Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 as daily driver

#samsungdex #tailscale #termux #vscode

It's been over a month now since I started using a tablet as my daily driver. To be honest, I find it very productive. I can safely say that this is a good laptop replacement, at least for my day-to-day grind.

Gear

Apps

Termux
One of the best terminal available for Android. I spend most of my time with this. I am able to access my development servers and do all the heavy lifting. In termux, you can still do light development, it has its own package repositories that you can take advantage of, command line tools like:

ssh
neovim
tmux
tmate
kubectl
go
node
jq

The list is long, but take note that these are ARM64 packages.

Tailscale
With Tailscale I am able to access my dev servers without the need to setup jumpboxes. This works even if I am outside my home network.

VNC Viewer
I will cover the server setup in a different post. I mostly use this for the web-inspector of the browser. Yes, I haven't found any good android browser that supports web-inspector. You can run VNCServer in your android device, but I prefer having this all in the server.

Code Server Remote VSCode
If you have Termux + nodejs installed in your Android Device, You can run this from your device itself, just do:

npm install -g code-server
code-server

Then go to your browser http://localhost:8080, I recommend Google Chrome. Code-Server itself is a PWA, so it can be installed in your home screen. With this, you basically have access to a full IDE. Just take note that not all extensions will work, but for the most part it will. You can check it here.

Samsung Dex
This is one of the main reason why I got this particular tabet in the first place. With Dex, you can have near full-desktop support for your Samsung Device. With multi-window support and full mouse functionality.

Summary

This is a short list of what I use on a day-to-day basis. I will not tackle the rest of the apps e.g. Slack, Google Docs. As they are probably been in your device already. I just want to highlight the apps that I think will help you if you are a developer.