TethrLink turns an Android tablet into a real second monitor for your Linux PC — not a mirror of a screen you already have — over a direct USB connection. No Wi-Fi, no router, no cloud, no account.
The PC asks GNOME to create a dedicated virtual display, captures it through PipeWire, encodes it with H.264, and streams it down the cable. The tablet appears in Settings → Displays like any other monitor: put it above, below or beside your laptop, and windows you drag onto it stay there.
The display size is worked out from both ends of the connection — its height from your monitor, its aspect ratio from the tablet — so the shared edge is fully crossable for the pointer and nothing is stretched on the panel. A 1920×1080 laptop with a 2960×1848 tablet gives 1730×1080.
Features: • A real second display, not a screen mirror • Zero-config transport — USB tethering, no router needed • Auto-discovery — the app finds the server itself, no IP to type • Display size derived from your monitor and the tablet's panel • GTK4 and Libadwaita desktop app • Serves only devices on a USB-attached interface; Wi-Fi and container bridges are refused
Requirements: • GNOME on Wayland. The virtual display uses Mutter's ScreenCast API, which has no cross-compositor equivalent. X11 sessions fall back to JPEG at your own screen's resolution. • An Android tablet running 5.0 or later, with USB tethering, and the TethrLink app installed.
Known limitations of this package: • Software encoding only. Hardware H.264 needs VA-API drivers that aren't available inside the snap; the .deb and from-source installs use your GPU normally. • Touch input, added in 2.0.0, is not available in the snap yet — it needs desktop permissions this package cannot currently request. Use the .deb if you want the tablet to drive your pointer. • One tablet at a time. • An idle session costs roughly half a core, because holding a steady frame rate means running the pipeline even when the screen isn't changing.
Get the Android app and the .deb from the GitHub releases page.
Source, issues and documentation: https://github.com/princesavsaviya/TethrLink
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Snaps are applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully.
Snaps are discoverable and installable from the Snap Store, an app store with an audience of millions.
If you’re running Kubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or later, including Kubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Kubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), you don’t need to do anything. Snap is already installed and ready to go.
Versions of Kubuntu between 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) don’t include snap by default, but snap can be installed from the command line as follows:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapd
To install TethrLink, simply use the following command:
sudo snap install tethrlink
Browse and find snaps from the convenience of your desktop using the snap store snap.
Interested to find out more about snaps? Want to publish your own application? Visit snapcraft.io now.