So in the near future billions of devices will no longer be running Linux anymore? That would be quite a blow to the OS in terms of chances of dominating operating systems that are being used by end users. Or will they simply fork it and strip it down until only the parts they really like will remain?
Google’s not-so-secret new OS
391–400 of 561 posts
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like alternative facts have reached the tech world too? You can take as hard look at Google as you would like, but choosing Microsoft over Google (one for-profit company over another), while not caring how the technology, the licensing or the workflow compares is a bit hypocrite. (e.g.they are both open, and they both have rules of commits). I'm wondering, why do you need a throwaway for such heavily invested F…
Associating your real name with a controversial opinion is basically just a bad idea.
Exactly. Even if you're right it won't do you any good
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. There's a considerable amout of people that regulary change their phone every 1 or 2 years because they like to have the last model even if they don't really need it.
Is there any research on how many do that across Europe, including new devices versus 2nd hand ones?
My anecdoticat evidence from even poor European countries suggest phones are renewed quite often (~2years). The horrible manufacturing quality of most modern devices ensures the market for 2nd hand devices stays small, because these things break easily.
To be honest, subjected to a "mildly aggressive & negligent" usage pattern, like mine, even an iphone will barely last more than 3 years and it will be in "far from good" condition after 1 year of usage!
Modern smartphones are simply not built to last unless you take exceptional good care of them. Or maybe it's just that me and the people I know tend to be "exceedingly violent" with our smartphones, dunno...
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's one design decision in Linux that makes this slightly harder than it needs to be in this situation: Linux's lack of a driver ABI. At the moment, phones include all sorts of custom drivers for very specific versions of the hardware. The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. You can't build your own kernel and upgrade without breaking all the binary-only drivers. Android falls between two stools…
>The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. Isn't this a rampant GPL violation? Why do we put up with this? We are about to lose the war for general purpose computing due to insufficient GPL enforcement.
Software Freedom Conservancy has been saying this for a long time, most the Kernel Devs, Linux Foundation, etc all seem to want to treat the Linux Kernel more like BSD than GPL.
They do not want to piss of their corporate masters..
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#395We definitely need a universal OS for all our devices and I really believe Google is in a great position to get us there. It would really surprise me if Apple got there first. Tim lacks vision and will keep on milking iOS even if the iPad Pro is a failure as a laptop replacement. Windows is still king in the desktop space, at least as far a user base goes, but it's terrible on tablets and phones. MS has all the tech…
> We definitely need a universal OS for all our devices Wait, do we? Why?
I'd say to have a common interface towards hardware that is quickly becoming similar across smartphones, tablets, and even laptops (read Chromebooks)?
I think why they would _not_ have the same interface between similar hardware and similar applications is a better question.
As for the user interface and bundled applications, let's not confuse "Operating System" with that although it's popular for some stupid reason. The one and same OS could of course have e.g. completely different window managers adapted for different human-device interactions and use cases. But that's very distanced from the actual OS, that is pretty much only interested in how to run and expose the hardware to the software.
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I seriously doubt the Linux kernel is anything but a minor contributor to Android's update problem The Linux kernel is at the very heart of Android's update problem - not because of "modularity" but because it lacks a stable ABI. Because of this, Android requires handset makers and SoC manufacturers like Qualcomm to provide updated drivers; these parties are perversely disincentivized to do so as they would rather…
> The Linux kernel is at the very heart of Android's update problem - not because of "modularity" but because it lacks a stable ABI. What are you referring to when you say the Linux kernel ABI is not stable? I ask because the A in ABI means application, and Linux has maintained a consistent ABI for decades. I have a suspicion that you're trying to suggest that in-kernel interfaces be kept rigid and unchanging to sati…
> The simpler solution would be for out-of-kernel driver developers to get their code up to quality and merged into mainline so that they'd be ported automatically whenever there's an in-kernel api change.
Or we could drive linux into irrelevance and not have to worry about that anymore. Windows and MacOS users do not have to suffer from this, why should users of an open source operating system? I for one welcome Google in cleaning out this mess with a competing kernel. You know your suggestion will never happen, you know some hardware manufacturers will never open their drivers, and some just can't be avoided (people doing GPGPU work will not switch from NVIDIA, most gamers won't switch from NVIDIA, NVIDIA is owning the GPU market for the purpose of machine learning with their SOC and is working on a lean vulkan driver for linux for things like Tesla's self-driving cars).
During the early days of constant wifi APIs churn within the kernel, there were many, many out of tree drivers that ran perfectly fine but took a very long time to get mainlined because hey the kernel devs have """standards""" as they like to call it. I couldn't use a distribution that was prone to upgrading its kernel version, like Fedora, because those out of tree drivers broke on a regular basis. One of Ubuntu's major advance in its very early days was to provide fresh software every 6 months while keeping a kernel that was in sync with all those drivers and they integrated said drivers into the distribution. That gave a middle ground between using something like Fedora/debian unstable with constant breakages, or suffering the glacial pace of debian stable.
... until I discovered NDISWrapper. An implementation of the Windows API for network drivers. Yes, really. It worked so good, and because it was a well maintained project, it quickly got updated to new kernel APIs and allowed anyone with any of the working windows drivers to be freed from this suffering. It was great. Nowadays the linux kernel has support for most wifi chips in-tree (Broadcom is still a problem though) but in those days it was truly liberating to be able to use Windows drivers in linux.
Talking about wifi drivers, the Windows XP driver for my first usb wifi adapter still worked in Vista and 7 despite the manufacturer never updating it. Identical driver binary working on 3 OS generations. Talk about commitment to not breaking things. NDIS 5.1 was "deprecated" for NDIS 6.0 but MS kept the support for it for as long as reasonable for the age of the hardware.
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Yes, but when you talk to regular people and their needs for web pages, apps, they are often either very trivial or unbearably complex Mostly they are unbearably vague and based on tons of false assumptions about how things work. Separating the trivial parts of a user request from the unbearably complex parts is itself often unbearably complex. It requires a conversation with the user to make it clear what is simple…
Just imagine that you can interactively by voice or by touch tell AI what/how to adjust stuff and it will use it to improve itself for your future similar tasks. Now project there will be 1,000,000 users like that, telling app what exactly did they mean and pointing to proper places in the app. So exactly this will be the conversation you desire, you'd directly tell your app builder what you want, and if it is not do…
>Now project there will be 1,000,000 users like that, telling app what exactly did they mean and pointing to proper places in the app. So exactly this will be the conversation you desire
That's not a conversation, that's a statistic. A conversation might start with a user showing me visually how they want something done. Then I may point out why that's not such a good idea and I will be asking why the user wanted it done that way so I can come up with an alternative approach to achieve the same goal.
In the course of that conversation we may find that the entire screen is redundant if we redesign the workflow a little bit, which would require some changes to the database schema and other layers of the application. The result could be a simpler, better application instead of a pile of technical debt.
This isn't rocket science. It doesn't take exceptionally talented developers, but it does require understanding the context and purpose of an application.
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#398Google could have taken firefox and improve it to make it better, but they created something new.
Now instead of improving the linux stack and the gnu stack (the kernel, wayland, the buses, the drivers), they rewrite everything.
They put millions into this. Imagine what could have been done with it on existing software.
They say they are good citizen in the FOSS world, but eventually they just use the label to promote their product. They don't want free software, they want their software, that they control, and let you freely work on it.
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bump it to 3-4 years then. Bloated manufacturer updates combine with bloat in most popular applications and the regular web bloat to make the phone unusably slow after few years. My S3 is 4 years old now, and it is works perfectly fine. When it dies, I will most likely adopt one of my Lumia devices as main one, or will buy a 2nd hand Android device, instead of giving money to support bad OEMs
> My S3 is 4 years old now, and it is works perfectly fine. Is it still getting security patches? If not then it's not running perfectly fine.
It might be running perfectly fine for his use case, you never know. The benefits are almost always compared with the financial liability and they vary for each of us.
Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's one design decision in Linux that makes this slightly harder than it needs to be in this situation: Linux's lack of a driver ABI. At the moment, phones include all sorts of custom drivers for very specific versions of the hardware. The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. You can't build your own kernel and upgrade without breaking all the binary-only drivers. Android falls between two stools…
>The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. Isn't this a rampant GPL violation? Why do we put up with this? We are about to lose the war for general purpose computing due to insufficient GPL enforcement.
No it's not a "rampant" violation. Some people believe it is a violation and some not. Linus Torvalds being one who thinks its's fine. See e.g. https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/14/218