Bliss OS, an Android ROM for your desktop PC, now supports the Vulkan Graphics API

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Android is the world’s most popular operating system for smartphones, but it does not have any significant presence on desktop. If you have ever wondered how you could run Android on your desktop, Bliss OS presents itself as one of the possible solutions for Android x86. Back in April 2019, Bliss OS based on Android Pie for x86 PCs was released with Google Play Store support. Now, some days ago, the team behind this project has updated its Android 9 Pie release with support for Vulkan Graphics API.

Bliss OS now comes with support for Vulkan, once users select Vulkan from the advanced grub menu, or manually add “VULKAN=1” to the grub command line. Consequent to Vulkan support, sleep states are also now partially working — CPU will still be active during mock sleep states, but the activity will drop to almost nothing. You may also need to use a third party tool to trigger sleep states if it does not show up in the power menu.

Bliss OS still has some issues. For instance, Taskbar is a popular recommendation for getting the desktop experience, but navbar issues persist when using Taskbar, so users need to ensure they have a fallback gesture method set up within the Blissify app. Sleep states are not working properly by default on non-Vulkan and IA_Hardware-Composer builds, and the systemUI could restart in those instances. The power button may also not work on some hardware.

Please note that Bliss OS is intended to be used by experienced users as their builds are still considered development builds. Installing this requires downloading the ISO file, burning it onto a USB drive using Rufus with options relating to boot security disabled, and then booting through the USB drive. You can run the OS in Live mode to test things out, and if you are happy with the results, you can install it through the USB drive. For more detailed instructions and other details, follow along the forum thread.

Bliss OS – Android 9 Pie for PC — XDA Thread