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

Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

blog.quarkslab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 285 posts

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#71

Post by ForHackernews »

justaguyhere wrote: post #66
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

So is a world with 4 options, 3 owned by megacorps, that much better? I guess you could argue competition is always good for consumers, but it starts to just be an oligopoly rather than real competition.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#72

Post by beckler »

adrianmonk wrote: post #65
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 sa…

I don't see that... yet. It sounds like Fuschia doesn't support ARM at the moment, and that would be a crucial first step.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#73

Post by RivieraKid »

hellcow wrote: post #68
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.

ChromeOS has some pretty serious limitations that make it DOA as a Mac OS / Windows / Linux alternative.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#74

Post by jpab »

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…

Do you mean Chrome OS?

Google is a web company; they want people to use the web. They made a laptop/desktop operating system built around their web browser, because they want everything to be on the web. It does most of the things you list, including synchronizing between devices since your data is all "in the Cloud".

As for market share, I'm not sure what power you think Google has, but getting 10% of the desktop OS market has got to be pretty difficult for anyone. I do not know what share of the market Chrome OS has.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#75

Post by geodel »

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,…

> 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...

Strange argument. Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well.

So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google. There are many phone makers not that many phone OS makes. And with chinese manufacturers already pounding them they have no leverage on Google.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#76

Post by mrep »

asah wrote: post #60
mrep wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly is the sole supplier of a product or service and the fact that bing exists makes search not a monopoly. In the concept of antitrust, the United States Department of Justice does not use that term directly and instead talks about power and the Supreme Court has defined market power as "the ability to raise prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market," and monopoly power as "the power to…

bing has under 3% marketshare vs 92.06% for google. As an advertiser or app/publisher, google has "the power to control prices or exclude competition." https://www.google.com/search?q=bing+market+share

From Section IV of the Justice Departments article:

The Supreme Court has noted the crucial role that defining the relevant market plays in section 2 monopolization and attempt cases. The market-definition requirement brings discipline and structure to the monopoly-power inquiry, thereby reducing the risks and costs of error. The relevant product market in a section 2 case, as elsewhere in antitrust, "is composed of products that have reasonable interchangeability for the purposes for which they are produced--price, use and qualities considered." Thus, the market is defined with regard to demand substitution, which focuses on buyers' views of which products are acceptable substitutes or alternatives.

For search advertising, they will likely find other forms of advertising such as Facebook as a good enough substitute and thus the market definition will include other forms of advertising and not just search. For app publishing, you can publish your app for android yourself which Fortnite did.

iOS distribution on the other hand can probably be argued for that and in fact they are getting sued for their "abusive monopoly in iOS app/in-app distribution services" [0].

[0] (PDF): https://www.hbsslaw.com/uploads/case_downloads/apple-dev/201...

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#77

Post by earthboundkid »

apozem wrote: post #69
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.

Traditionally, large money-making companies liked having big, obvious loss areas, so that when the hard times come, they can just cut that and restore the illusion of growth on Wall Street. It only buys you a couple of quarters of fake growth, but for Wall Street, that's often enough.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#78

Post by krn »

RivieraKid wrote: post #73
hellcow wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described ChromeOS.

ChromeOS has some pretty serious limitations that make it DOA as a Mac OS / Windows / Linux alternative.

I believe Linux (Beta) for ChromeOS[1] should eliminate most of these limitations.

There is also Fedora Silverblue[2], which is an immutable desktop OS.

[1] https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

[2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#79

Post by RivieraKid »

jpab wrote: post #74
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…

Do you mean Chrome OS? Google is a web company; they want people to use the web. They made a laptop/desktop operating system built around their web browser, because they want everything to be on the web. It does most of the things you list, including synchronizing between devices since your data is all "in the Cloud". As for market share, I'm not sure what power you think Google has, but getting 10% of the desktop OS…

No. I mean a full-fledged alternative to the major operating systems. Do people in charge of Chrome OS say "In 5 years, we want developers, designers and project managers at Google use this OS"? I don't think so - it's not their ambition to compete with Mac OS or Linux.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#80

Post by jayd16 »

rvz wrote: post #23
pier25 wrote: post #15

A couple of years ago it was believed that Fuchsia would replace Android and ChromeOS. Then, IIRC, it was said in a Google IO that it was just some sort of experiment to test new OS ideas. What do you think is Google's masterplan for Fuchsia?

> Then, IIRC, it was said in a Google IO that it was just some sort of experiment to test new OS ideas. That's a form of public denial on their side. Why would they upstream Chromium, LLVM, Rust and Android ART support then? It has first class support for Flutter as a way of running all Flutter apps from day 0. Don't be fooled too easily by that statement.

Its a thorough experiment, sure. I'm not sure that proves secret master plans. That said, if it finds a market fit as they go along I'm sure they'd use it.
Post reply on HN