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

181–190 of 285 posts

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#181

Post by notyourday »

close04 wrote: post #177
notyourday wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Samsung has 20% of the market and a lot more of the high end market. Going with "not Google" means a lot of users no longer using Google Play Store and services. It most certainly would "affect" Google. That will make Samsung phones very pretty door stops. Users do not care about phones. Users care about apps that run on those phones. Samsung has no apps that users care about ( IG/Facebook/TikTok/Snapchat/Banking/N…

That's the point I made in the comment. Having no apps will shoot even good OSes in the foot. This being said all Samsung needs is for an antitrust investigation to break the exclusivity clause. Samsung doesn't need to drop Android, they need to be able to sell phones with other OSes. Tizen probably fits the bill for low-end, cheap phones. With the exclusivity clause in place Samsung would have to bridge the canyon b…

I would argue that it is not possible to slowly built that ecosystem. Samsung apps are crap and popular apps that people want create no motivation from developers to support yet another platform.

That's why the Windows Phone failed -- even though Microsoft offered shops with reasonably popular apps both money and placement to make them available in their store at the end the cost of supporting another platform was too high.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#182

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

> Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design.

I've got Plasma setup to take advantage of a decade of Mac muscle memory, and think it does "macOS" better than macOS itself.

> Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iOS

Install firejail, and its wrapper scripts. The wrapper will automatically wrap common commands and apps in a sandbox, and you can use the firejail CLI to launch apps that it doesn't wrap.

I agree with your other points, however I lament that BSD-style licensing will prevent a lot of cool things from having their sources see the light of day or be upstreamed.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#183

Post by atombender »

pvarangot wrote: post #179
atombender wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Which several ones? The old puck shaped access points don't run it, and the Hub is the only other device with a processor that's capable or running it.

Internally. Not on any released products.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#184

Post by scythe »

notyourday wrote: post #168
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…

Has Google ever created any non-web product that it supported for more than a token amount of time, that it continued to re-iterate on for years that was not linked to Google properties?

Golang would qualify, but it's not really a "product" from the perspective of most users.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#185

Post by zingermc »

notyourday wrote: post #168
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…

Has Google ever created any non-web product that it supported for more than a token amount of time, that it continued to re-iterate on for years that was not linked to Google properties?

Android, Maps, Chrome?

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#187

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#188

Post by nv-vn »

earthboundkid wrote: post #77
apozem wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People like to claim these things anecdotally but if you sit down for a few minutes and think about it then it doesn't really make sense. By doing something like that you'd sacrifice current growth, and since money today is worth more than money in the future cutting dead weight now would be more valuable to the shareholders (not to mention the fact that the losses accumulate each year as cash being drained from your accounts).

The reality is probably that companies are making a bet on some far fetched technology, so for example Fuschia or the developers behind it could lead to something insanely profitable, but there's only a 20% chance. If you're in a good year then the investment is worthwhile because the expected value is still positive. If you're in a bad year you can't afford to wait for the investment to pan out (not to mention your risk model goes totally out of whack; if the market is doing poorly consumers won't shell out cash for this new tech) so you have to cut costs in that area.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#189

Post by tyingq »

jfb wrote: post #6
kyaghmour wrote: post #4

This debate about monolithic vs. micro-kernels has been had many times. Maybe this time the resolution is different, who knows. But FWIW Linux didn't reach its success because someone made a feature comparison between it and what else was out there in a spreadsheet and somehow discovered how Linux was so much better. Instead, Linux won (and continues to win) because it's the Rocky Balboa of operating systems. It may…

Keep in mind, too, that path dependence plays a huge role here. Linux took off when the alternatives were Windows NT, Novell Netware, or commercial Unixes running on underpowered RISC hardware.

"commercial Unixes running on underpowered RISC hardware."

Commercial Unix running on expensive hardware (and software) was the key opening for Linux, not the underpowered bit. Linux on X86 took a while to catch up performance wise.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#190

Post by joezydeco »

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…

but I could certainly see Fuchsia being used for IoT devices

Like Google Brillo! Oh, wait. Android Things! Oh, wait. Weave? I give up.

Post reply on HN