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Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

blog.quarkslab.com

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Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#81

Post by dekhn »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #54
weego wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's me thinking it was just because shared hosting providers didn't have to deal with insane and onerous licensing costs and vm isolation problems

That also would have been true for BSD. Linux probably also had good timing while the Unix wars were fought.

Yep. I remember choosing Linux in '93 because it had a huge momentum behind it (the hacker literally asked me "Linux or BSD" before handing me 4 floppies). I didn't really understand the technical or legal differences at the time, but it was clear that BSD wasn't as "hot".

In retrospect I really liked BSD for a lot of the ways it did things (more stable, excellent long-term backwards compatibility).

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#82

Post by arexxbifs »

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?

Avoiding GPLv2.

What Google says about their plans and what their plans actually are does not necessarily have to converge.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#83

Post by jayd16 »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #46

I fully welcome some more competiton on the operating system front. I am sad to see WindowsNT, Linux and macOS be the only dominant operating systems. My personal very perhaps unpopular view is that Windows NT has a better technial implentation than Linux. Linux does most things well, form small devices to big iron. That is true now. But when it started, it was as a learning experiment, and damn good one too. An amaz…

10 OSes would be really cumbersome in current toolchains. If we got that far, hopefully there would easier ways to cross compile code.

Even for the big three I'd like to see some shared container runtime or something.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#84

Post by monocasa »

beckler wrote: post #72
adrianmonk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not publicly, but there's a suspicious amount of arm support up and down the stack. Like aarch64-fuchsia target in upstreamed stable Rust.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#85

Post by nightowl_games »

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?

> What do you think is Google's masterplan for Fuchsia?

I think they made it pretty clear that Fuchsia is not "an experiment to test new OS ideas".

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts

Specifically:

> Fuchsia's goal is to power production devices and products used for business-critical applications. As such, Fuchsia is not a playground for experimental operating system concepts. Instead, the platform roadmap is driven by practical use cases arising from partner and product needs.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#86

Post by kgersen »

RivieraKid wrote: post #79
jpab wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why 5 years? They can already if they want to.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#87

Post by aquabeagle »

cxr wrote: post #52
snarfy wrote: post #43

The technical reasons for Fuchsia to exist are debatable. The real reason it exists is because Linux is GPL.

If that were true, then Google could have picked BSD or Linux's progenitor Minix, like Apple and Intel did, instead of starting from near-scratch.

Google is king of NIH.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#88

Post by atombender »

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…

Apparently Google is already running Fuchsia (or at least Zircon) internally on several smart home devices, such as the Home Hub. Here [1] is an article from last year, still relevant.

[1] https://9to5google.com/2019/02/08/fuchsia-friday-home-hub-ma...

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#89

Post by mav3rick »

RivieraKid wrote: post #79
jpab wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Developers , PMs already use Chrome OS at Google. Designers can / will also happen.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#90

Post by mav3rick »

ForHackernews wrote: post #67
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.

All of Chrome OS is open.
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