Devlog #4 — Termux Desktop

No new features today — just fixing stuff that was manual hardwork

Problem:

The setup used one big pkg install to install everything at once. Turns out if even one package fails (like websockify hitting a bad mirror errors again and again ), the whole command dies and nothing else .

What I Fixed

I Split everything into two scripts:

setup.sh — runs once, installs all packages one by one so a single failure doesn’t kill the rest, downloads noVNC, and sets up the home-screen widget
start-desktop.sh — unchanged, just launches the desktop like before

The widget thing is probably my favourite part of today. setup.sh now automatically creates the Termux:Widget shortcut, so after first-time setup you just tap a button on your home screen to start the desktop. No opening Termux, no typing. Actually plug and play now.

Also rewrote the README to match all of this.

What Didn’t Work Out

Had an idea to build a proper Android app that wraps everything — no terminal at all. But Android sandboxes apps from each other so an APK can’t actually run pkg install inside Termux. It would’ve been a lot of work for not much gain over the widget shortcut. Dropped it.

Next

Testing everything on a real device tomorrow. Fingers crossed setup.sh doesn’t explode.