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Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

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Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#51

Post by cookguyruffles »

nicoburns wrote: post #40
cookguyruffles wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer. Do not allow a subtly different technical design distract you from the largest switcheroo here: this is a single-vendor enterprise OS delivered under the guise of open source, it comes with all the trappings of a single-vendor enterprise OS. Let's not be too quick to forget when Android first started out, all the idealism about the wonders of a free software mobile OS. A decade later, it's…

Yes, although at least both Android and Fuchsia are released under genuinely open source licenses, even if they development model isn't open.

These licenses are totally meaningless when Google make anti-competitive threats to their partners for attempting to exercise that license. They benefit from all the marketing of their vendor ecosystem in the public eye using the open thing, while quietly holding a gun to everyone's head in the background. That is the absolute antithesis of what "genuine open source" is supposed to be about, it is a marketing ruse and you've fallen for it.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#52

Post by hortense »

rusk wrote: post #47
lmm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learned experience for long-lived multi-user systems running on heterogenous hardware, of questionable relevance to today's landscape.

That’s true. But unfortunately all that baggage comes with lots of genuinely useful stuff too. Starting from scratch rarely works, unless you’re willing to put in a lot of time and effort, and are in it for the long haul, and people that want to start from scratch rarely are, and google doesn’t have a good track record in these matters either.

They have an OS running on a consumer device that connects to the wifi where you can play media, browse the web, and run flutter apps, so it seems like they already put the time and effort.

It even self-updates, so in some sense it's already ahead of the standard linux distributions!

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#53

Post by rusk »

getcrunk wrote: post #50
rusk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. But unfortunately all that baggage comes with lots of genuinely useful stuff too. Starting from scratch rarely works, unless you’re willing to put in a lot of time and effort, and are in it for the long haul, and people that want to start from scratch rarely are, and google doesn’t have a good track record in these matters either.

Normally I'd agree about Googles track record. But they HAVE to innovate in the android/mobile space. It would be their death as opposed to just dropping a random messaging app. And they did all the "from scratch" work. It would be short sighted to not let zircon at least have the potential to replace Linux. Apple vertical integration strategy recently took a big step forward and googles response may well be this.

> And they did all the "from scratch" work.

We should judge on what has been finished rather than what has been started. After people start to work with it, that's when the real costs will start to be incurred.

Apple are an interesting case in that they have done this very very gradually over many many years - building on top of existing tried and tested platforms where possible.

Google seem to be dominant in android/mobile despite their crappy OS. Whether they're threatened or not, this does need to be improved. This may or may not be due to Linux - to me it seems to be more the case that it's again their failure to stick to things that's the most frustrating aspect of using Android - but maybe using Linux means they spend more development time doing that than dealing with features. Perhaps they're just trying to emulate Apple's strategy alá cargo cult.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#54

Post by rusk »

hortense wrote: post #52
rusk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. But unfortunately all that baggage comes with lots of genuinely useful stuff too. Starting from scratch rarely works, unless you’re willing to put in a lot of time and effort, and are in it for the long haul, and people that want to start from scratch rarely are, and google doesn’t have a good track record in these matters either.

They have an OS running on a consumer device that connects to the wifi where you can play media, browse the web, and run flutter apps, so it seems like they already put the time and effort. It even self-updates, so in some sense it's already ahead of the standard linux distributions!

> They have an OS running on a consumer device

I read this as "prototype".

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#55

Post by dragonsh »

wikibob wrote: post #5

A big success for Rust in the wild

By that metric JSON is the clear winner but that's not the case, its a win for Rust and also for C, C++, Dart, GO, Python and many more.

  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Language                 Files     Lines   Blanks  Comments     Code Complexity
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Rust                     10640   3126941   295777    480090  2351074     125641
  C++                       8744   2025857   318786    180185  1526886     174494
  C Header                  7293    894250   148795    199271   546184      18621
  GN                        5014    303531    38062     39284   226185       6367
  Go                        2873    800205    75566    113344   611295      87456
  Markdown                  2648    288903    74633         0   214270          0
  C                         1708    365017    49446     53285   262286      46408
  JSON                      1305   4454311       82         0  4454229          0
  FIDL                      1303     94290    13433     43888    36969          0
  Dart                       606     69163     9153     10205    49805       4425
  License                    545     21628     3271         0    18357          0
  YAML                       421     10036      784      1882     7370          0
  Plain Text                 368    127457    14426         0   113031          0
  Python                     352     56456     4845      5083    46528       4096
  Assembly                   301    128989    12067         0   116922        828
  Shell                      281     24032     3022      4754    16256       1971
  BASH                       234     22508     2795      4752    14961       2117
  TOML                        65      4043      198        90     3755          1
  JavaScript                  56     33445     1768       855    30822       3695
  GLSL                        51     12951     2347      4386     6218        756
  SVG                         48      8543        1         2     8540          0
  gitignore                   43       388       31        69      288          0
  Perl                        41     48582     3874      4185    40523        858
  Handlebars                  31       556       41         4      511         18
  Mako                        31      1453      174         0     1279         49
  XML                         31      1473       16       129     1328          0
  Protocol Buffers            28      5160     1068      1562     2530          0
  HTML                        19       882       40        12      830          0
  Makefile                    18       527      107        34      386         24
  Bazel                       17      1493      131       170     1192         37
  Dockerfile                  17       248       33        19      196         18
  C++ Header                  14     10691      214       206    10271        103
  CSV                         13    140350        0         0   140350          0
  Autoconf                    12       910       34        32      844          7
  ReStructuredText            11      1969      659         0     1310          0
  Vim Script                  10       428       65         0      363         31
  Device Tree                  9       246       32        43      171          0
  Go Template                  7       521       80         0      441          5
  Module-Definition            5       176       23         0      153          4
  Smarty Template              5        74       24         0       50          5
  CMake                        4       396       45       123      228         38
  CSS                          4       387       51        13      323          0
  JSX                          3       355       15        39      301          0
  Patch                        3      2591      105         0     2486          0
  Scala                        3        80       13         0       67          3
  Fish                         2       140       16        40       84         18
  LD Script                    2       122        4        10      108          0
  PHP                          2         4        1         0        3          0
  AWK                          1        97       14         4       79          0
  Batch                        1        23        3         0       20          2
  Emacs Lisp                   1        71       14        12       45          2
  Meson                        1        12        3         0        9          0
  Nix                          1         7        1         0        6          0
  Prolog                       1        45       11         0       34          0
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Total                    45247  13093013  1076199   1148062 10868752     478098
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $467,287,312
  Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 142.185717 months
  Estimated People Required (organic) 291.973834
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Processed 437275620 bytes, 437.276 megabytes (SI)
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#56

Post by iib »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #3

What's the community-driven alternative?

I guess GNU Hurd [1], jokingly speaking, but correct from an architecture (ukernel) point of view.

The real community-driven alternative is Linux, which started and still is a monolithic kernel, but the multiple features it got along the years may make the distinction even less clear [2]. It seems it will also accept some Rust code in the future, so the difference may drop even in languages used. [3]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/

[2] https://qconlondon.com/system/files/presentation-slides/thom...

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CANiq72khBa2GcB6-PHM3A44Y90d6vz...

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#57

Post by rvz »

piokoch wrote: post #2

10 years ago I would be really excited, as I could expect some groundbreaking tech like search engine or revolutionary approach to something, like Gmail (no ads sent to users, great UI, hige disk space). Today, instead of excitement, I am wondering how this thing is going to push me in some walled garden, how I will be tracked, how my data will be fetched and sold, what will be the trick used to move people away from…

> Today, instead of excitement, I am wondering how this thing is going to push me in some walled garden, how I will be tracked, how my data will be fetched and sold, what will be the trick used to move people away from free Web...

Since Chrome came along, the 'Web' became less free from the start and the moment Google forked WebKit (called Blink) to use it in their own browser, it has turned the web more into a walled garden each time apps use specific Chrome features and it is getting worse. Even in that early decade, we knew about how Google and others were tracking us since the PRISM program leaks.

Later DRM was added with reasons and votes unknown, devs have to keep telling users to switch from any other browser to Chrome to use their apps and now this forked engine is in tons of Electron apps with Microsoft jumping in and using it in their Edge browser. The time to complain was 10 years ago and now it is almost too late.

Now Google is doing it again with Fuchsia which will eventually replace ChromeOS and Android. Fuchsia is highly dependent on Flutter and those apps will run on Fuchsia devices on day 1. There is an extremely low chance of that being abandoned so I'm afraid it will continue.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#58

Post by KozmoNau7 »

piokoch wrote: post #2

10 years ago I would be really excited, as I could expect some groundbreaking tech like search engine or revolutionary approach to something, like Gmail (no ads sent to users, great UI, hige disk space). Today, instead of excitement, I am wondering how this thing is going to push me in some walled garden, how I will be tracked, how my data will be fetched and sold, what will be the trick used to move people away from…

With how Google is acting, I am fairly certain that I well never willingly buy a device that runs Fuchsia. I will have to find a better alternative device/OS or keep my current Android phone going forever.

There is however a huge issue of being locked-in to only officially-sanctioned OS versions, and I fully expect Google to try and completely replace everything that is still open in Android with proprietary replacements, making the Fuchsia-based phone OS the only accepted version.

As an example of the lock-in, the primary mobile payments app where I live has the following list of requirements/restrictions:

  - Android or iOS only (there is no PWA or other web-based version)
  - Minimum version is currently Android 6.0 or iOS 11
  - Device must not be jailbroken or rooted
  - Device must not run a non-official ROM, such as LineageOS
The use of this app is pervasive in society here, if you buy/sell anything second-hand, people will expect you to use it and will be surprised, annoyed, and/or suspicious if you prefer to use cash instead.

And this is by far not the only app with these restrictions. Banking apps, streaming services, there are a large number of apps with these restrictions, all under the guise of security concerns. Thankfully most of them have web-based versions or alternatives, but it can present enough of a hurdle that even tech-savvy people either will not or cannot use anything but a recent Android or iOS device.

Almost as bad are websites that would work perfectly well in a mobile browser, but practice "soft" lock-in by condescendingly pointing you towards the official Play Store/App Store if you try to load the site in a mobile browser. Facebook Messenger is a huge and obvious offender here, there is nothing about instant messaging that wouldn't work perfectly well in a browser, after all the desktop version at messenger.com works just fine.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#59

Post by rootsudo »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #34
raxxorrax wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are wrong that Gmail was revolutionary. It was a good service, but nothing special in my opinion. But yes, the license would allow Google to close the system down whenever they want. Still curious to know how Fuchsia would be a better choice for a system. Nest seems to be powered by Fuchsia...

Its so weird how fast history is forgotten. Gmail was a galactic leap forward in terms of mail clients. At school there was a grey market to sell gmail invites at 20 dollars per

It really is. Things get comfortable and people assume that's always how it was.

Like cell phones. Wow, over a decade of them and if you had one 15 years ago you were considered a early adapter, and 20 years ago you were way ahead the curve. If you had one in the 90's, wow.

Still, mobile computer in your pocket, wow.

Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub

#60

Post by dragonelite »

vbsteven wrote: post #45

What is interesting about Fuchsia is how Google first created Flutter and made it popular for Android/iOS and to a lesser extent the web. And now they start releasing Fuchsia OS/devices and developing apps/software for it will immediately feel familiar to many mobile developers. This could help adoption instead of yet another GUI framework to learn from scratch.

Huawei is doing the same kind of approach, make android apps compatible with their Harmony system. I think everybody has learned from Microsoft and Samsung's experience trying to launch a new ecosystem without support for current application android ecosystems.
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