Android 17 Leaves Linux GUI Apps Broken on Pixel 9 Pro After 1 Week of Testing
Updated
Updated · ZDNet · Jul 7
Android 17 Leaves Linux GUI Apps Broken on Pixel 9 Pro After 1 Week of Testing
1 articles · Updated · ZDNet · Jul 7
Summary
A week of testing on a Pixel 9 Pro found Android 17’s Linux GUI app support effectively unusable, with Weston failing to provide a stable way to launch graphical Linux apps.
Weston should let users run Wayland-based GUI apps through Android’s Linux terminal, but the analyst could not reliably open the Weston terminal from the compositor even after raising memory allocation from 2GB.
A workaround briefly opened weston-terminal from the standard Linux shell, but Flatpak apps such as Chromium then failed with a D-Bus portal initialization error because the compositor was not actually running.
The feature has been available since Android’s 2025 Canary builds, yet repeated reinstalls, upgrades and RAM increases to 50% of the phone’s memory still did not make it work.
That leaves Android close in theory to functioning as a Linux desktop, but not ready for general use until Google fixes the Weston implementation in a future update.