{
  "id": 20025077,
  "title": "4.26 Hours of Rootless Debian 13 on Samsung DeX: Thermal, Battery & Compiler Telemetry",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/14/4-26-hours-of-rootless-debian-13-on-samsung-dex-thermal-battery",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-11-14T18:29:40.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/thecbr600/426-hours-of-rootless-debian-13-on-samsung-dex-thermal-battery-compiler-telemetry-m5c"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nIn 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.",
  "summary": "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…",
  "key_points": [
    "4.26-hour soak test maintained SoC temperature at 36.0 °C median",
    "Battery temperature dropped from 30.3 °C to 26.7 °C during test",
    "Battery level remained at 80% with no degradation"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}