Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Tl; DR
- Android Linux Terminal Application can now run Linux graphics applications in the latest Canary version, a major step for functionality.
- A new “Display” button is launching a graphic environment, allowing users to run full desktop applications that are not available on Android.
- The hardware acceleration can also be activated for better performance, opening the way to the execution of even more powerful Linux software and games.
The Linux Terminal application that Google has introduced earlier this year is one of the new most exciting features in Android, not for what it does, but for what it can potentially do. The terminal application allows you to start a Debian instance in a virtual machine, allowing you to execute full -fledged Linux applications which are not available on Android. Unfortunately, the current version of the terminal application is limited to the execution of command line programs, but this should change in the near future. In the new Android Canary version that Google has published today, the terminal application now allows you to run Linux graphics applications.
Earlier this year, we led a port of Doom Linux in the Android terminal application to present the upcoming graphic capacities of the application. For months, Google has been working to add a hardware acceleration support and a complete graphic environment to the Linux terminal, but the company has never pushed these features to public versions, forcing us to compile Android from source to try them.
However, after having installed the Android Canary construction of July 2025, we noticed that the terminal application was updated with the management of the graphic application. When you open the terminal application in this version, you will see a new button in the upper right corner. This button launches the “display” activity of the terminal application, which transmits the graphic output of the Linux virtual machine to the Android host.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Once on this screen, you can type the ‘Weston’ command to open a graphic environment. Weston is a reference implementation of a Wayland composer, a modern display server protocol, and is preinstalled with the Android Linux Terminal.
In the graphic environment, we were able to launch applications like BEDIT, a basic text editor. We have not tried to run Doom again, but you can see what it looks like in the video we recorded earlier this year.
By default, the hardware acceleration is not activated in the Linux terminal. To activate it, you must create an empty file called ‘virglrenderer‘And place it in the’/sdcard/linux‘Directory. If you see a toast message that reads “virgl activated” when you open the Linux terminal, you have done things correctly.
The addition of the graphical management of the application in the Linux terminal is a big problem, because it opens the door to the execution of many useful Linux programs which are not available on Android. It also opens the door to the execution of PC games in the future, although more work will have to be done to make them compatible, especially since most Android devices have ARM processors. Anyway, this is a big step forward in Google’s plans to combine Chrome OS and Android in a single platform, so we are delighted to see how things are going.
Although this feature is activated in the latest Android Canary construction, we don’t know when it will land in the beta version or stable channels. We hope that Google will deploy it in the second quarterly version of Android 16, which should be deployed in December. However, there is no guarantee that the company will do.
