Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google’s not-so-secret new OS

techspecs.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 561 posts

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#421

Post by marcusjt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #373
pjmlp wrote: post #339

Earlier 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 SO's S3 is of more-less the same age and it's so slow that it's barely usable now. Still can't track down why - she is not a power user, she wasn't installing apps beyond the few things I installed her and the OS updates. My old S4, currently used by my brother, suffered the same fate, being slow even after a factory reset. I wonder where this comes from?

I'm surprised that the factory reset doesn't resolve the issue, it always has for me, turning my slow old phones back into shiny new ones again.

However do be aware that your perception of what is slow changes as you use newer devices which perform better, making older ones feel slower than they did before - much like a shiny new work PC makes your home PC feel slow (or vice-versa) - so that may partly explain it.

Finally, I've just breathed new life into my ageing Nexus 7 (2013) tablet by installing the custom ROM "AICP" on it, which has made a huge difference to its performance & battery life. I recommend giving it a whirl on your SO's S3 - download from http://dwnld.aicp-rom.com/?device=i9300 (though you'll need to read up elsewhere about installing custom ROMs if you've never done it before)

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#422

Post by MiddleEndian »

Sanddancer wrote: post #201
thinkloop wrote: post #110

Why can't the pure web replace apps and programs? All the pieces are almost there: hardware acceleration, service workers, notifications, responsive design... I currently "add to home screen" for most things. I edit my images online, and develop code using cloud9 ide, etc. There are few things I need apps/programs for right now, and that's improving day by day. iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share, b…

I take photos miles from where there's cell signal. I write code on the bus while heading to doctors appointments. The web is about as far from a panacea as you can get. It's slow, it's bloated, falls apart when you don't have a connection, useful applications die when the company dies. Were some of the midi devices I use for music "web-based" they'd have probably become doorstops decades ago. A web-based IDE would b…

The main reason I wouldn't want web apps, even if they somehow became as fast and integrated as native apps, to become the standard, is because they automatically update at the developers' whims. Vim won't change unless I make it change.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#423

Post by lmm »

flukus wrote: post #363
pjc50 wrote: post #310

Earlier 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…

> 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. This is just an excuse. The reality is the manufacturers still have the mentality that once something is sold their responsibility ends. We see the exact same results on certain OS's that do have stable ABI's. You've probably made a transaction recently on a device that uses an o…

> The reality is the manufacturers still have the mentality that once something is sold their responsibility ends.

Not my experience. I have three hardware devices that worked on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD 5-10 years ago, and now only work on Windows and FreeBSD. (Amusingly enough one of them is a windows CE device)

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#424

Post by lossolo »

sametmax wrote: post #398

Google 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 promot…

Isn't Google paying to Mozilla for Google searches from inside search bar in Firefox ? Isn't like main money flow for Mozilla? More people use Chrome, more money Google saves. It's all about the data, making Firefox better didn't benefit Google as good as creating new browser. Now they do not have to pay so much for all their users searches to other companies and they have so much more data that they can use internally for other products.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#426

Post by iainmerrick »

"Fuchsia" and "magenta" are pretty gutsy names to choose, given how similar it sound to Apple's vaporware "Pink" OS from the 90s (AKA Taligent, AKA Copland). Somebody has a sense of humor!

It's really hard to tell if this is actually something that will ship, or yet another Google boondoggle to be swiftly discarded (like the first attempt at ChromeOS for tablets). Google under Larry Page built and discarded a lot of stuff; I wonder if it's the same under Sundar Pichai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#427

Post by lmm »

yoz-y wrote: post #121
MarkMc wrote: post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

Would android apps be a good fit for desktop? Most of them do not even work well on a tablet and I think they would scale very badly to even touchscreen laptops. I doubt that most developers would do any effort to have their apps "responsive".

I wish I could run the Trello app on my touchscreen laptop, if only so I could drag cards to the top to archive them (for some reason the web UI doesn't offer that). I wish I could get Google's suggested pages there. And for a lot of Amazon's apps, the Windows version feels like an out-of-date port of the Android version where I'd be better off running the Android version.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#428

Post by the_af »

Roy0 wrote: post #396
linuxkerneldev wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Goo…

> Or we could drive linux into irrelevance and not have to worry about that anymore

I know this is going to sound flippant, but believe me it's not: who's "we" in your sentence? Google? Because I wouldn't want to see Linux "driven into irrelevance" unless it gets replaced by another free software OS which works and is not completely owned and controlled by a single corporation. Actually, I'd rather see Linux's problems fixed or improved rather than adopting Google's brand new OS.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#429

Post by lmm »

pjmlp wrote: post #290
spullara wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java should have focused on manipulating the DOM rather than creating their own canvas. Was not obvious at the time though.

You mean like JavaScript nowadays uses Canvas and WebGL?

I think the key difference is you get to that incrementally. You start by "making the monkey dance" on an otherwise-static page, and you can work your way up to rendering everything on a fully-programatically-controlled canvas, a little bit at a time. Forcing you to do everything yourself from the start as TCL (remember tklets?) and Java did makes the barrier to entry much higher.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#430

Post by nialv7 »

MarkMc wrote: post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

> have a relatively simple way to develop software which runs on 99% of laptops and 85% of smartphones and tablets.

We already do. It's called a webpage.

Post reply on HN