We keep saying our smartphones are more powerful than the computers we grew up with, but almost nobody actually uses their phone like a computer. That always bugged me, so I’ve tried to make my phone double as my PC for some time now. Granted, the experiments have always been hit or miss — until I finally tried it on my Google Pixel. While it can’t replace a proper workstation, I found it to be pretty good as a portable Linux PC. In fact, it’s so good that it has practically replaced my Raspberry Pi.
First, how I use my Raspberry Pi
What exact use case am I replacing with the Google Pixel?
I first bought my Pi intending to use it as a home server. I set up Nextcloud and Pi-hole on it, and for a while, that was all I needed. Then I got deeper into homelabbing and kept adding more Docker containers, like Immich and Jellyfin, and it quickly became evident that the Pi wasn’t powerful enough to keep up. Things got much worse once I got into local AI and wanted to run my own local AI server, which a Pi realistically can’t handle.
This is when I shifted all my Docker containers to my main workstation, effectively turning it into my main homelab. The Raspberry Pi became my dedicated writing machine. I ran the default Raspberry Pi OS as the distro and set up LibreOffice for writing my articles, Chromium for research, and GIMP for editing images and screenshots.
Basically, I just flipped the roles and started “working” on my Pi while doing my experiments on my workstation. This immediately showed me just how lean my actual work requirements are and got me curious about potentially moving my workload to my phone and finally living the mobile work life.
Google Pixels can turn into a desktop PC
The Pixel Pocket Computer
Pixels have had a desktop mode for some time now. If you plug your Google Pixel into a monitor, you’ll see a pop-up asking whether you want to mirror the screen or use desktop mode. Pick desktop mode, and the monitor will switch to a proper full-screen desktop. Pair it with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and you’ve basically got a working computer.
There’s a taskbar along the bottom with your pinned apps in the center and a button to open the app drawer. The back, home, and multitasking buttons sit in the right corner. Up top, you get your notifications on the left and the battery, network, and other system icons on the right. Pull down from the top, and you get your quick settings and all your app notifications.
Now, the multitasking button, instead of opening the recent apps menu, opens virtual desktops — which is my favorite part. You can use different desktops to organize the different apps you’ve got open for more coherent multitasking. You’ve also got basic window-snapping support, where you can drag a window to the edge of the screen and it’ll snap into place.
It’s an overall clean experience and perfect for quick computing.
Currently, my workflow revolves around jotting down ideas on my Pixel, and when it’s time to write, I connect it to a monitor, switch to desktop mode, open Notion and Google Keep snapped side by side, and start writing. It has basically taken over everything I did on my Pi. What’s more, you have access to the entire library of Android apps in the Google Play Store, which, in my opinion, makes it more functional than a Raspberry Pi.
The text can look a bit janky the first time you use desktop mode. This is typically a scaling issue. You can fix it by going into Settings > Connected devices > External Displays. Now set the Resolution to match your monitor, and tweak the Display Size until the text looks just right.
Then you’ve got the Linux terminal
You can run actual Linux commands on your Pixel
Starting with the Pixel 6, all Google Pixel devices have a native Linux terminal. It runs a full Debian Linux environment inside a virtual machine on your phone. It’s hidden in the developer settings by default. Here’s a quick guide on how to enable the Linux terminal.
Once enabled, the Terminal app should show up in your app drawer. Open it, let it download the Debian image, and you’re in. That said, before you start typing commands, click the three dots in the top-right corner to open Settings. From there, go to Advanced and change the following:
- Display Resolution: Full
- Graphics Acceleration: GPU-accelerated renderer
- Memory size: 4 GB or higher
- Keep awake: 1 hour (or more, depending on your use case)
Once done, run this quick command to update everything so you’re not dealing with any outdated packages:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
From here, you can install any odd command-line tool you normally use on your Raspberry Pi and use it as you normally would. I’ve tried all the popular CLI and TUI apps, and all of them work like a charm. That said, I primarily use it to SSH into my workstation and control it from here.
I’m personally using a Google Pixel 10 for this. However, any model that’s a Pixel 6 or higher should be able to run it. Performance will be more or less limited by the processor generation (the newer, the better) and how much RAM you can allocate to the VM.
You can even run graphical Linux apps
It’s not perfect, though
The Terminal app has a button in the upper-right corner that lets you switch to graphical mode. So, if you run a graphical app using the terminal — say, LibreOffice or GIMP — it’ll start in this graphical space. As such, you’re not just getting access to your regular Android apps from the Google Play Store, but also to all the graphical Linux apps available in the Debian repositories. In fact, you can also install Flatpak and get access to its entire catalog of apps.
That said, the apps don’t open like regular Android apps — they open inside the Terminal app window. Still, you can make the Terminal app go full-screen and get the complete desktop experience for your desktop-grade Linux apps.
The apps themselves function as expected, but I found the experience a bit laggy — and I was already dedicating the maximum amount of memory to the terminal. I also noticed that while I could use my mouse to click buttons inside the apps, I couldn’t use the scroll wheel. Also, some apps (not all) were just fixed in place. I could only maximize and minimize them — not move the windows around.
Overall, the Pixel Terminal is excellent for SSHing into your different systems and running the usual CLI and TUI apps, but the graphical space leaves a lot to be desired. Granted, this is still an “experimental” feature, and hopefully, we’ll see more improvements. Google has said that they want to “make Linux apps, tools, and games available on Android“, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Be careful of running Docker apps
The Pixel is not a home server
Since the Pixel terminal is essentially a real Debian environment, you can install Docker and run different containers in it. As such, if you used your Raspberry Pi as a small home server, the Pixel can technically do that job too. However, I personally wouldn’t recommend doing that for a couple of reasons.
The first issue is that the Pixel is still a phone — it’s not designed to run indefinitely like a computer. Your containers run inside the Terminal app, and Android can kill it to save battery or free up memory. Likewise, an overnight system update can reboot the phone and take your services down with it. There’s also no way to have your containers start automatically when the phone boots. You have to open the Terminal and bring them back up yourself every time.
The second issue is battery life and heat. In my experience, the Terminal is heavy on the battery even without desktop mode, and the phone gets noticeably warm. You could work around that by keeping the phone plugged in somewhere cool, like a room with the AC running, but keeping a phone plugged in and working hard all day isn’t good for battery health in the long run.