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Google's Mysterious Fuchsia OS Can Now Run On the Pixelbook (theverge.com)
Google's mysterious operating system, dubbed Fuchsia, has been in the works for more than a year now with very few details about the OS made public. According to a new report from Chrome Unboxed, we have learned that Google has released documentation to allow developers to load Fuchsia onto the company's Pixelbook. The Verge reports: This isn't your typical developer operating system, and you'll need two machines to host and target a Pixelbook to load the OS. It's very much a work in progress, with early hints at a user interface and functions. It's still interesting that Google has chosen its own Pixelbook to experiment with, though. Fuchsia has mostly been linked to embedded systems like wearables and Internet of Things devices in the past, but testing was expanded to Intel's NUC and Acer's Switch Alpha 12 Chromebooks. Fuchsia has been created from the Google-built Zircon microkernel, and not the typical Linux kernels that hold Android and Chrome OS together. It's not immediately clear exactly why Google is building a new operating system, nor what devices it will run on. As testing spreads to more Chromebooks, some are now speculating this could be a successor to the "Andromeda" project that never materialized.
I think that this will be disastrous for Linux.
Linux has been floundering on the desktop for ages now, only ever getting perhaps 3% of the market.
Linux has done slightly better in server and VM environments, but even then it faces some serious competition from the BSDs, Windows Server, Solaris, and other OSes. Many Linux users have reported problems involving systemd, which has already driven some server users away to other OSes, like FreeBSD.
Linux has also seen some embedded usage, but these days it's mostly contained to Android on mobile devices. More serious users of embedded Linux have been moving to QNX and other realtime OSes for a while now.
If we see future versions of Android, or perhaps an OS that replaces Android, become popular, it would effectively be removing most of Linux's market share. Linux would go back to being the kernel used on some servers, and a very small percentage of desktop systems.
What's worse, I think that there's the real possibility that this new OS from Google could very well start eating into Linux's desktop and server market share, too, if this new OS ends up being usable in such environments.
It sounds to me like Fuchsia OS could very well become the universal OS that we've all been waiting for: the OS that runs on embedded systems, through to mobile devices, through to servers, through to workstations, and perhaps even through to supercomputers and clusters.
Linux could have been this universal OS, had the Linux community not bungled stuff up so badly with systemd, GNOME 3, Wayland, PulseAudio, and so on. But like so many times before, Linux has missed out on its true potential.
It's looking more and more like Fuchsia OS will be the operating system of the future, with it competing against Windows and macOS, and with Linux becoming less and less relevant.
..., timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. And no, I don't mean the Greek, and in case of Google or any such entity, it actually shouldn't be "even when they bear gifts", but "especially when they bear gifts".
Google has always suffered from NIH syndrome. They will develop and abandon their own kernel rather than use the Linux kernel with billions of development hours because Google engineers didn't write linux.
It really is that simple.
Google hates the use of the GPL by internal developers. Like most BSD projects, it's written in hate.
https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/fuchsia/blob/master/LICENSE
I get why Google would do this. Why anyone else would give them development hours without a gurantee of reciprocity escapes me, as it does most developers (who side with GPL 75% of the time). People invest in codebases, they want to be able to take that investment with them - especially if they leave on poor terms.
It's not immediately clear exactly why Google is building a new operating system ...
All the better to spy on you, my dear!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.