, making running a real Linux desktop on Android a compromise. The author wanted to test how modern flagship ARM64 hardware can push a rootless, user-space Debian 13 (Trixie) workstation while keeping Samsung Knox intact, delivering hardware-accelerated graphics, native audio, and multi-hour desktop stability. They built and open-sourced dex-linux-workstation, a modular installer, and ran empirical stress tests logging 4.26 hours of continuous telemetry.
The architecture eliminates network-loopback display protocols, uses zero-copy display transport over local UNIX domain sockets, and enables hardware-accelerated OpenGL across Qualcomm Adreno and ARM Mali/Immortalis GPUs. Audio is PulseAudio running over local loopback TCP with low-latency buffering. RAM is optimized with Chromium wrapper scripts, and the desktop workflow was demonstrated in a YouTube Proof of Concept.
In a 4.26-hour docked soak test, the SoC temperature stayed at 36.0 °C median, battery temperature dropped from 30.3 °C to 26.7 °C, and battery level stayed at 80% with no degradation. RAM footprint was 10.1 GB, with zero Android LMK terminations. In a 32-minute unplugged compiler workload, 9 Redis builds were completed successfully, with only 8.3% thermal variance and an average power draw of 2.2 W. The VirGL/EGL pipeline works across both Snapdragon and MediaTek architectures, with glmark2 scores of 186 FPS on Snapdragon and 112 FPS on MediaTek.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
