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Google's Upcoming 'Fuchsia' Smartphone OS Dumps Linux, Has a Wild New UI (arstechnica.com)
More details have emerged about Fuchsia, the new mobile OS Google has been working on. ArsTechnica reports that Fuchsia is not based on Linux (unlike Android and Chrome OS). Instead, the OS uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called "Magenta." From the article: With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0. Dumping Linux might come as a bit of a shock, but the Android ecosystem seems to have no desire to keep up with upstream Linux releases. Even the Google Pixel is still stuck on Linux Kernel 3.18, which was first released at the end of 2014. [...] The interface and apps are written using Google's Flutter SDK, a project that actually produces cross-platform code that runs on Android and iOS. Flutter apps are written in Dart, Google's reboot of JavaScript which, on mobile, has a focus on high-performance, 120fps apps. It also has a Vulkan-based graphics renderer called "Escher" that lists "Volumetric soft shadows" as one of its features, which seems custom-built to run Google's shadow-heavy "Material Design" interface guidelines. The publication put the Flutter SDK to test on an Android device to get a sneak peek into the user interface of Fuchsia. "The home screen is a giant vertically scrolling list. In the center you'll see a (placeholder) profile picture, the date, a city name, and a battery icon," the author wrote. "Above the are 'Story' cards -- basically Recent Apps -- and below it is a scrolling list of suggestions, sort of like a Google Now placeholder. Leave the main screen and you'll see a Fuchsia 'home' button pop up on the bottom of the screen, which is just a single white circle."
Time to completely fucking change everything so I have to re-learn how to use the phone and write my apps. Change for the sake of change, dontcha know.
Well I can't stand UIs that use three very similar shades of grey, so they had to go to the other extreme.
Of course looks aren't everything, but there are plenty of GUIs that look good and are shit to use, but very few the other way round.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That is fantastic news that they are targeting 120 fps ! I hope this helps push all the other vendors (phones, monitors, etc.) stop stop targeting a shitty 30 fps experience.
At our Fortune 50 company I'm always educating our UX and Graphic Designers about the reasons why we run our app at 60 fps. Kind of hard to argue when they see a demo first hand. :-) Now if only the rest of the company would get on board ditching the crappy 30 fps that people seem to think is "good enough."
I wonder if Google is trying to target VR at some point placing a safe bet of 120 so they can hit the magic 90+ FPS required? The 120 fps for apps is just a bonus
> Android hung around inside Google for about five years before it launched on a real product.
So basically Fuschia is a tech demo today -- that may, or may not ship.
I wonder if they are going to ignore the whole Android ecosystem or embrace it, because 2 billion devices running Android is pretty hard to ignore.
They are doing this to go after the Rooters. They want to close off the "Root your device and load whatever you want" hole in these devices.
They aren't. It's gonna be worse. Since the OS is gonna be BSD/Apache based it means even more of the manufacturers won't release the drivers back into the open which means upgrades not made by them will be impossible.
The Linux kernel development process is a total PITA and I don't mean in the combative, degrading and misogynistic attitudes prevalent on the mailing list. The actual process and leadership is broken.
* They keep flawed external user space APIs in place in "Major Releases" for compatibility with broken apps. Not that major releases mean anything anymore.
* They consistently and openly break internal APIs in a way that drivers will fail to compile as a way to brow-beat vendors into not shipping binary blobs.
* Linus himself has said it has become bloated and shitty (not an exact quote), but no push has been made to debloat or clean it up. The video drivers are probably the worst offenders; I ran duplo to detect code duplicates and it totally filled up my hard drive.
* How long has NTFS been around? Long enough that the internal driver ought to be able to safely write to it.
* The development process has become so segregated that there is no cross talk. For example compressed RAM, compressed SWAP and a compressed file system each expand and recompress data between each other even when they use the same compression method.
* The kernel continues to add unnecessary build requirements like bc and perl even though Rob Landley (toybox and formerly busybox maintainer) has provided several (not-accepted) patches. Add that to the insanely large repo size and you basically have to pay people to touch it now.
* Too many more reasons to mention, but it works, I use it, people use it, businesses use it and there is no real competitor at the moment to force them to compete and actually fix stuff - new features make news, cleaning up 1000 lines of duplicate code doesn't - I hope magenta inspires a 1000 paper-cuts cleanup campaign.
Alphabet* (Google) basically used linux in the beginning because that is what the android project started on and the alternatives at the time didn't have the same level of support for embedded architectures that could be used in phones and tablets. Sure, the BSDs had some support for the processors, but decent accelerated 3D graphics ruled them out (not that it is superb in Linux either). Now that they have a large market share, they can leverage that into vendor support, but since many of them don't want to open source their code and help their competitors reverse engineer the hardware that their company invested lots of time and money in, it is useful to have a relatively stable internal API that Alphabet can control without arbitrarily being overruled because some old IBM mainframe still uses that bug/feature.
-- Yes I said Linux without the GNU --- musl-libc, toybox, jwm, X11 and st is all you need for a basic desktop system