Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system • Hacker News Board

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#61

Post by lima » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #31

Ah, Fuchsia... another of Google's solutions looking for a problem. I remember hearing about it and immediately asking "what is the market for this?" and not being satisfied with the answer. On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else that has no strategic benefit to them (as far as I could tell,…

> Sundar came from Chrome. Fuchsia didn't.

Fuchsia appears to be really close to Chrome/Chrome OS - they even share the build system and many components.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#62

Post by cesarb » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

messe wrote: post #21

wbl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BSD was around!

It was, but it was in legal limbo.

I have also read that, back then, Linux was better at supporting common hardware than the BSDs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338). My personal experience at the time is that I didn't even consider the BSDs; Linux had UMSDOS, which allowed me to try it out without having to repartition and/or reformat (then later I noticed that I was nearly always on Linux, so I reformatted a whole partition as ext2 and dedicated it exclusively to Linux).

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#63

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

RivieraKid wrote: post #57

I'm more excited about the possibility of a high quality desktop OS rather than the kernel. The Linux kernel is great but a great open-source desktop OS doesn't exist today. Specifically, this product doesn't exist today: - Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design. - It includes seamless synchronization between devices. - Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iO…

[deleted]

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#64

Post by miohtama » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

Assuming most (not all) vulnerabilities are C-style use after free and buffer overflows. If kernel were written in Rust these vulnerabilities would not be issues? Meaning microkernels only make sense in C world. What am I missing?

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#65

Post by adrianmonk » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #31

Ah, Fuchsia... another of Google's solutions looking for a problem. I remember hearing about it and immediately asking "what is the market for this?" and not being satisfied with the answer. On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else that has no strategic benefit to them (as far as I could tell,…

I don't know if this is Google's intention, but I could certainly see Fuchsia being used for IoT devices.

IoT devices have a big problem with software updates. The people who make them are primarily interested in selling hardware, not supporting it for the many years it will probably be in your home. (You might replace a smartphone every two years, but how often do you replace a light switch or thermostat?)

Google says Fuchsia is built to be easy to update. Different components are able to be upgraded independently. There is a stable binary API for drivers.

Imagine a world where IoT devices are built to some Fuchsia-based standard which allows them to continue to be updated even when the manufacturer inevitably abandons the devices and their users. You could get more out of the devices, and you could worry less about security.

It wouldn't solve 100% of the problem, though, because there would always be some device-specific code, including device drivers and any software that enables unique capabilities of the device.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#66

Post by justaguyhere » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #5

I'm both very excited someone is taking a shot at trying something new on kernel side. But i can't help wonder about what would a future look like where 90% of hardware run on a Google-owned operating system.

Maybe Google will take a bit out of Windows marketshare? It really sucks that we only have three options now - windows, mac and Linux. Two of these are owned by mega corps and the last one isn't as user friendly as the others

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#67

Post by ForHackernews » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

RivieraKid wrote: post #57

I'm more excited about the possibility of a high quality desktop OS rather than the kernel. The Linux kernel is great but a great open-source desktop OS doesn't exist today. Specifically, this product doesn't exist today: - Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design. - It includes seamless synchronization between devices. - Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iO…

I really doubt Google has any interest in building a "great open-source desktop OS". Everything they've done with Android suggests they'll throw releases over the wall, but keep any interesting or useful bits proprietary & closely tied to Google cloud services.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#68

Post by hellcow » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

RivieraKid wrote: post #57

I'm more excited about the possibility of a high quality desktop OS rather than the kernel. The Linux kernel is great but a great open-source desktop OS doesn't exist today. Specifically, this product doesn't exist today: - Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design. - It includes seamless synchronization between devices. - Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iO…

You just described ChromeOS.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#69

Post by apozem » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #31

Ah, Fuchsia... another of Google's solutions looking for a problem. I remember hearing about it and immediately asking "what is the market for this?" and not being satisfied with the answer. On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else that has no strategic benefit to them (as far as I could tell,…

Bloomberg, 2018:

> One person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff described the effort simply: "It’s a senior-engineer retention project."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/google-te...

Fuchsia’s greatest value is letting senior devs solve fun puzzles without the burden of shipping anything customers want.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#70

Post by scythe » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

RivieraKid wrote: post #57

I'm more excited about the possibility of a high quality desktop OS rather than the kernel. The Linux kernel is great but a great open-source desktop OS doesn't exist today. Specifically, this product doesn't exist today: - Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design. - It includes seamless synchronization between devices. - Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iO…

>I don't understand why Google hasn't done this yet.

If Google or some similar company were to make a desktop OS, it would probably be packed with so many monetization "features" that the free software community wouldn't be very interested and may even see it as a threat. Chrome OS already demonstrated most of this pattern.

The elementary project has done some great work with their UI, but the limitations of a decentralized funding model mean that it just isn't as complete as the major OSes. Meanwhile the jousting between Red Hat and Canonical over control of the GNOME ecosystem alienates a lot of users. Meanwhile corporate control of Qt has limited KDE's popularity. In all three cases the organizational problems associated with developing a truly freedom-preserving OS in a profit-oriented world crop up in different ways. Google taking over doesn't sound like a solution to me.

Some kind of alliance between free software developers and hardware manufacturers has long been dreamt about but hasn't materialized over the last two decades. All too often, Linux OEMs attach a half-baked homegrown distribution and their hardware tries to rely on it. We've also hoped that democratic countries will decide that a free and open-source operating system would be good for national security and fund development. In practice, interest has mostly come from Russia and China, with user freedom off the priority list.

Google isn't a deity. They don't exist to serve humanity but rather their investors. The organization problem continues to be difficult.