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Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

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Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#271

Post by dTal »

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 know if you've tried Plasma but it's an excellent DE that hits your "seamless synchronization" and "better UX than MacOS" requirements.

Sandboxed apps are a no-go on a productive desktop. Have you tried using Snaps? They're sandboxed by default, and it's extremely annoying having barriers in the way sharing data between them. Sandboxing is the sworn enemy of composition. It's like keeping all the interior doors of your house locked.

Clearly defined platform / guaranteed to work: Linux-the-kernel provides a binary-compatible ABI. This is entirely sufficient, if you bundle everything including libc. If you don't want to do that, well glibc is backwards-compatible so you can just build against some reasonably old version of glibc and it'll work on any recent distro. This isn't some obscure method - lots of software is binary-distributed this way (Firefox, Blender).

Easily make a commercial product: well, I'm currently using Pointwise and Mathematica on Linux, so it doesn't appear to be that hard.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#272

Post by mav3rick »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #267
mav3rick wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? You don't know what dev mode is. Yes you can of course turn it on in dev mode lol. I liked how you've been rebutted on every post in this thread.

Perhaps you would like to share a screenshot or a pointer to some documentation. Chrome OS forces users to sign in to run apps and use extensions. Sounds like this is no better than crouton or crostini.

This feature is Crostini. I now know you have either half knowledge or are intentionally posting in bad faith.

You don't need to turn developer mode on for this feature. That means you get verified boot , updates (including your Linux distro) as well as the security guarantees of Chrome OS. Crouton requires you to give up all of that. You can't get sync without signing in. Cloud sync is the foundation of the OS. It's what makes it stateless. If you don't like that it's not for you but stop spreading half truths about the product in bad faith.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#273

Post by bwat49 »

mattigames wrote: post #226
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…

About the MacOs thing I couldn't disagree more, I'm forced to work with a Macbook at my current job and it's the dread of my existence, I even wrote an article about such pain points: https://ivanca.tumblr.com/post/615979862803562496/15-flaws-o...

I agree with most of your points, but I actually much prefer OSX's app/icon based alt tab to windows style window/thumbnail based alt tab

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#274

Post by earthboundkid »

nv-vn wrote: post #188
earthboundkid wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Xbox: figment of the imagination because markets are rational.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#275

Post by de_watcher »

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…

NT? Well, several decades after the UNIX, after several tries of making Windows... you can probably come up with something that works.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#276

Post by ocdtrekkie »

logicprog wrote: post #200
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fundamentally untrue. Monopoly has nothing to do with product or service quality. This is proven by Google, which both has bad products and terrible service. Monopoly is built by using network effects and illegal business arrangements to gut competitors such that a better product cannot win in the market.

Network effects aren't part of the quality of the product? Seems to me like they are. Interestingly as well, the most network-effect-ridden sectors of the internet, namely social media platforms, also seem to be the most diverse. There are a heck of a lot of social media platforms out there! Furthermore, what about Google Search allows it to take advantage of a network effect? It's a product designed to be used by a…

You looked at the wrong side of Google Search, which is why you didn't understand it. Searchers are the product being sold, Google Search's business is ads, and it's customers are advertisers.

Due to their monopoly, businesses can't switch: You might hate Google. Google might be your direct competitor. No matter what, you have to give Google money, and Google gets to make all of your web design decisions, because if Google doesn't approve of you, you don't exist.

Google isn't good at this, it's just that you really can't leave. They have too much search data solely based on the fact everyone already uses them. Why does everyone already use them? They're the default. Through investing in web browsers and mobile OSes, Google is the default everywhere already. And the majority don't ever change the default. So no matter how bad they are at search, they remain in top.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#277

Post by RivieraKid »

mav3rick wrote: post #89
RivieraKid wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So Chrome OS team's explicit ambition is to provide a full-fledged alternative to Windows and Linux distributions?

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#278

Post by notyourday »

zingermc wrote: post #185
notyourday wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Google support for Android is atrocious, I do not think this is really debatable is it? Even Google's own hardware ( Nexus ) does not newer versions.

Maps is a web project.

Chrome is a feeder for Google's web properties.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#279

Post by pwdisswordfish2 »

mav3rick wrote: post #272
pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you would like to share a screenshot or a pointer to some documentation. Chrome OS forces users to sign in to run apps and use extensions. Sounds like this is no better than crouton or crostini.

This feature is Crostini. I now know you have either half knowledge or are intentionally posting in bad faith. You don't need to turn developer mode on for this feature. That means you get verified boot , updates (including your Linux distro) as well as the security guarantees of Chrome OS. Crouton requires you to give up all of that. You can't get sync without signing in. Cloud sync is the foundation of the OS. It's…

I figured it was just Crostini.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#280

Post by giantrobot »

Koshkin wrote: post #145
giantrobot wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That becomes extremely problematic as a lot of devices anymore ship with bare minimum firmware to turn themselves on and require the host to upload firmware to actually work. The "drivers" on disk are then the modules required by the OS and a big blob of firmware. Other times devices are just a thin PHY interface and all of the work is done in software inside the driver. There's nothing on the device to even run onbo…

So the idea is similar to the one at the base of (the original) OpenGL, i.e. that of a hardware API that can be used by any OS.

There's a bit of that already with USB device classes. A keyboard might have a bunch of special features if it at least works with the USB HID keyboard class it will have base level keyboard functionality.

For some things like HIDs this can be pretty workable. For more complicated peripherals it is far more challenging if not impractical.

That's not to say device drivers should be an insane Wild West of compatibility shims and edge cases but some blanket solution doesn't solve all problems.

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