Maru OS brings wireless desktop streaming via Chromecast to the Google Nexus 5X

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We’ve seen a number of teams work on taking the Android OS and making it usable on a desktop environment. There are even some big money OEMs that have devices which let people connect their smartphone to the PC and use the software as if it was their desktop. You’re probably thinking of Samsung’s DeX feature, but this capability has been around for years with the custom ROM Maru (on select devices). The folks behind this particular project have just announced version 0.6 of Maru (dubbed Okinawa) and it adds a wireless desktop streaming feature to the Nexus 5X by using the Chromecast technology.

We’ve covered this ROM on a number of occasions and while the project has had massive potential, the team is small and the number of devices that are compatible with the ROM is limited. It has been a while since the last new release of the ROM, but version 0.6 is here now and with it comes a number of massive changes. This update brings Maru OS from Android Marshmallow (6.0.1) to Android Oreo (8.1.0) so that in and of itself is a major jump. Not only that, but they have transitioned from vanilla AOSP to a custom, slimmed-down version of LineageOS.

Maru has used Debian as their desktop software and this update takes that from version 8 Jessie to version 9 Stretch. The work doesn’t stop there though as mentioned, Maru now supports wireless desktop streaming via Chromecast. It brings better input handling (for using keyboards and mice) thanks to the dynamic input switching feature (while also supporting USB keyboards and mice via USB-OTG). Finally, the new update fixes the longstanding bug that prevented Maru Desktop from fully utilizing all available CPU cores on a device.

This means that users should see the much-improved performance from multi-threaded workloads and improved responsiveness when running multiple processes as well. All of this equates to a better user experience with the ROM and it allows the developers to lay the foundation to enable Maru to support nearly any Android device.