Remix OS—it's Android, but rearranged into a mouse-and-keyboard OS.
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Jide's Remix OS—a... well, remixed version of Android that is more suitable for a PC's mouse and keyboard—is now available for download. The OS turns Android into a windowed desktop environment with the ability to multitask, just like Windows, Mac OS, and desktop Linux.
The OS is available today as a 700MB "alpha" version, which you should be able to run on your own hardware. The project's webpage says it is compatible with "most computers in the world powered by x86 chipsets," and it seems to require a 64-bit CPU. Remix OS is based on the long-running Android-x86 project, which has a crowdsourced hardware support list here, but the bottom line seems to be "try it and see what happens." You'll need at least an 8GB USB 3.0 flash drive with a recommended write speed of 20MB/s along with a PC with a "USB legacy" boot option.
We tried Remix OS at the end of a recent article that looked at Android on the desktop. The OS definitely proved nicer than vanilla Android with a mouse and keyboard, but just like with Android tablets, the biggest software weakness is app support for the new environment. Remix actually comes out a little better here, since if you get stuck with a phone app, you can usually just shrink it down to a phone-sized window. The other big weakness in our test setup was the hardware: Jide's own "Remix Mini" was woefully underpowered for serious multitasking, but with Remix now available for lots of hardware, you can fix that problem yourself.
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