Well it is a container rather than an emulator. Maybe some parts are emulated, like opengl, but I believe waydroid is a lot "closer to the metal" than anbox is.
Up thread some person is running and emulator/container with some not-lightweight software in it! On the Pine! Maybe "pathetic" is not the right word. It's more powerful than my first laptop (I think the comparison there is phones-now to laptops-back-then)
> Performance is quite comparable to Anbox on the same device.
I had a PinePhone. The performance of Anbox on it was slow, and apps were rendered at a low resolution and scaled up using bilinear scaling. And I had to configure zram/zswap (which was a good idea regardless of using Anbox or not), because otherwise the 1 gigabyte of RAM wasn't enough to fit Linux and Anbox, and Anbox would terminate from merely poking around in the settings app and trying to login to MicroG or something.
I hope that the scaling (and performance?) is fixed in Anbox, and that Waydroid performs faster than Anbox and uses less RAM. But I no longer have a functioning PinePhone to test further on.
I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG0uAQqeqW4. Scrolling through the recent apps list has both a high latency and low frame rate (and PinePhone-native UIs like GTK Phosh and Plasma Mobile are not really better). And the gameplay had 150 or more milliseconds of latency between touch input and the screen responding, which is awful.
> It's more powerful than my first laptop
This speaks to how unoptimized and GPU-dependent today's software is (Xfce on a dual-core ULV Intel-based laptop from 2016 is more responsive than KDE Plasma on that laptop or a Zen 3 desktop PC, admittedly with a crappy GPU), and perhaps how today's screens are higher-resolution than old laptops.
> I think the comparison there is phones-now to laptops-back-then
The comparison is with "laptops from just a few years ago". My old laptop runs circles around my PinePhone, though I won't say it's better than good phones of today.
