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Everything We Knew About Fuchsia's UI, Armadillo, Is Gone (9to5google.com)
Over the last two years, we have heard numerous reports about Fuchsia, a new operating system for phones, computers, and just about everything else by Google. We've seen it in a variety of demos, all of which featured a UI, codenamed "Armadillo." Now it seems that Armadillo, and thus everything about Fuchsia we've "seen," has been removed. Reader Suren Enfiajyan shares a report: Everything we've known Fuchsia to look like falls under Armadillo. Last May, when we got our first look at Fuchsia UI, it was possible because Armadillo was simply a Flutter app that could be built to run on Android. After some months, we were also able to show off the first five minutes of Fuchsia UI on the Pixelbook using Fuchsia's screenshot tool, and we saw improvements to Armadillo, like Google Sign-In support. All in all, it was clear Fuchsia was shaping up to become a clean operating system that implements and extends Material Design. Unfortunately, none of the demos and examples are accurate anymore. With a recent code change, humorously titled "Armadillo fainted!", spotted by Redditor alawami, we've reached the end of an era. Every single piece of Armadillo code has now been permanently removed from Fuchsia's Topaz repo.
At least they killed it early before people started using and liking it.
If you want to look at the Fuschia source code, it's available here. To me, it looks more like a college-level project, rather than a kernel that has come into contact with the messy realities of the real world.
Their goal is to make things secure, and they want to do things 'right' by making it a micro-kernel.
Again, to me it looks like the authors have good knowledge on the theory side of things, but lack understanding of a lot of real-world use cases. For example, they removed a lot of the syscalls that the Linux kernel has, it's not Posix compliant, and you really should think long and hard before removing things in a decades-old, well-tested standard.
But who knows, maybe they'll get lucky and hit all the use cases Android needs. Maybe someone with experience will help them make the kernel solid. But most likely, the code will get uglier and uglier as it needs to accomodate more use cases, until it's so ugly that someone at Google starts a side project to replace it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
agreed that google is a selfish prick of a company and anything they offer to 'users' has strings attached. no doubts at all, they can't be trusted, they employ mostly young people, lacking in real world experience and google, overall, has the attention span of a teenager.
android is total shit, from a tech POV. its not about users or user freedom, never was and never will be. the only thing android does well is deliver eyes and clicks to google's real customers, the corporations.
given that they ruined their linux os and the update 'story' is worse than MS (and that says a lot, right there), I have zero faith in anything they do, other than to optimize their own money making machine. they do that very well. they collect and sell a lot of info about us. but makers of a trustable ANYTHING? no. not in a million years.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Greybeards are the ones who've built a bunch of OSes. They have the experience.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I never understand this metaphor. Dems do get outraged more often than they should, but if there's someone wailing "but muh riiiiights!" then usually you can make a pretty good guess which party they represent, especially if the asserted "rights" are a gross misrepresentation of the actual law.
Greybeards are the ones who've built a bunch of OSes. They have the experience.
Some of us are so goddamn old we no longer have beards, or hair, for that matter.
Because the first requirement of a UI is of course that the user should be totally unfamiliar with it.