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With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

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Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#31

Post by zanny »

_pmf_ wrote: post #8
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #4

AIUI, the situation until now has been that essentially, every Android device released has its own fork of Android. Which is absurd, and explains why the Android security update situation is such a mess. Glad Google are trying to fix this.

> AIUI, the situation until now has been that essentially, every Android device released has its own fork of Android. Which is absurd, and explains why the Android security update situation is such a mess. The situation is the same for all embedded Linux devices. All have non-mainlined (and non-sidelined) changes to device tree, startup code, pin muxing code, special kernel parameters, special drivers, specially adju…

> if every vendor has the same issues

Except every vendor doesn't. By some magic voodoo witchcraft, x86 remains consistently capable of producing a single kernel that can run on anything from Intel or AMD.

Because they upstream their platform support.

That is literally it. No, it is not a technical impossibility of the ARM world to support common hardware abstractions like IBM-PC platforms. They choose not to.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#32

Post by pjmlp »

unethical_ban wrote: post #30
rayiner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of the problem. You face a problem, look online for a solution, and find answers that pertain only to different distros than what you're using. It hasn't gotten much better as far as I can tell. I used Linux as my primary desktop for a few years around 2002-2005 (Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu). Back then, configuration was mostly automatic, though you had to do stuff like install the NVIDIA kernel blob manu…

First of all, I disagree flatly that Linux is hard to use and troubleshoot. Google "blah ubuntu" or "blah fedora" and you get an answer. This isn't 2002. Second, systemd troubleshooting and RDP servers are not common uses for Grandma, so even if valid points were made, most users aren't affected.

Just yesterday I was searching the Internet to understand why the travel netbook where I have an AMD GPU has suddenly stopped supporting hardware acceleration for videos.

Something that was working up to a few months ago, the last time I used it.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#33

Post by pjmlp »

zanny wrote: post #31
_pmf_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AIUI, the situation until now has been that essentially, every Android device released has its own fork of Android. Which is absurd, and explains why the Android security update situation is such a mess. The situation is the same for all embedded Linux devices. All have non-mainlined (and non-sidelined) changes to device tree, startup code, pin muxing code, special kernel parameters, special drivers, specially adju…

> if every vendor has the same issues Except every vendor doesn't . By some magic voodoo witchcraft, x86 remains consistently capable of producing a single kernel that can run on anything from Intel or AMD. Because they upstream their platform support. That is literally it. No, it is not a technical impossibility of the ARM world to support common hardware abstractions like IBM-PC platforms. They choose not to.

That magic voodoo witchcraft are the hardware requirements, Microsoft has for their OSes since the MS-DOS days, that Google keeps on not wanting to require.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#34

Post by TeMPOraL »

_asummers wrote: post #11
MattSteelblade wrote: post #7

Describing Linux as "horrendously difficult to use" is disingenuous at best. There are so many different variations between distros and what people mean when they say "Linux" that to categorize them all in this tone is hardly professional. I'm not familiar with betanews.com, but it does claim to be a tech site.

Knowing how to use Linux is easy if you have a decent mental model of CPU, memory, hard drive, network, drivers. Most people outside of tech don't and would be hopelessly lost debugging many Linux issues., the same way they're lost debugging iOS issues or Windows issues. That all said, it has gotten much more user friendly with e.g. Ubuntu over the past decade or so and hopefully the aforementioned state of affairs b…

> Knowing how to use Linux is easy if you have a decent mental model of CPU, memory, hard drive, network, drivers.

... and of Linux internal unstructure and how it came to be. As someone who grew up with Windows and only later started to use Linux more and more, I'm still puzzled by the latter whenever something breaks. I'm no longer annoyed the way I used to be, though, because I understood the crucial thing: Linux distros are big hodgepodges of components. A distro is nothing but someone's opinionated vision of what software should be put on top of the kernel, and thus depending of the distro, version and the phase of the moon, you get different combination of stuff. And each piece of software has its own quirks, its own way of management, stores configuration in its own format in its own special place, etc.

I suppose it's fine for an ever-evolving landscape of solutions, but for a casual user, it made it impossible to reconfigure pretty much anything in the system without having Google on-hand (preferably on a secondary machine, in case you break something).

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#35

Post by _pmf_ »

zanny wrote: post #31
_pmf_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AIUI, the situation until now has been that essentially, every Android device released has its own fork of Android. Which is absurd, and explains why the Android security update situation is such a mess. The situation is the same for all embedded Linux devices. All have non-mainlined (and non-sidelined) changes to device tree, startup code, pin muxing code, special kernel parameters, special drivers, specially adju…

> if every vendor has the same issues Except every vendor doesn't . By some magic voodoo witchcraft, x86 remains consistently capable of producing a single kernel that can run on anything from Intel or AMD. Because they upstream their platform support. That is literally it. No, it is not a technical impossibility of the ARM world to support common hardware abstractions like IBM-PC platforms. They choose not to.

> Because they upstream their platform support.

It's a bit easier to upstream when the gatekeeper sits on the next chair and is paid out of the same pocket as you are.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#36

Post by orbifold »

MattSteelblade wrote: post #7

Describing Linux as "horrendously difficult to use" is disingenuous at best. There are so many different variations between distros and what people mean when they say "Linux" that to categorize them all in this tone is hardly professional. I'm not familiar with betanews.com, but it does claim to be a tech site.

Try getting any moderately complicated software to work on more than one distribution at once. There is a reason why people keep inventing variations of https://github.com/LLNL/spack, docker, virtual machines. Distribution packages are usually horribly outdated, broken or both (Arch Linux is one slightly better example). Professional software on Linux is usually tied to some old RedHat Enterprise Linux Distribution (in the case of Scientific Linux, version 6 was based on a RedHat enterprise version from 2010-11-10), which ships with say gcc 4.4.7, so if you want to use any modern C++ features you have to install your own compiler. It ships with an outdated Java version, so you have to install your own JDK.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#37

Post by n4r9 »

MattSteelblade wrote: post #7

Describing Linux as "horrendously difficult to use" is disingenuous at best. There are so many different variations between distros and what people mean when they say "Linux" that to categorize them all in this tone is hardly professional. I'm not familiar with betanews.com, but it does claim to be a tech site.

Technically the quote was "regarded as horrendously difficult to use." The question is really whether it's true in popular thought.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#38

Post by kpil »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #34
_asummers wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing how to use Linux is easy if you have a decent mental model of CPU, memory, hard drive, network, drivers. Most people outside of tech don't and would be hopelessly lost debugging many Linux issues., the same way they're lost debugging iOS issues or Windows issues. That all said, it has gotten much more user friendly with e.g. Ubuntu over the past decade or so and hopefully the aforementioned state of affairs b…

> Knowing how to use Linux is easy if you have a decent mental model of CPU, memory, hard drive, network, drivers. ... and of Linux internal unstructure and how it came to be. As someone who grew up with Windows and only later started to use Linux more and more, I'm still puzzled by the latter whenever something breaks. I'm no longer annoyed the way I used to be, though, because I understood the crucial thing: Linux…

I can say the exact same about windows. It's confusing as hell, a mishmash of weird semi-trustable drivers and utilities with no overall plan.

For a casual user it's impossible without google to figure out how to change simple settings like making alt-tab stop being on crack and disappear after 0.5 seconds of indecision. Or figure out why plugging in a headphone requires a confirmation on some machines, but not on others... Etc.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#39

Post by hungerstrike »

unethical_ban wrote: post #30
rayiner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of the problem. You face a problem, look online for a solution, and find answers that pertain only to different distros than what you're using. It hasn't gotten much better as far as I can tell. I used Linux as my primary desktop for a few years around 2002-2005 (Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu). Back then, configuration was mostly automatic, though you had to do stuff like install the NVIDIA kernel blob manu…

First of all, I disagree flatly that Linux is hard to use and troubleshoot. Google "blah ubuntu" or "blah fedora" and you get an answer. This isn't 2002. Second, systemd troubleshooting and RDP servers are not common uses for Grandma, so even if valid points were made, most users aren't affected.

We had Google in 2002 and the answer would probably have been easier to find at that time since there wouldn't be hundreds of different Ubuntu versions and sub-distros to clutter up the results. I can't count the number of times I've found an answer that applies to "Ubuntu" where the alleged solution didn't apply to the version that I'm running.

Also, systemd can cause anyone problems - I'm not sure it can distinguish between you or Grandma.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#40

Post by pier25 »

MattSteelblade wrote: post #7

Describing Linux as "horrendously difficult to use" is disingenuous at best. There are so many different variations between distros and what people mean when they say "Linux" that to categorize them all in this tone is hardly professional. I'm not familiar with betanews.com, but it does claim to be a tech site.

I agree with your point, Linux is really broad.

OTOH for a lot of users even Windows is "horrendously difficult to use".

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