Google is looking to offer a native Terminal app for Android, possibly with Android 16. The Terminal app will allow installation of a Linux VM with full GUI and GPU acceleration along with other sysadmin features including disk resizing, port forwarding, and partition recovery. This is an extension of Google's earlier project of allowing Chrome OS to run on Android using the Android Virtualization Framework.
18/f/California.
Jokes aside, this appears to be a full virtual machine rather than something like WSL that can interact with and manipulate the host OS. You probably won’t be able to do anything interesting with your Android files using it, just mess around in a sandboxed distro. So it’s still good for developers who want a portable Linux environment to run things in, but not nearly as useful as a properly integrated terminal would be.
WSL 2 is a full VM. And then there are some things microsoft are doing so you’re able to access the windows partitions.
Right, I should have specified isolated VM. WSL and Windows are interconnected (even if some things, like accessing Windows files within WSL2, are horribly slow). Google’s solution probably won’t have anything like that, given their reluctance to allow users access to Android’s underlying systems.
I guess the downloads, music… Folders will be available. Basically what an app can access, this should be able to access too