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Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

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Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#111

Post by ReverseCold »

alnitak wrote: post #85
JoshTriplett wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that you can install or upgrade Windows on a system without buying a new laptop or requiring support from the vendor; the vendor doesn't lock down laptops to prevent upgrades and force people to buy a new device instead.

Let me ask a (potentially) very stupid question here: What prevents doing the same on phones? What would make a phone hardware able to install anything that compiles to its CPU architecture the same way a PC can?

Qualcomm distributes firmware blobs. Once the blob is out of date you cannot use it on a newer version of Android.

(And device manufacturers do this too, but it's a ton easier to, say, fix flash with a shim than it is to fix networking.)

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#112

Post by qznc »

georgeecollins wrote: post #66
qznc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is no money in it. It is only worth it, if you use it to funnel people elsewhere, like Office or Play Store.

But that implies that no one needs a different OS than Windows NT or Unix. People are constantly coming up with reasons to have new programming languages. Are there no reasons to justify a new OS?

There are plenty of research or toy OSs, but if they try to get really useable, they just implement a Unix compatibility layer and take drivers from BSD.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#113

Post by ReverseCold »

drvdevd wrote: post #100
alnitak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask a (potentially) very stupid question here: What prevents doing the same on phones? What would make a phone hardware able to install anything that compiles to its CPU architecture the same way a PC can?

The short answer is that phone hardware is all over the place .. x86/64 has actually made generic kernels (including Windows) possible by having a slew of very similar machines. You can't expect the same thing from ARM systems yet - each system has to be specially targeted.

No, they're all similar enough. Only things forcing the upgrades are...

- Android breaks compat with old drivers every update - HW makers only ship (often vulnerable) binary blobs.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#114

Post by thinkling »

ReverseCold wrote: post #111
alnitak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask a (potentially) very stupid question here: What prevents doing the same on phones? What would make a phone hardware able to install anything that compiles to its CPU architecture the same way a PC can?

Qualcomm distributes firmware blobs. Once the blob is out of date you cannot use it on a newer version of Android. (And device manufacturers do this too, but it's a ton easier to, say, fix flash with a shim than it is to fix networking.)

Pardon my ignorance, but... doesn't Android run on top of the firmware? You're saying newer versions of Android are breaking backward compatibility with older firmware?

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#115

Post by fauigerzigerk »

cbhl wrote: post #105
alnitak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask a (potentially) very stupid question here: What prevents doing the same on phones? What would make a phone hardware able to install anything that compiles to its CPU architecture the same way a PC can?

Paraphrase the question in the reverse and you get your answer: What makes this possible on Windows desktops? Stable binary driver ABI. Hardware monoculture. Expensive driver certification program. Letting hardware vendors release binary drivers without releasing the corresponding sources. An opt-out automatic update mechanism. (Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on the Android team.)

So it's Linux fault and Fuchsia is the solution, right? :)

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#116

Post by justin66 »

huxley wrote: post #27
georgeecollins wrote: post #18

When I was younger there IBM, Apple, Be, and Microsoft were all working on these amazing new operating systems. Now the #1, #3, #4 most popular operating systems are all some variation on Unix. What happened? Why did no one except Microsoft come up with a new operating system worthy of mass adoption?

A lot of Windows NT was based on work Dave Cutler had done on VMS and RSX-11, so while I'm sure most of the code was new, the ideas are of a similar vintage to Unix.

> while I'm sure most of the code was new

Is there any reason to believe less than 100% of the code was new?

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#117

Post by digi_owl »

mysterydip wrote: post #55

I had recently been looking for a laptop to replace my wife's aging machine. She wanted something to hit all her social media stuff, save pictures and videos, basic office, and watch her tv and movie streams. I had a barely-used lenovo that I had put xubuntu on that I wanted her to try first to gauge her size and performance requirements, but she wasn't ready for linux. I searched around a bit (knowing putting window…

On that note, Android 7 and newer supports tiled apps. And if the OEM wants to, can even do floating apps (thinks windows).

Also, Samsung demoed their Galaxy S8 the other day. And one of the big tings was Dex, a dock that turned the phone into a desktop computer. Microsoft has in the last year or so been pitching a similar system called Continuum.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#118

Post by peterwwillis »

TruthSHIFT wrote: post #106
peterwwillis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very long list of inferior technologies that beat superior ones in popularity, or age. QWERTY keyboards, Electronic forms, Combustion engines, Agribusiness refinements, Byte-oriented computers, Genetic technology (outside of GM crops), Building construction/insulation, Monorail and near-sonic trains, Pharmaceuticals, PlayStation, 8086, TDMA, USB, PHP, VHS... The most common link between them is a low barrie…

I realize that this has nothing to do with your larger point, but what technology do you consider to be superior to the original playstation? My understanding is that the PS1 was a significant technological leap.

3DO, Jaguar, PC-FX, Saturn, N64 were all superior technologies, and PlayStation absolutely trounced them in popularity for 10 years. Initially both the Genesis and SNES outsold all the 5th gen platforms, but eventually their perceived better quality and an increased availability of platform titles took hold.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#119

Post by gizmo686 »

georgeecollins wrote: post #66
qznc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is no money in it. It is only worth it, if you use it to funnel people elsewhere, like Office or Play Store.

But that implies that no one needs a different OS than Windows NT or Unix. People are constantly coming up with reasons to have new programming languages. Are there no reasons to justify a new OS?

Unix, in the sense that we talk about it today, is not an operating system, but a family of operating systems that is based on the original Unix. Linux is Unix in the same way that C is Algol. In the grand scheme of potential languages/operating systems they are very similar, and familiarity with one will transfer well. However, if you consider the ML family of languages (Haskell/Ocaml), or the Prolog family, you will see that Algol/C/Java/Rust are in some sense variations on the same language. In this sense, we have not seen the great variaty of new languages you are referring to.

In the case of OSes, it is beneficial to formalize these similarities into a single API. As long as the operating systems remain conceptually simmilar, there is no point in unnessasarily fragmenting the API. When there is need to deviate from the common Unix system, Unix-like operating systems have no problem doing so. But there is not strong enough reason to through out the massive amount of investment, both in software and human expertise, that has been built up on the common Unix base.

Re: Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

#120

Post by izacus »

thinkling wrote: post #114
ReverseCold wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm distributes firmware blobs. Once the blob is out of date you cannot use it on a newer version of Android. (And device manufacturers do this too, but it's a ton easier to, say, fix flash with a shim than it is to fix networking.)

Pardon my ignorance, but... doesn't Android run on top of the firmware? You're saying newer versions of Android are breaking backward compatibility with older firmware?

As Android evolves, you need to update drivers to keep in step with new features (pretty much the same as with Windows - you need new drivers for newer Windows usually). But as opposed to Windows, Linux kernel doesn't really have a very stable driver API and the manufacturers love to patch and mess with the kernel itself to get their hardware working. As such, porting closed-source drivers to newer Android OSes is usually impossible without support from the manufacturers.

Qualcomm (by far the most popular hardware vendor for Android devices) doesn't care about supporting their released hardware.

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