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The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

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Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#61

Post by rcarmo »

ricardobeat wrote: post #13
jkmcf wrote: post #2

Aside from control, what does this provide over Linux? IMO, the Linux desktop problem is due partially to relying on the antiquated X Windows system, but mostly a lack of funding a good vision, e.g. Unity. After growing up with OpenLook, then Motif, the plethora of Linux window managers, and unhappy years with Windows, I noticed most of the elegant apps were being written for OSX. I’m not sure how much of this is due…

Elementary is the OS you're looking for: https://elementary.io I wish it had more adoption. Right now there are not a lot of apps written using it's UI guidelines/framework as most projects are worried about portability and/or have moved to Electron. It is slowly getting better though, and seems to be developing an ecosystem geared towards quality as OSX used to be: https://medium.com/elementaryos/appcenter-spotlight…

I’ve been using Elementary for a year straight[1] and like it a lot, but I see it as Ubuntu with the “right” UX.

(I also don’t see Linux developers flocking to it in droves, which is sad because it is a lot cleaner and easier to use than Gnome and KDE, IMHO, but then again Linux has always been more about diverging choices than unity—and I don’t mean the desktop environment here).

The only thing Elementary needs to do is allow for disabling all animations, to get rid of the perceived latency issues some folk complain about...

But I digress. It isn’t an OS, and you get all the Linux legacy underneath, so it’s understandable that Fuchsia is happening. Google seems to be attempting to lay a new foundation here, and I think it’s actually a good idea to do so, although the number of third-party packages and run times they’re bringing in makes it hard to peg it as “legacy-free”.

Time will tell, I guess.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830761

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#62

Post by rcarmo »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #20
ricardobeat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elementary is the OS you're looking for: https://elementary.io I wish it had more adoption. Right now there are not a lot of apps written using it's UI guidelines/framework as most projects are worried about portability and/or have moved to Electron. It is slowly getting better though, and seems to be developing an ecosystem geared towards quality as OSX used to be: https://medium.com/elementaryos/appcenter-spotlight…

I wish more distros would start supplying packages for Pantheon. I'm not interested in a distro that forks Ubuntu LTS + specially patched packages (because Gnome3 refuses to merge changes that fix problems, but only really benefit non-Gnome3 desktops (completely against the spirit of open source and GNU + FDO)), but I would love it to be based on a distro that is kept up to date (such as Debian or Arch).

I actually like that it’s LTS underneath, because I know I can run the machine for a couple of years with stable packages and then upgrade to the next version.

I understand the appeal of more up-to-date stuff, but with Docker I can have my stable cake and swap toppings at will :)

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#63

Post by kyrra »

noobermin wrote: post #52
cbhl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control is all of it. Security on Android is a joke for 80%+ of users. They can't run on the latest version of Android, because various vendors' drivers are in out-of-tree kernel patches that are un-upstreamable for non-technical reasons. (By comparison, Chrome OS is also Linux-based, but, IIRC, it requires all shipping devices to have drivers upstreamed.) Owning an OS with a stable device driver ABI would allow Goog…

>Owning an OS with a stable device driver ABI Are they actually doing that though? I haven't read anything along those lines, not that I have looked at Fuchsia in depth.

I haven't read this yet, but they have docs outlining driver development. Note that it is called a "driver development kit" which may imply it's more stable.

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/ddk/over...

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#64

Post by rcarmo »

aphextron wrote: post #28
ricardobeat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elementary is the OS you're looking for: https://elementary.io I wish it had more adoption. Right now there are not a lot of apps written using it's UI guidelines/framework as most projects are worried about portability and/or have moved to Electron. It is slowly getting better though, and seems to be developing an ecosystem geared towards quality as OSX used to be: https://medium.com/elementaryos/appcenter-spotlight…

I really wanted to love Elementary. But the UI lag and general clunkiness compared to OSX is just too much for me. I think the world can only benefit from new operating systems completely free of Linux influence.

Try installing Elementary Tweaks and turning off most animations (some, sadly, cannot be turned off yet, but I run it on an Acer C720 with 2GB of RAM, and it works beautifully).

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#65

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

badsectoracula wrote: post #60
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It extends beyond desktop environments, that's only the most visible piece. Closely related to desktop environments are the two major UI toolkits. Why does Kate have a different file picker than Gimp? Why does LibreOffice give me yet another file picker? On MacOS and Windows, the file picker is a solved problem. Init systems, until fairly recently when most distributions consolidated around systemd, were in a similar…

> Why does Kate have a different file picker than Gimp? Why does LibreOffice give me yet another file picker? On MacOS and Windows, the file picker is a solved problem. Because these file pickers are implemented by two different GUI toolkits that have a different idea of how file picking should be done. This isn't anything new, Xaw programs used their own (handmade) file dialogs, Motif had its own, Java/Awt had its o…

You're absolutely right that the problem isn't unique to Linux, it was just the easiest example I had on hand and was relevant to the discussion. I could just as easily fire up a variety of programs on my Mac that feature different file pickers and GUI conventions.

Windows, as you point out, is kind of thrashing around when it comes to what it wants its GUI to be. I don't think the situation will ever improve there as Microsoft is very reluctant to break backwards compatibility.

> Wayland is very restrictive for many uses and actually lacks several useful features compared to X11 - some it pushes towards the applications in the stack (so instead of a single solution that is shared among -say- 1000 clients you get 1000 solutions), while other stuff are simply impossible (unless you are XWayland which gets special status, leading to the ironic situation that even under Wayland the X APIs provide you with more functionality :-P).

I will admit that I haven't dug into Wayland very much, but this is my impression as well. I try it (the Wayland KDE on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) periodically, but it seems a lot crashier than X.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#66

Post by greenhouse_gas »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #45
Shoothe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they don't know themselves what will become of it. It's more a research project similarly to Midori.

I think there's a lot more going on than they are publicly letting on. If the general public starts to believe that there is an Android successor in the works, many people will stop buying Android devices until further notice. This could be absolutely catastrophic for the Android device market. If I were Google, I would bury the name Fuchsia, call the thing Android 10, and let it be known that it's years out.

>If the general public starts to believe that there is an Android successor in the works, many people will stop buying Android devices until further notice.

The bigger danger is the response by android developers. Will you invest in a soon-to-be-deprecated Android Native app written in a soon-to-be-deprecated API (because, at least according to the Internet rumors, Fuchsia will be using Dart instead of Java and will have a totally different API), rather than just write it in Xamarin, Cordova or React Native?

And once your apps aren't written in Android API, how hard is it to port to, say, Windows Phone?

This damages their moat.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#67

Post by Rusky »

noobermin wrote: post #53
openfuture wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capability based security and microkernel, both pretty substantial differences.

Aside from the microkernel, doesn't Android already do capability based security?

No. It has a user-visible idea of "capabilities" in the sense that apps get a checklist of things they can and cannot access, but that's not "capability based security," just another access control list.

Capability based security like Fuchsia has means that there is no ambient authority, or in other words no singleton resources. No fopen(), no connect(), etc. Instead, processes access everything through file-handle-like objects that are given to them by their creator, which can thus be sandboxed/mocked/revoked/etc without anything extra like containers or jails or VMs.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#69

Post by Shoothe »

blablabla123 wrote: post #29
Shoothe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they don't know themselves what will become of it. It's more a research project similarly to Midori.

Yes, and there are tons of research OSs. Most of them suffer from a lack of Hardware support. I'd be ready to switch to OpenBSD/Solaris/QNX/other fancy OS tomorrow if all my HW components were supported. I doubt anything non-Linux based is ever becoming popular within the next 100 years. ;)

They don't need to replace Linux in one big event. They'll probably test and safely move some working ideas to their production OSes (similarly as Span was introduced in .NET from Midori).

There is also some effort in abstracting device drivers in Android (Project Treble) but how it could be used in Magenta is not clear.

Personally I'd be really interested in seeing this OS deployed in production. I like Linux but it's XXI century, we should be slowly adopting basic security principles in our OSes (capabilities, microkernels). But I fear that Magenta will look similar to Android, while it is open source Google will internally use a customized version that the customers will not be able to compile themselves.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#70

Post by swetland »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #19
jkmcf wrote: post #2

Aside from control, what does this provide over Linux? IMO, the Linux desktop problem is due partially to relying on the antiquated X Windows system, but mostly a lack of funding a good vision, e.g. Unity. After growing up with OpenLook, then Motif, the plethora of Linux window managers, and unhappy years with Windows, I noticed most of the elegant apps were being written for OSX. I’m not sure how much of this is due…

Here’s a list of syscalls: https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/magenta/blob/master/docs/s...

That's a bit outdated (magenta was renamed zircon a while back and that mirror is overdue for deletion). Try:

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/master/docs/syscal...

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/master/docs/concep...

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