[HN Gopher] Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting ...
___________________________________________________________________
Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-
gen Nest Hub
Author : panic
Score : 269 points
Date : 2021-05-25 07:04 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5google.com)
| josefresco wrote:
| I can't say I've ever thought about the OS on my Nest Hub. It's a
| digital picture frame, and it plays YouTubeTV/Music while I'm in
| the kitchen. It occasionally answers a question - what will this
| new OS change?
| wikibob wrote:
| A big success for Rust in the wild
| Google234 wrote:
| I'm 99% sure it's mostly C and C++
| abarth wrote:
| Fuchsia has a lot of Rust code. (Disclosure: I write Rust
| code for Fuchsia on a daily basis.)
| abarth wrote:
| CLOC says about ~1 MLOC of Rust and ~1.1 MLOC of C++ in htt
| ps://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/s..
| .
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I'd still call this a success for rust in the wild, if a
| huge entrenched company like Google would include it so
| much for a big OS play, even if it shares that room with
| more established languages.
| raggi wrote:
| There are many ways to cut metrics, but here's some line
| counts:
|
| C 365017 C Header 894250 CMake 396 C++ 2025857 C++ Header
| 10691 Rust 3124869
| scoutt wrote:
| Being these two the most important functions [1], [2].
|
| The rest is merely overhead :)
|
| [1] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/mai
| n/z...
|
| [2] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/mai
| n/z...
| dragonsh wrote:
| By that metric JSON is the clear winner but that's not the
| case, its a win for Rust and also for C, C++, Dart, GO, Python
| and many more. --------------------------------
| ----------------------------------------------- Language
| Files Lines Blanks Comments Code Complexity --
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| -------------- Rust 10640 3126941
| 295777 480090 2351074 125641 C++
| 8744 2025857 318786 180185 1526886 174494 C
| Header 7293 894250 148795 199271
| 546184 18621 GN 5014
| 303531 38062 39284 226185 6367 Go
| 2873 800205 75566 113344 611295 87456
| Markdown 2648 288903 74633 0
| 214270 0 C 1708
| 365017 49446 53285 262286 46408 JSON
| 1305 4454311 82 0 4454229 0
| FIDL 1303 94290 13433 43888
| 36969 0 Dart 606 69163
| 9153 10205 49805 4425 License
| 545 21628 3271 0 18357 0 YAML
| 421 10036 784 1882 7370 0
| Plain Text 368 127457 14426 0
| 113031 0 Python 352
| 56456 4845 5083 46528 4096 Assembly
| 301 128989 12067 0 116922 828
| Shell 281 24032 3022 4754
| 16256 1971 BASH 234 22508
| 2795 4752 14961 2117 TOML
| 65 4043 198 90 3755 1
| JavaScript 56 33445 1768 855
| 30822 3695 GLSL 51 12951
| 2347 4386 6218 756 SVG
| 48 8543 1 2 8540 0
| gitignore 43 388 31 69
| 288 0 Perl 41 48582
| 3874 4185 40523 858 Handlebars
| 31 556 41 4 511 18 Mako
| 31 1453 174 0 1279 49 XML
| 31 1473 16 129 1328 0
| Protocol Buffers 28 5160 1068 1562
| 2530 0 HTML 19 882
| 40 12 830 0 Makefile
| 18 527 107 34 386 24 Bazel
| 17 1493 131 170 1192 37
| Dockerfile 17 248 33 19
| 196 18 C++ Header 14 10691
| 214 206 10271 103 CSV
| 13 140350 0 0 140350 0
| Autoconf 12 910 34 32
| 844 7 ReStructuredText 11 1969
| 659 0 1310 0 Vim Script
| 10 428 65 0 363 31
| Device Tree 9 246 32 43
| 171 0 Go Template 7 521
| 80 0 441 5 Module-Definition
| 5 176 23 0 153 4 Smarty
| Template 5 74 24 0 50
| 5 CMake 4 396 45
| 123 228 38 CSS 4
| 387 51 13 323 0 JSX
| 3 355 15 39 301 0 Patch
| 3 2591 105 0 2486 0 Scala
| 3 80 13 0 67 3 Fish
| 2 140 16 40 84 18 LD
| Script 2 122 4 10
| 108 0 PHP 2 4
| 1 0 3 0 AWK
| 1 97 14 4 79 0 Batch
| 1 23 3 0 20 2 Emacs
| Lisp 1 71 14 12 45
| 2 Meson 1 12 3
| 0 9 0 Nix 1
| 7 1 0 6 0 Prolog
| 1 45 11 0 34 0 ------
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| ---------- Total 45247 13093013
| 1076199 1148062 10868752 478098 -------------------
| ------------------------------------------------------------
| Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $467,287,312
| Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 142.185717 months
| Estimated People Required (organic) 291.973834 ----------
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| ------ Processed 437275620 bytes, 437.276 megabytes (SI)
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| ----------------
| ancarda wrote:
| Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $467,287,312
| Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 142.185717 months
| Estimated People Required (organic) 291.973834
|
| Where does this come from? Does cloc now try to estimate how
| much time/money would be required to build software?
|
| I'd be interested what it thinks of my code. Do you have to
| give it a lot of code for these numbers to appear?
| jsnell wrote:
| That's probably sloccount or scc, not cloc.
|
| At least for sloccount, the cost/effort estimation model
| has very little to do with reality in the modern world
| though.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Congratulations to the team, this is a big milestone. I worry
| that this will permit Google to disengage from the linux
| community, but I'm optimistic that it will result in improved
| device security.
| getcrunk wrote:
| This is exciting to see (in a neutral way, I'm not rooting for
| it) because I wonder how large fuchsia will grow and if it will
| contend with Linux. Why wouldn't Google want to push containers
| running it's brand spanking new os without 30+ years of cruft on
| gcp. And if it has performance/security why wouldn't developers
| start moving over.
| rusk wrote:
| > without 30+ years of cruft
|
| AKA learned experience
| lmm wrote:
| Learned experience for long-lived multi-user systems running
| on heterogenous hardware, of questionable relevance to
| today's landscape.
| rusk wrote:
| That's true. But unfortunately all that baggage comes with
| lots of genuinely useful stuff too. Starting from scratch
| rarely works, unless you're willing to put in a lot of time
| and effort, and are in it for the long haul, and people
| that want to start from scratch rarely are, and google
| doesn't have a good track record in these matters either.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Normally I'd agree about Googles track record. But they
| HAVE to innovate in the android/mobile space. It would be
| their death as opposed to just dropping a random
| messaging app.
|
| And they did all the "from scratch" work. It would be
| short sighted to not let zircon at least have the
| potential to replace Linux.
|
| Apple vertical integration strategy recently took a big
| step forward and googles response may well be this.
| canadianfella wrote:
| What is zircon?
| rusk wrote:
| > And they did all the "from scratch" work.
|
| We should judge on what has been finished rather than
| what has been started. After people start to work with
| it, that's when the real costs will start to be incurred.
|
| Apple are an interesting case in that they have done this
| very very gradually over many many years - building on
| top of existing tried and tested platforms where
| possible.
|
| Google seem to be dominant in android/mobile despite
| their crappy OS. Whether they're threatened or not, this
| does need to be improved. This may or may not be due to
| Linux - to me it seems to be more the case that it's
| again their failure to stick to things that's the most
| frustrating aspect of using Android - but maybe using
| Linux means they spend more development time doing that
| than dealing with features. Perhaps they're just trying
| to emulate Apple's strategy ala cargo cult.
| hortense wrote:
| They have an OS running on a consumer device that
| connects to the wifi where you can play media, browse the
| web, and run flutter apps, so it seems like they already
| put the time and effort.
|
| It even self-updates, so in some sense it's already ahead
| of the standard linux distributions!
| seanhunter wrote:
| Which standard distribution are you running that doesn't
| self-update? All of the ones I use (Fedora, Centos,
| Debian, Ubuntu, Qubes) do this and have done for years.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Ubuntu doesn't update itself, out of the box. It just
| mentions the availability of updates in the MOTD. And
| upgrades to new distributions are completely manual and
| user-initiated.
| rusk wrote:
| > They have an OS running on a consumer device
|
| I read this as "prototype".
| klodolph wrote:
| It's aimed at the opposite end from GCP, aimed at things like
| phones, tablets, and laptops.
| raggi wrote:
| fwiw, I got us booting on GCE years ago, and the scripts may
| still work.
|
| https://cs.opensource.google/fuchsia/fuchsia/+/main:scripts/.
| ..
| znpy wrote:
| "permission denied"
| raggi wrote:
| https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/main/scripts/g
| ce may work better. I will ask around if there's
| something up with some ACLs in code search, it seems to
| work for me on personal machines and incognito.
| [deleted]
| bhaavan wrote:
| So is this Zircon kernel based? Or just fancy name for linux?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| It is using Zircon kernel.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Congrats to the Fuschia/Zircon team! It's very exciting to see a
| freshly-architected OS appear on the scene, with a non-copyleft
| license, a big company behind it (so hardware vendors will
| actually write drivers for it), and direction set by one company
| (instead of 10+ as is the case with Linux/Android). Can't wait to
| play around with it :-)
| andrekandre wrote:
| according to ars technica [1] they removed the ui layer from the
| repo... is that accurate and does that mean we are in for a macos
| type situation where the real treasure (the ui bits) are locked
| away?
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/google-launches-
| its-...
| axegon_ wrote:
| I've only recently started fiddling with Fuchsia and I'd be
| interested to see it running on a device and see how truly usable
| it could be in the real world. It seems the community is pretty
| active online which is a good thing: I raised a concern about
| building Fuchsia on non-Debian based distros and potential
| solutions(one of which I tested and workes) and I had 4 or 5
| replies in a couple of hours. And while the thread has turned
| into yet another "bash Google" thread, I'd like to thank the
| engineers for their work and hoping to see more in the future. As
| I said I haven't tested it on an actual device but if it is as
| lightweight and versatile as advertised, it has the potential to
| become incredibly big and valuable. I guess only time will tell.
| [deleted]
| nicaragua wrote:
| I wonder if it will last longer than Stadia did.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Hmm, looks like Fuchsia still uses Dart/Flutter for the front
| end. My experiences have been positive (although I'm sure someone
| will be happy to explain how my opinion of Flutter is wrong) so
| I'm glad to see it.
| klodolph wrote:
| Dart / Flutter is nice, the problems with it back in the day
| were mostly just the fact that it _was_ (previously) competing
| with JavaScript on the front-end.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| I'll gladly come in with the other end of the argument :)
|
| Dart? A half-baked language with quite a lot of unexpected
| gotchas that can cause you to lose days trying to find why
| something isn't working (only to notice a lib author forgot to
| add a return for one branch of the code, or the code works
| differently depending on what runtime it's on).
|
| The Flutter ecosystem is constantly breaking, the plugin system
| was broken for at least a year and "in migration" where most of
| the stuff you do is either "broken for future" or "is going to
| be broken in future". Dependencies are in a circular hell where
| updating one thing might make you update the whole project, but
| then your project might not be compatible with the current
| Flutter version so you'll have to nuke your directories and
| call 'flutter create' again in the project so it recreates
| stuff with the new templates.
|
| Also don't get me started on issues. Had a crash span for over
| 6+ months on all devices with low-budget Adreno GPU-s, most of
| the issues were "closed automatically" because of inactivity or
| because they declared it does not follow the template google
| requires for the issue, altho there is dozens of them reported,
| they held a hotfix for months on end in a branch with other
| changes because it was " a lot of work" to merge it downstream.
| Had a talk with the Flutter team about reconnecting to isolates
| on one conf, one dev's answer was "oh yea that's problematic,
| maybe just the best is for the user to restart the app".
|
| It's classic Google behaviour wrapped in a "new cool thing"
| package.
|
| Flutter is a great thing if you wanna build a cheap app fast
| and never worry with maintaining it ever again. If you're going
| for something long-term, avoid it like plague.
| peanut_worm wrote:
| I am not sure I trust Google with an operating system anymore
| ptomato wrote:
| imagine releasing a new OS in 2021 written largely in a non-
| memory-safe language.
| Google234 wrote:
| Modern C++ is memory safe. More so than (unsafe) rust. Also,
| this OS was not started in 2021..
| criddell wrote:
| What problem does Fuchsia solve? Google already has at least
| three other operating systems to use.
|
| On the other hand, Google has never seemed particularly shy about
| starting something new rather than work on something old. I'm
| thinking of their messaging systems that they start every couple
| of years.
|
| Also, the branding isn't great. The top image in the linked story
| immediately makes me think this has something to do with
| T-Mobile.
| tapoxi wrote:
| It's capability based, so instead of this weird hodgepodge we
| have in the Linux world that resulted in Docker containers it's
| natively a part of the OS design.
|
| Also its not GPL, so we will see actual binary drivers instead
| of GPL <> proprietary shims in Linux that need to be recompiled
| on kernel upgrade.
|
| So it solves a lot of problems for Google and can replace
| Android/Chrome OS/Cast OS.
| bionade24 wrote:
| They haven't worked on the base stuff of Android and ChromeOS.
| Both use Linux software abandoned by upstream, e.g. ChromeOS
| uses upstart and have their patched non-mainline kernels. This
| requires lots of extra work, then even doubled since they have
| 2 platforms. Wanting to have one mature platform for both makes
| sense to me.
| pradn wrote:
| I also believe there's significant chunks, like the network
| stack, written in memory-safe languages like Rust. An
| improvement over C.
| mbStavola wrote:
| Around December or January I tried to get Fuchsia going in QEMU
| to play around a bit and maybe contribute back some code, but
| nothing quite worked as I expected. Based on this experience I
| had figured they were still years off from shipping but I'm
| pleasantly surprised to see that I was (obviously) wrong.
|
| Congrats to the team and looking forward to seeing it work as
| intended!
| abdulla wrote:
| If you're willing to give it another go, you should try it in
| FEMU (our fork of QEMU): https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/get-
| started/set_up_femu
| dman wrote:
| Any pointers to any hardware / dev boards that one can run
| fuchsia on? I remember seeing Intel NUCs being used in the
| past, is there a recommended hardware configuration for
| developers now?
| abarth wrote:
| https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-
| src/development/hardware/intel_n... describes which NUCs
| are known to work.
| dman wrote:
| Thank you!
| greatgib wrote:
| Something should be particularly wrong with the project if
| you have to use your own fork of qemu...
| luch wrote:
| It's actually pretty standard to fork QEMU when you want to
| emulate a custom kernel/board. QEMU is a good common
| emulation platform, but in no way it can emulate correctly
| every quirks of a custom pci or even PIC device expected by
| the system.
| greatgib wrote:
| I'm not expert in QEMU, but to my understanding, it would
| make sense to fork QEMU to support a new
| hardware/board/platform, but not so much to support a new
| "software"/"firmware" on top of an already existing and
| used board platform.
| throwaway59229 wrote:
| Why did Google choose to fork QEMU?
|
| I had a brief look at the setup information and there's
| nothing that makes it clear why there's yet another piece of
| highly Google-specific (though presumably open source)
| software that people would need to learn to use while they
| learn about Fuschia.
| raggi wrote:
| FEMU is really AEMU, it forked from QEMU many years ago for
| a variety of reasons.
|
| Today this configuration offers Vulkan support, which will
| hopefully make it's way back to QEMU eventually.
|
| We use both QEMU and FEMU in our work, if you checkout
| Fuchsia you will find prebuilts of both in //prebuilt. QEMU
| provides broader control over hardware and broader
| emulation features, often useful to the kernel and driver
| teams. FEMU provides Vulkan graphics, more useful for teams
| working on GUI applications.
| josteink wrote:
| Not to discredit the effort, but saying you've released your
| own fork of QEMU to run your own OS, creates an impression
| that you're perfectly happy to (prefer to?) create a parallel
| universe for yourself, with your own tools and its own
| ecosystem... Which will obviously all be controlled by
| Google. Not very good optics, IMO.
|
| If you want promote Fuschia as a useful, general purpose
| computing platform (and not just an attempt for Google to
| avoid the GPL), you probably want to work upstream with
| existing projects to improve support generally instead of
| creating your own suite of forks.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| Why the down votes ? Perfectly polite and mostly valid
| comment.
| rusk wrote:
| This is how old google would have worked. Now that google
| is all grown up they take a more cost conscious approach.
| How the mighty have not so much fallen, as sunk.
| rvz wrote:
| Yet Google's Browser engine is a fork of WebKit and
| surprise it is used in Chrome, Electron and QtWebEngine and
| everyone is using it.
|
| As Fuchsia is highly dependent on Flutter and the whole
| ecosystem will be able to run Flutter apps on day 1, I
| would bet that this is going to be the Android replacement
| in this decade.
| abdulla wrote:
| As raggi mentioned above, you can use both.
|
| The additional feature that FEMU provides us is Vulkan
| support, which allows you to interact with a GUI.
|
| On the team, we use both. For example, I know many folks on
| the Zircon team prefer vanilla QEMU.
| rosetremiere wrote:
| I recall reading that Huawei's microkernel was actually more
| interesting/better than fuchsia, on a technical sense (don't know
| the metric).
|
| Anyone has a (founded) opinion on the subject?
| cute_boi wrote:
| Its just a attack on linux. Just like what they did to firefox.
| Made a superior browser and make it opensource and gain monopoly.
|
| Now they have control over os. They can do anything.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Wake me up when they do that "anything". In the mean time
| they've created useful and successful open-source products
| which anyone can benefit from.
| zentiggr wrote:
| And yanked them out from underneath the adopters whenever it
| wasn't fun anymore.
|
| I don't trust in anything Google anymore except that internal
| politics and profit motive will override anything beneficial
| eventually. Look at Chrome if you're not sure what I mean.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Yea I can see that with chrome. They created useful in that
| time that any opensource benefit others. After that they
| started writing their own spec for chrome, made youtube slow
| on firefox using shadow dom api etc.
|
| These I think google is more evil that microsoft. But many
| people enjoy free service thats why they are not complaining.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The average person uses android OS.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Which architectures have fuchsia ports? And what cpu
| feature/device support is needed to port fuchsia?
| Jyaif wrote:
| x64 and arm64
|
| https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/architecture/archit...
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Google has officially outdid itself in under-marketing a major
| platform.
|
| A brand new OS, and... barely anything even on hacker news. No
| barrage of media leading up to the annoucement.
|
| Is this basically a boondoggle being relegated to IoT?
| paulus_magnus2 wrote:
| Why would anyone want to into this? From industry perspective it
| baffles me how Google divided an conquered not one but multiple
| platforms: (Android, Google TV, Google Auto).
|
| From the user perspective I don't need another toy OS. I was able
| to develop Linux Kernel modules on my 486dx with 8MB of RAM. I
| was able to use excel, word on it.
|
| Right now I have a mobile phone with better hardware than my work
| PC from only few years back (8GB RAM, 512GB UFS storage powerful
| multicore CPU). Still Android only allows me to click colourful
| buttons and simple apps, it has not progressed at all in the last
| decade.
|
| Samsungs of the world, please come together, build a non-profit
| consortium and develop an open platform with real OS with full
| capabilities.
| nicaragua wrote:
| Never trust a company without a customer service department.
| nicaragua wrote:
| Love how the insecure people downvote such a fact.
| Grazester wrote:
| I came here for a technical discussion about Fuchsia and it's
| microkernel approach instead this is mostly fill with complains
| about Google as a company.
|
| Is there a social justice forum I can visit where I may be able
| to have a technical discussion about Fuchsia?
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Fuschia forums? People are discussing the news of a new OS
| release and its implications.
| cpach wrote:
| Please post your thoughts and questions about Fuchsia!
|
| I wonder where Fuchsia will be in 5-10 years. Will it thrive?
| If so, in what space will it thrive?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Hacker News is still the best place for such discussions.
| There's just a lot of low-effort noise from people who force
| every topic to conform to their existing knowledge areas.
| e12e wrote:
| Has anyone done a comparison with Minix 3? What are the
| (dis)advantages to a new microkernel rather than building on
| Minix 3?
| jeffbee wrote:
| I think the cause of this phenomenon is that most HN readers
| are not qualified to comment on Fuchsia, are ignorant of any
| and all facts about it, but are also compelled to comment. So
| you get this thread, and most threads here. Actual technical
| exchange between people who are both not obviously wrong is
| rare here.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Googlers thinking non-Googlers are unqualified to comment on
| _anything_ seems like a fairly common theme to me.
|
| I really wonder what caused this kind of ideological
| entitlement. Was it a company culture that never said "no"?
| Was it the constant talk of how Googlers are just smarter and
| more brilliant than everyone else? Genuinely curious.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Ways to become qualified to comment on fuchsia are as
| simple as using it or reading its source code or docs.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| It was the part where people decided to ignore what was
| actually being presented, and instead derailed every
| possible conversation about google into their predetermined
| track. Not you specifically, but this entire fuschia
| thread.
|
| What is someone to think when every time their work is
| presented publicly the comments are all completed unrelated
| to what was presented? You too would conclude that group is
| unlikely to present meaningful feedback or thoughts.
|
| (I have never, and will never, work for google).
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I agree, actually, but that's fundamentally different
| from saying people aren't "qualified".
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| Perhaps it would useful for Google and googlers to "read
| the room" - as it were - and consider _why_ a lot of
| people have such strong reactions to Google 's conduct
| and methods, why a lot of people are distrustful of
| anything that comes out of Google (and FAANG in general),
| and why the reactions are so strong from privacy
| advocates and the open source/free software crowd in
| particular, in context of where and how Google started
| and where it is now.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are suggesting here. Should the
| developers that work on specific input methods for fuscia
| be "reading the room" and instead spend their time
| switching to work on ad tech, where they can influence
| it? Google has 10's of thousands of engineers, wedging ad
| tech discussions into the output of every last one of
| them seems completely and utterly unrelated to the
| article.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| I would humbly suggest that people working for companies
| that have become notorious for customer-unfriendly
| behavior and a complete disregard for privacy, reconsider
| whether that is something they wish to continue to
| contribute to, or not. Do they wish to contribute to the
| coffers of a company that _will_ use every possible means
| available to erode privacy, to extract maximum value from
| open source without giving one iota back, and to enforce
| more and more corporate censorship on the open web.
|
| Advertising and a complete disregard for privacy is in
| every part of Google's DNA, you cannot possibly claim
| ignorance of it, simply because you are in a department
| not directly working on advertising. That is equivalent
| to covering your ears with your hands and going "la la la
| I can't hear you".
|
| That is why it gets brought up in every discussion about
| Google, because one bad apple really does spoil the
| entire bunch, their bad behavior in regards to privacy
| and a complete lack of customer support taints the entire
| organization, and everyone who works for Google has sold
| their respectability for a Silicon Valley paycheck.
|
| Everyone who works in tech needs to take a good long hard
| look in the mirror, and decide for themselves whether
| they're OK with everything their employer is doing, and
| if not, perhaps consider why they choose to still work
| there.
| cpach wrote:
| I wouldn't say rare. But yes, the phenomenon you describe
| definitely takes place quite a lot.
| kerneis wrote:
| For what it's worth, a few Google engineers are hanging around
| so if you have any specific technical question I think we'd be
| glad to answer it :-)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Could you say something, how the kernel is different from
| linux for example? Why would I want to choose Fuchsia for a
| smartphone, for example. Where is the advantage?
| kerneis wrote:
| The key concepts are documented here:
| https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts
|
| Some things that Fuchsia was able to do thanks to starting
| from scratch:
|
| - The system is based on capabilities, a security model
| which is based on explicit tracking of permissions. It
| wouldn't be possible to change Linux to be capability-based
| because the ambiant-authority model has been used
| pervasively since it was conceived 30 years ago.
|
| - Fuchsia provides a stable binary interface (like Windows,
| but unlike Linux). This lets you update your system while
| keeping some components unchanged, eg. binary drivers from
| a hardware manufacturer that wouldn't provide updates for
| them anymore. I think Linux could technically change this,
| but they have historically been unwilling to, and it is
| unlikely to change in the future.
| the8472 wrote:
| > Fuchsia provides a stable binary interface (like
| Windows, but unlike Linux).
|
| Linux does provide a stable binary interface, _to
| userspace_.
|
| > eg. binary drivers from a hardware manufacturer that
| wouldn't provide updates for them anymore
|
| That can be seen as much as a downside as an upside,
| because it makes life a lot easier for hardware
| manufacturers to ship more binary blobs
| fragileone wrote:
| > That can be seen as much as a downside as an upside,
| because it makes life a lot easier for hardware
| manufacturers to ship more binary blobs
|
| Which is essentially the point of this approach for
| Google, to exert greater control.
| ac29 wrote:
| I dont know about that. The Linux/GPL model has had mixed
| success in the embedded space - most vendors still ship
| their code as binary blobs making it difficult or
| impossible to update the LInux kernel, which has security
| and other implications. But, there have been some vendors
| embracing the open source model to some extent at least,
| and a lot of third party work in supporting upstream
| kernel development of drivers.
|
| I dont think it would be fair to call Fuchsia a step
| backwards in this respect - vendors that ship closed
| source binaries for Fuchsia are almost certainly shipping
| closed source binaries for Linux as well.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Or just convinience.
|
| When the goal is, to support a broad range of devices -
| and the vast majority of hardware manufactors are not
| into open hardware - it is probably easier, to convince
| them of supporting Fuchsia by writing firmware and
| drivers - if they do not have to deal with the GPL and
| the kernel driver integration, like it is the case with
| linux. They just write their driver once against a stable
| API.
|
| That makes things easier.
|
| And google are not driven by free software ideals - but
| rather buisness pragmatism. But I don't see this design
| choice as an attack on free software.
| LucidLynx wrote:
| The micro-kernel architecture is definitely a game
| changer for this, compared to Linux...
|
| Linux tried different things to reload dynamically the
| drivers & core stuff, without rebooting the computer, but
| I always had diverse issues after some hours...
|
| Thanks for the link + info :)
| trasz wrote:
| Implementing capability-based security in a typical Unix
| (and thus Linux) is definitely possible, see FreeBSD's
| Capsicum.
| kerneis wrote:
| I don't know a lot about Capsicum, but from what I
| remember (and see from their website) it adds
| capabilities to FreeBSD but doesn't make them mandatory.
| As such, it is a tool to build compartimentalized
| applications. It does not provide a comprehensive
| solution to sandbox existing applications, and does not
| remove the ambiant-authority model. It is a better, safer
| chroot(). Fuchsia, on the other hand, is built on top of
| capabilities from the ground up, ensuring that you don't
| even have a concept of "file descriptor" or "centralized
| filesystem" to begin with.
| trasz wrote:
| To put it differently, in FreeBSD the application has to
| explicitly enter the capability mode, while in Fuchsia it
| doesn't have that choice.
| zentiggr wrote:
| Unfortunately, every new project coming from Google now has a
| couple of decades of baggage, directly caused by the unexpected
| / manipulative cancellation of projects.
|
| While I am not Google-free at the moment, especially email, I
| have long ago learned to avoid trusting any Google product to
| stay stable, or even available.
|
| And that doesn't even scratch the surface of the decades of
| "everything we do is tuned to collect as much data as we can
| steal without getting caught, and using it to our benefit in
| any way we can hide from you, our users."
|
| Cynicism is pretty much the norm now, and is going to color
| everything Google does forever.
|
| I'm sure there are forums and github sites with actual
| technical details, but that's only a fraction of what gets
| traded here. YMMV.
| edent wrote:
| The personal is political. And the technical is political.
|
| You cannot separate a work from the context in which it
| operates.
| izacus wrote:
| And flooding every conversation with your political agenda so
| none else can discuss any other topics is abusive.
| yaomtc wrote:
| The above was edent's only comment. It's abusive if it's an
| organized effort, which it is not.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >You cannot separate a work from the context in which it
| operates.
|
| Why not try?
| lghh wrote:
| Because I have a conscience.
| macspoofing wrote:
| A little hyperbolic, don't you think? If you're writing
| Fuchsia OS, then you don't a conscience?
| lghh wrote:
| That's clearly not what I said. I was responding directly
| to my parent comment which said we should try to separate
| a work from the context in which it operates. It was not
| a value statement on Fuchsia OS, anyone who worked on it,
| or anyone on Google. It was simply a statement on
| separating work from the context in which it operates.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >It was not a value statement on Fuchsia OS, anyone who
| worked on it, or anyone on Google.
|
| This thread is about Fuchsia OS - so you're separating
| your statement from the context in which it operates?
| lghh wrote:
| It's clear you're not engaging in good faith, I won't be
| continuing this conversation.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Why would you choose to pretend you know less than you do?
|
| Things are made by people and each individual person has
| their own background, circumstances and ideas. The culture
| of Bell Labs abetted (but did not cause) Unix and the
| sharing of source code. The lack of pressure to generate
| profit within Bell allowed Unix to use an unusual licensing
| model, which led to it being widely available in
| universities.
|
| Context does not totalize - it allows and directs. Google
| has a business plan and a culture that promotes some things
| and prevents others. It's not a conspiracy - they're quite
| public about most of it. There are things that are possible
| at Google that are less possible elsewhere. We can, as
| participants and observers in culture, speculate about what
| is more possible and less possible in a Google OS project.
| To not do so would be blindfolding ourselves.
|
| If you want to talk about something "outside" of its
| cultural context (if such a thing is possible), you
| certainly can - but will your conversation partners set the
| same things outside the context? Better to be explicit than
| blindly implicit imo.
| Spivak wrote:
| Because then work just becomes a more boring riff on the
| Nuremberg defense. You can't just be like "I'm just paid to
| write code and so will completely ignore any and all
| ethical issues with what my company does with it."
|
| There's a reason the ACM code of ethics has "everyone is a
| stakeholder" and "avoid harm" as the top two overriding
| principles.
|
| I can understand arguments about keeping political issues
| unrelated to your work and working relationships out but
| you this isn't that.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Because then work just becomes a more boring riff on the
| Nuremberg defense.
|
| Writing code to build Fuchsia OS does not involve great
| violations of morality and ethics that call out for
| something like the 'Nuremberg defense'.
|
| >I can understand arguments about keeping political
| issues unrelated to your work and working relationships
| out but you this isn't that.
|
| Where's the dividing line? Wasn't it Basecamp that had a
| large portion of their workforce quit because they
| couldn't be activists at work? Was that them mitigating
| the 'Nuremberg defense'? What about the recent issue with
| a principle of an elementary schools calling on parents
| to boycott Israel [1].
|
| There are very few jobs in modern America that have these
| great ethical dilemmas. There are, however, plenty of
| people that are willing to engage in hyperbole and
| politicize every space they can. That's a much bigger
| problem.
|
| [1]https://nypost.com/2021/05/24/nyc-principal-
| apologizes-for-a...
| Spivak wrote:
| You're doing exactly what you condemn in your post. I
| said a boring riff specifically because I wanted to
| highlight that there's a huge magnitude difference while
| being able to use the most common term for the particular
| line of reasoning.
|
| You're right, writing an OS for Google isn't some world
| shaking ethical conundrum and it certainly wouldn't be
| enough to turn down a FAANG salary and the experience
| for. But that doesn't mean that the company's corporate
| strategy for the product (i.e. the entire reason the
| project is funded) is suddenly irrelevant and you can
| wash your hands of it. If the business reason for pushing
| this OS is so that Google can have a desktop OS with
| lock-in to their services and have data collection at the
| deepest level like they do with Android then that doesn't
| meet the bar for avoiding harm and that as engineers we
| ought to be empowered to push back or outright say no to
| to buildings things that hurt our users.
|
| Nothing about this has anything to do with Israel or
| Pizzagate, or Black Lives Matter. Politics encompasses
| far far more than the things you see on CNN. I'm not
| saying that people should be advocating for random
| political causes they care about in the workplace. I'm
| saying that people should be able to act politically for
| things that are literally their work.
|
| * Pushing for accessibility features being a requirement
| to ship is political.
|
| * Pushing for telemetry to be anonymized is political.
|
| * Pushing for ML datasets to include people with dark
| skin so they actually work is political.
|
| * Pushing for data collection being opt-in is political.
|
| * Refusing to build a product that interferes with EMT
| radio frequencies is political.
| tester34 wrote:
| it's ok
|
| there's dont be evil
| unionpivo wrote:
| "Because, I don't want for it to be good, because its
| Google, but it probably is."
|
| That's what I have going in my mind and it's going to color
| any of my opinions on it, no matter how how objective I try
| to be.
|
| So I think It's important to discuss this openly, so we
| know where we are at.
|
| Looks like there is a growing minority of tech people who
| distrust Google and I am among them.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| Minority? I feel like i can't read _anything_ about
| google on HN without half the converstion being unrelated
| to the technology and strictly related to ads. The
| minority are the people that think "wow cool, another
| new shiny toy to investigate!".
| unionpivo wrote:
| HN is minority of tech people, and even on HN not
| everyone share same opinion, I doubt it's even 50%.
| canadianfella wrote:
| Ironic that you decided not to comment on anything technical.
| dqpb wrote:
| There's no clear line here - it's systems all the way down.
|
| When a new component is added to the critical path, its vital
| to ask "What happens if my account gets flagged? How much of my
| life can Google shut down with a single bit flip?"
| tempest_ wrote:
| It should at the very least tell you how aggressively google
| has been burning its goodwill as of late.
|
| Google offers things with the left hand while slapping you with
| the right and you seem surprised that people only want to talk
| about the slapping.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I think the discussion cannot be really detached, since Google
| has strong ambitions that will undeniably influence features
| and capabilities of their OS.
|
| But as for the microkernel approach, I think the advantages are
| on the table, but they are theoretical. Until now, no OS with a
| micro architecture was successful at getting significant market
| share.
|
| What would your requirements at an OS like this be? For me, it
| would be extensibility and the minimalist approach.
|
| Don't know the implementation details, but it sounds a lot like
| a time when people loved OOP too much, or later disliked it
| just as much.
| SixDouble5321 wrote:
| >Until now, no OS with a micro architecture was successful at
| getting significant market share.
|
| Not sure in what sense you mean this. Minix may be the most
| common OS on the planet. Intel embedded it in an quite a
| number of its products.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Look outside of the desktop into embedded platforms.
|
| QNX, Switch OS, INTEGRITY OS, L4.
|
| To a certain extent, all Android OS services after Project
| Treble.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I work in the embedded area and it is true that these
| approaches are more successful here. But I think that is
| due to real pressure for memomy and speed or real time
| applications. That isn't really the case for general
| purpose devices like PCs. Those have an unlimited amount of
| memory and CPU power.
|
| I might try it for embedded devices some day.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The irony is that hypervisors and containers have
| basically taken away whatever benefits monolithic kernels
| might have.
|
| OS X and Windows are much better in this regard than
| GNU/Linux/BSDs with their ongoing efforts to move all
| drivers to userspace, even though they will never be
| fully pure microkernels when done with it.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| He, true. Although I wonder if microkernels tend to
| expose more lower level function in user mode that could
| be relevant to overall system security. The big problem
| is probably memory access, which would be prohibited in
| user mode, but maybe there are other security
| implications (I couldn't answer that question).
|
| Other than improved security that may also be protected
| by a hypervisor, you might still gain more stability when
| pushing drivers to user mode. Or your hypervisor has a
| bug and allows a guest to gain privileged kernel access.
| Not a security expert, so this is mainly guess work.
| surajrmal wrote:
| We have several mailing lists you can converse on. We're happy
| to answer any technical questions.
|
| https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/community/get-inv...
| smklein wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! I see iterating on Banjo is still on
| the roadmap - always more work to do :)
| piokoch wrote:
| 10 years ago I would be really excited, as I could expect some
| groundbreaking tech like search engine or revolutionary approach
| to something, like Gmail (no ads sent to users, great UI, hige
| disk space).
|
| Today, instead of excitement, I am wondering how this thing is
| going to push me in some walled garden, how I will be tracked,
| how my data will be fetched and sold, what will be the trick used
| to move people away from free Web...
|
| Maybe I am wrong, I hope I am wrong.
| grawprog wrote:
| >Today, instead of excitement, I am wondering how this thing is
| going to push me in some walled garden, how I will be tracked,
| how my data will be fetched and sold, what will be the trick
| used to move people away from free Web...
|
| There's no need to wonder. Fuchsia's been designed to do all
| those things and more.
|
| https://beebom.com/what-fuchsia-os/
|
| Starting with a modular design that caters to device
| manufacturers that allows them to provide only part of the
| operating system. The days of devices with full os's are coming
| to an end.
|
| Cloud based constant device syncing between all devices
|
| >Dependency on Web Apps
|
| Google and device manufacturers will have full control over the
| microkernel and bootloader
|
| Honestly, I'm not excited at all. I've been dreading fuchsia
| since it was first announced. Everything about the os is
| designed around google having complete control over the os
| itself and everything on your device.
| tyingq wrote:
| Yep. I would guess the main driver for Fuchsia is that being
| a microkernel, drivers can be userspace things. So less work
| for Google to manage phone vendors. And the Fuchsia version
| of "AOSP" is easier to keep their secret sauce out of since
| there's no Linux GPL wrangling.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| I'm so done with this smart home stuff.
|
| "Alexa, turn on Living Room."
|
| "I'm sorry, I'm having trouble understanding now."
|
| I mean, yeah, I can toggle the light switch to get it to turn
| on, but then it gets screwed up and I need to go into the app
| to reset it when the internet comes back on.
|
| I don't even want to think about a smart thermostat. My dumb
| thermostat from 10 years ago let's me set timers which is all I
| really need.
| JackGreyhat wrote:
| I have openhab in place for issues like this. Enjoy the smart
| home with a local connect-to-everything controller/bridge.
| Runs on a Pi, as a VM, ... Works great!
| raptor99 wrote:
| Check out Home Assistant. Not sure how well voice controls
| work with it but my automation is flawless so far. Really
| seems to help using local only open source firmware where I
| can and Zigbee for any sensors that aren't hard wired in
| (mostly for battery efficiency.)
|
| I just read yesterday that Home Assistant is now
| automatically included in Raspian (Raspberry Pi targeted OS).
| I run my home and shop automation on Pi's but ultimately a
| NUC is probably a better long term solution.
| Semaphor wrote:
| You don't want a remote-controlled smart (actually: dumb)
| home. You want a fully local solution, then you can add
| remote, internet-dependent functionality like alexa to it.
| That way your primary mode of control will always work.
| nsm wrote:
| Agreed. I've been really happy with Ikea's Tradfri line.
| It's all on Zigbee, works without internet and doesn't need
| an "Ikea account". However lights and blinds only for now,
| plus they have perpetual shortages.
| luma wrote:
| Agreed. I'll add to that a healthy application of the
| Principle of Least Astonishment. If you have a light, there
| should be an obvious light switch nearby that turns the
| light on and off, and does so even if your home automation
| system is offline for whatever reason.
|
| "Smart" devices should, wherever possible, function as dumb
| devices if for whatever reason they can't be smart. There
| are a whole lot of devices that simply become bricks.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs.
| You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of
| Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for
| the convenience."
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I know it's a joke but if the failure mode is "brakes
| don't work" on an escalator full of people, it is much
| worse than stairs
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Very true-- I would definitely imagine that escalator
| brakes are a thing that fail closed in the absence of
| power, but clearly there are failure modes (probably a
| rare confluence of multiple concurrent failures) where
| this kind of thing can happen, such as that incident in
| Rome in 2018:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1SjQfwLieU
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Another in China in 2017
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADb57ysvCbU
|
| https://coconuts.co/hongkong/news/engineer-gets-2-months-
| in-... (misleading URL, actually suspended sentence)
|
| Rather that than an falling elevator, but it still
| doesn't look fun
| khimaros wrote:
| Rhasspy is an easy to use open source, fully offline,
| suite for this with wake word detection and integration
| with home assistant.
| rkeene2 wrote:
| I've never understood the desire to control systems by
| speaking to them in code words. Speaking monopolizes a
| shared channel, requires diverting your conversation, and
| is really slow.
|
| For practically anything that involves using code words
| to tell the computer what to do there are better input
| methods, like physical switches, or purely automated.
|
| This is slightly off-topic, but in your opinion what are
| some of the reasons people prefer to use voice input with
| code words over the other options ?
| 8note wrote:
| Physical switches rely on light as a handshaking method.
|
| When the light is off, the switch is invisible and you
| have to guess at where it is, or where you need to be
| walking (hitting your shins on things, or stepping on
| lego)
|
| Using a non-light based interface means it works just as
| well when the light is on and off, vs being a broken
| experience for half of the usecases
| zentiggr wrote:
| If I'm curled up comfortably with my SO, and don't want
| to take ten minutes of unwinding, doing whatever, then
| tucking back up together...
| rkeene2 wrote:
| It seems like in that case a remote control could be
| placed nearby -- are you also using voice activated code
| words to control the television ?
| 8note wrote:
| Unless your SO is sitting on the remote
| bikezen wrote:
| Cooking. My hands might be occupied or dirty etc, but I
| need to set or change a timer.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Or washing dishes; pretty much anything in the kitchen.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Yep. Cooking is what I use Alexa for. The main control is
| homeassistant, but it forwards some lights to Alexa for
| me to control ober voice.
| rkeene2 wrote:
| Thanks for helping me to understand this better.
| toyg wrote:
| This is how the Honeywell stuff seems to work, at least for
| my thermostat. As long as there is some local wifi,
| thermostat and controlling unit will work, even if you
| cannot contact them from the internet.
| h4waii wrote:
| What happens if power goes out, the units stop working if
| WiFi isn't on a UPS?
|
| This would definitely be a problem in cold climates where
| a dead furnace could lead to frozen and burst pipes.
| Semaphor wrote:
| In my case: No power would mean I have nothing to control
| anyway. The only reason my local network is down would be
| my power down. That happened twice in the last 16 years.
| toyg wrote:
| The unit is event-driven, so no, you would just lose the
| ability to change its current programming. Regardless, it
| can be bypassed on the actual boiler heater, it's just a
| thermostat. It's a decent set of compromises, definitely
| better than anything going "no internet, no service".
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| And get some motion detectors. Your lights should come on
| when someone enters the room and the light is below a
| threshold. I usually hit the off switch by the door when I
| leave, otherwise if no one is present the lack of movement
| will dim and then turn the lights off. It's 2021 people!
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Motion detection is not presence detection. I still want
| the light even if I'm sitting still, such as reading a
| book or using a computer.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| We use the motion detection to turn on lights and usually
| turn off manually. I've set up ours to remain on until a
| fair amount of inactivity. In two years it's only turned
| off once whilst we were watching a movie.
| 8note wrote:
| Do you not move when you're asleep?
| akeck wrote:
| We put Etekcity remote controlled sockets in a few places and
| stopped there. That being said, apparently you can buy a
| radio module to control them from a raspi, but we haven't
| gone there yet.
| archiepeach wrote:
| I've actually had a really positive experience using a smart
| thermostat. The main benefit is having a temperature
| schedule, which my previous dumb thermostat didn't have. It's
| also handy being able to adjust the temperature from my phone
| whenever I'd like to. I find controlling it by voice kind of
| pointless. On the phone, you can easily see what it's
| currently at, then adjust it for the next e.g. hour, after
| which it'll switch back to the default schedule.
| larntz wrote:
| I agree being able to change the temperature settings from
| a phone would be convenient, but they've had "smartish"
| thermostats capable of relatively complex temperature
| schedules for at least 20 years.
|
| No need for an internet connection or mega corp data
| collections.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| You don't really need anything "smart" for this. This is
| basically simple remote with timer. My $50 thermostat has
| adjustable schedule with override capability. No machine
| learning needed. The only thing that's missing is the phone
| capability but I think that would be easy to add.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Most dumb thermostats also have next-hour-override
| functionality, though I will say I had a Nest at a previous
| house and also thought it was pretty decent. In particular,
| it was nice being able to turn it way down when going away,
| but then crank it back up when heading home but still 30
| mins away.
| nobleach wrote:
| While I've never had issues with turning on and off lights
| via Alexa -> Smart Plugs, I have had my Echo Dot unable to
| play my wakeup alarm due to internet blips. Really? That
| particular function couldn't store some data in some sort of
| local storage? Like, I don't want the thing to be able to
| tell me Rick Springfield's biggest hits in order of Billboard
| chart performance while offline... I simply want my alarm
| sound to play at 6am.
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| You need an offline smart assistant:
| https://medevel.com/10-open-source-voice-assistants/
| zentiggr wrote:
| I think in this case it would be called an alarm clock.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| And it should be a wind-up mechanical one so that power
| failures don't affect it.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| Mental failures affect those. I would never remember to
| wind it.
| nobleach wrote:
| Yes, while one could make the case that I should purchase
| and plug one more thing into my wall. Would it be
| impossible to place a small amount of memory on the board
| that remembers alarm settings? If this thing is built as
| a convenience, I don't want to have a bunch of other
| devices for convenience (a radio, a noise generator, an
| intercom....)
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > I mean, yeah, I can toggle the light switch to get it to
| turn on, but then it gets screwed up and I need to go into
| the app to reset it when the internet comes back on.
|
| That doesn't sound right. All the Zigbee/Z-Wave switches I
| use maintain proper state through HA, even if they lose
| connectivity for a period of time.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I never bought in to the premise of the "smart home."
|
| It sounds like endless minor annoyances and aggravation more
| than anything.
| jvolkman wrote:
| In my experience it brings minor conveniences: yelling at
| Google or Alexa to turn on the kitchen lights when your
| hands are greasy, or dimming the lights with your phone
| when you're sitting on the couch with a cat on your lap.
| None of these are huge selling points, but once in place
| they're nice.
|
| If done right, though, the system just degrades gracefully
| to a normal set of switches.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Yep, that's pretty much been my experience.
|
| I'm in a rental, so instead of smart switches I just use
| smart bulbs. For like <$10/bulb, I've got full RGB/colour
| temperature adjustable.
|
| Most are configured so turning them on turns them on full
| brightness and pleasantly warm. The one in the bedroom
| and the baby's room are configured to turn on dim and
| warm, and if you do another quick off-on flick of the
| switch they'll come on at full brightness.
|
| So they... work like normal light bulbs. Except they're
| all remote controllable from your phone. So if the baby
| falls asleep on top of you and the light's on you can
| turn it off without getting up and waking her up.
|
| From there, I added some basic z-wave sensors in a few
| spots in the house. If you get up in the middle of the
| night to use the bathroom, as soon as you step in the
| hall the motion sensor picks up that (1) someone is
| moving in the hallway and (2) the hallway is currently
| really dark; and it turns the hall light on a really dim
| red. Enough you can see where you're going without
| killing your night vision. Then a minute after it stops
| sensing motion it turns off.
|
| If you walk into the one end of the basement where the
| washer/dryer/workshop/storage/etc are, all of the lights
| will come on for you, and a couple minutes after it stops
| sensing motion they all turn back off. If you want them
| to stay on you can just flip the switch off-on to turn
| them all on and keep them on. So now if you just wander
| over to let the dog out, grab a tool from the shop, throw
| a load of laundry in, etc, the lights are just automatic.
| No need to try and balance a laundry basket while you
| screw around with light switches.
|
| The room my office is in does the same thing except uses
| my computer's lock state for presence detection. So when
| I walk in the lights come on, when my computer unlocks it
| keeps them on. When I lock my computer it goes back to
| the regular program. At any point I can pull my phone out
| and flip them over to the super bright, super harsh light
| when I need it for doing fine work instead of working at
| my computer.
|
| Just a lot of little, basic conveniences. And it's
| amazing how futuristic it feels to just wander around the
| house and have lights turn on and off for you as you do.
|
| It all runs locally in a VM on my server, with all the
| smart devices entirely isolated from the internet. If the
| internet's out... nothing changes. If my
| server/WAP/whatever dies, then my house just goes back to
| working like a normal house.
| zaarn wrote:
| I have smart thermostats, specifically the AVM Fritz! ones.
| They only require their own router (which, where I live, is a
| common thing to have) and use DECT to talk to the router (you
| can find DECT usb sticks that work on Linux, the protocol
| they talk isn't super complex). They run about 2-10 years on
| a single battery, depending on use.
|
| And they're fully offline, the router has an API I can
| control them from (HomeAssistant instantly picked up both
| thermostats and lets me control them), pretty much everything
| I want.
|
| AVM's smarthome story is miles ahead of Google/Apple/etc.
| Same for IKEA's smarthome stuff. If you need offline capable
| things, use those.
| awa wrote:
| I have been presently surprised with Google Assistant in this
| regard, the integration with my TV (with new Google TV
| Chromecast) is amazing and a lot of time I don't bother to
| pick up the remote. (Saying things like "Play xyz on TV",
| switches on the TV, figures out the right app and starts
| playing the show saving me 4-5 actions on the remote)
| ziml77 wrote:
| It sucks. They tried to pull me into the walled garden by
| ending Works With Nest and I still hate that I had to change to
| a different solution. The Nest thermostats are great, but
| having to go through the internet for any automation sucks.
| kervantas wrote:
| I too have become more cynical in the recent years...
| _Microft wrote:
| You might want to add: _[I wonder] when it will be discontinued
| with just a one month 's notice and will turn my device into a
| brick._
| cogman10 wrote:
| This is the bigger risk. I don't see Fuchsia as a walled
| garden OS as it's pretty well designed to avoid that.
| Userspace everything with a microkernel makes for a nice
| small security footprint for IoT devices that can be
| perpetually updated.
|
| The issue is how long google keeps up "perpetual".
| IntelMiner wrote:
| To add to the pot of cynics
|
| I wonder how much of it is driven to supplant Linux's "viral"
| GPL-ness
| luma wrote:
| It may also have been a play to remove Java as a fundamental
| requirement due to their experience with Oracle and Android.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Built on GPL, but not _encumbered_ by it! It 's free to take
| whatever direction it wants! Join the independent*
| revolution! /s
|
| This PSA is proudly brought you by Google's Bureau of Prop...
| _ehrm_ Truth.
|
| *: independence neither implies nor contains freedom.
| josefx wrote:
| Or: "Join the independent" is a slogan of the open handset
| alliance, users are required to install Google Play and
| related services on all applicable devices.
| zibzab wrote:
| Google open source engagement was already "throw over the
| wall" style before this.
|
| I assume things will only get worse now.
| kerneis wrote:
| Fuchsia, like Chrome, has been open-source for years, and
| all commits and reviews as well as the bug tracker are
| public. It is a very different model from how Android
| releases work.
|
| (Disclaimer: I work on Fuchsia at Google.)
| ryukafalz wrote:
| So, if I buy a device that runs Fuchsia (say, this Nest
| Hub), is enough of Fuchsia FOSS that I can run my own
| copy of it with e.g. a different UI and without Google
| services? This is true of Android devices by necessity as
| the kernel is GPL (bootloader locking aside); is it true
| of Fuchsia devices?
|
| As for bootloader locking, Google releases some Android
| devices with unlockable bootloaders. Can we expect the
| same of Fuchsia devices?
| kerneis wrote:
| There are several parts to your question, let me try and
| answer each of them as I understand them.
|
| Fuchsia is built with a minimal core (sometimes called a
| microkernel) and many user-space services interacting
| with each other over an IPC protocol (called FIDL). The
| open-source part of Fuchsia, available on fuchsia.dev, is
| a standalone system which you can build and run on
| supported architectures. It contains all the services
| required to start a user interface, interact with the
| network, etc. Currently, the main supported hardware
| architecture for people wanting to build their own
| version of Fuchsia is the Intel NUC:
| https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-
| src/development/hardware/intel_n....
|
| For a retail devices, such as the Nest Hub, vendors can
| build a custom system with additional or different
| services from what is found in the open-source release.
| Thanks to stability of the FIDL interfaces, those closed-
| source services do not prevent the core system from being
| updated. For more information on services and packages,
| you can read https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-
| src/concepts/software_model and the pages linked from it.
|
| Some of those services are drivers; others may be in
| charge of communicating with Google Services or
| customizing the UI; and not all of them are necessarily
| open-source. So if you wanted to build your own version
| of Fuchsia for a Nest Hub, you'd need to replace the
| closed-source components. As far as the Nest Hub is
| concerned, I'm not sure what the exact status is. I
| believe a significant part of the drivers have been
| developed in the open (which is how 9to5google was able
| to guess in the past that we would be targeting this
| platform), but take this with a grain of salt, I didn't
| work on drivers. The part that interacts with Google
| Services is closed source. I'm not sure this is much
| different from the situation with Android: not all
| drivers or UI used on Android devices are open source,
| are they?
|
| Finally, as you note, the bootloader can be locked on
| retail devices, preventing you from reflashing the system
| with your own build unless it is signed by an authorized
| key (mostly for security reasons, as far as I understand
| it). This is a product decision that is not related to
| Fuchsia itself, it depends on each manufacturer. I don't
| think it has ever been supported to reflash a Nest Hub,
| and the migration to Fuchsia shouldn't change that.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Thanks, this is useful information.
|
| > For a retail devices, such as the Nest Hub, vendors can
| build a custom system with additional or different
| services from what is found in the open-source release.
| Thanks to stability of the FIDL interfaces, those closed-
| source services do not prevent the core system from being
| updated.
|
| This is helpful so long as the interface does not change;
| do you anticipate ever having to change it or do you
| think it's pretty final at this point?
|
| Regarding drivers, it's interesting that they're
| userspace services interacting with the rest of the
| system via IPC. Are there any sort of security guarantees
| to protect against malicious services? (Obviously a
| proprietary driver could do its job _incorrectly_ , but
| if they can't otherwise mess with other parts of the
| system that's helpful.) EDIT: I suspect that as it's a
| capability-based system, there is a decent amount of
| isolation between drivers and the rest of the system, but
| I just want to be sure.
|
| > I'm not sure this is much different from the situation
| with Android: not all drivers or UI used on Android
| devices are open source, are they?
|
| Regarding Android drivers: my understanding is they
| sometimes do have proprietary userspace components. Any
| kernel-side components are necessarily FOSS however, as
| they are derivative of the Linux kernel and therefore
| GPL. (This doesn't mean that they're always easy to use
| though, as manufacturers seldom upstream them and the
| Linux kernel is a huge project.)
|
| On the Android UI, you're correct; most often the UI on
| an Android phone is not FOSS. I suspect this is because,
| as that part of Android is permissively licensed, the
| device vendors don't have to release it. So they don't.
|
| I've had mixed feelings with Fuchsia from a licensing
| perspective for that reason. On one hand, having a stable
| interface might make it easier to deal with proprietary
| drivers, provided that interface is locked in amber and
| never changes. On the other hand, Fuchsia's permissive
| licensing makes it more likely that manufacturers will
| make all their drivers proprietary, because they clearly
| do whenever they can. (At least the ARM vendors do; the
| x86 vendors seem to be a lot more open to working in
| public.)
| kerneis wrote:
| > do you anticipate ever having to change it or do you
| think it's pretty final at this point?
|
| We're not there yet, but defining a stable driver runtime
| is on our roadmap for 2021: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-
| src/contribute/roadmap/2021/stab...
|
| For non-driver interfaces, similar stability commitments
| may be shared over time, as the platform matures and we
| get more users.
|
| > Are there any sort of security guarantees to protect
| against malicious services?
|
| Fuchsia is based on capabilities, ie. handles to access
| resources, and those include memory regions. So a driver
| will only be able to access the parts of memory that you
| delegate to it. I don't know enough about drivers to
| provide a detailed security analysis, but I think it
| provides far more isolation than what you have in a
| monolithic kernel such as Linux.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > Fuchsia is based on capabilities, ie. handles to access
| resources, and those include memory regions. So a driver
| will only be able to access the parts of memory that you
| delegate to it.
|
| Ah thanks - Fuchsia drivers having capabilities to
| specific memory regions mostly answers my concerns at
| that level I think.
|
| Well, I guess I'll continue to be both interested in it
| from a technical perspective and conflicted about it
| based on licensing.
| swiley wrote:
| It's not really true for Android either because the
| graphics drivers are mostly userspace and end up coupled
| with a lot of the vendor provided stuff.
|
| Fuchsia has no GPL so it's unlikely any of the driver
| source will be available to you.
| [deleted]
| kerneis wrote:
| > Fuchsia has no GPL so it's unlikely any of the driver
| source will be available to you.
|
| The open-source repository already contains over 50
| directories named `drivers`: https://cs.opensource.google
| /search?q=f:drivers%2F$&sq=&ss=f...
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Yes, but it's very unlikely that chipset vendors like QC
| or MTK will provide the source to their drivers. Why
| would they?
|
| On the other hand, if the driver interfaces are stable,
| it should be possible to implement a GPL kernel that can
| use these drivers.
| swiley wrote:
| The BSDs have lots of drivers too, but it's rare you see
| them coming to an embedded board first (and rarer you see
| BSPs published for them from vendors.)
| hibbelig wrote:
| Are unlockable bootloaders bootloaders that cannot be
| locked, or bootloaders that can be unlocked? Not a native
| speaker.
|
| Hm. I think it is about bootloaders that can be unlocked.
| techrat wrote:
| "Unlockable" == "The option exists for the user to unlock
| the bootloader if they wish to do so."
|
| Even as a native speaker, it can get awkward explaining
| 'unlockable bootloaders' because the impliction is that
| they're first locked if they can be later unlocked...
| when there are also locked bootloaders that CANNOT be
| unlocked.
|
| It's better to just assume 'unlockable' means 'not
| restricted.'
| tmerc wrote:
| In this case, unlockable means it can be unlocked. As a
| native American English speaker, I have not seen
| unlockable used as "cannot be locked", but both
| definitions are in the Oxford dictionary. If I understand
| correctly, a locked bootloader prevents you from
| installing a different OS or rooting a device you might
| "own".
| surajrmal wrote:
| While the platform may be open source, the product may
| not be. We have products which are completely open
| source, but the one being used for the Nest Hub is not.
| This is similar to the idea where you may use Linux for
| the bottom half of an OS, but the top half may be
| something else entirety. Different products may make
| different decisions, but a common core is used amongst
| all products.
| dmantis wrote:
| Chrome is not open-sourced, Chronium is. I cannot rebuild
| Chrome with full protection against tracking, for
| example, but with all other parts unchanged.
|
| Android "open sourced" as well, but literally nobody runs
| AOSP, stock OSS apps are staled for years, Google makes a
| lot to make system barely usable without proprietary
| parts from Google Services.
| kerneis wrote:
| That's a fair point, and the distinction between Chrome
| and Chromium is indeed relevant. Sorry for the confusion,
| see my sibling comment about how it applies to Fuchsia
| (ie. what is open source and what may not be).
|
| What I really meant to say, though, is that Fuchsia is
| taking an approach to inclusiveness and open source which
| is much more similar to the one of Chromium than Android.
| You may find out more on https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-
| src/concepts/principles/inclusiv...
| kemonocode wrote:
| The fact it's more permissive with its license already
| does not bode well. Just like with Chrome, there could be
| a myriad of forks that can be closed source themselves
| and so without easy means to peek inside what they're
| really doing, and although many distributors did the bare
| minimum with Android due to its Linux kernel's license,
| there was _something_.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Is Fuchsia meant only for embedded devices (smart
| displays, smartphones, etc) or will there be laptop
| releases akin to Chromebooks?
| DenverCode wrote:
| >We've been tracking the development of Fuchsia since
| 2016, starting from an ambitious experimental UI, to
| running on Google's many internal testing devices for
| Fuchsia, ranging the full gamut of Google's smart home
| and Chromebook lineup.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Smart phones are definitely general purpose computers
| kerneis wrote:
| If you are interested in running Fuchsia on a laptop or
| desktop device, you probably want to follow the
| Workstation product effort:
|
| - https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-
| src/contribute/roadmap/2021/work...
|
| - https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-
| src/contribute/governance/rfcs/0...
|
| And as mentioned elsewhere, you can already build Fuchsia
| for an Intel NUC, with keyboard, mouse, ethernet and
| external screen support: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-
| src/development/hardware/intel_n...
| ori_b wrote:
| How many of your colleagues are outside Google?
| kerneis wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the question, but you may be
| interested in the following article about Samsung
| contributing to Fuchsia:
| https://9to5google.com/2021/05/12/samsung-
| contributing-f2fs-...
| hn8788 wrote:
| They're probably talking about things like Go where it's
| open source, but it's controlled by Google employees.
|
| https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoIs
| Goo...
| ori_b wrote:
| Your implication is that Google is not treating Fuchsia
| as a 'throw it over the wall' project, but as one with
| community participation. How many of your colleagues are
| from outside of Google? How often do you work with non-
| googlers as you develop it?
|
| Are you regularly reviewing code submitted by your
| colleages at Samsung?
|
| The fact that you're confused by the concept of working
| with people outside your company doesn't bode well for
| the open-sourceness of this project.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Good thing trusty google never changes direction or
| policies and that fuschia is copyleft, so it can never be
| closed in the future.
| pjmlp wrote:
| All new FOSS OS clones are BSD/Apache licensed.
|
| RTOS, Azure RTOS, mbed, NuXX, Zephyr
|
| For sure it isn't a coincidence.
| snvzz wrote:
| Clones?
| pjmlp wrote:
| POSIX clones.
| snvzz wrote:
| POSIX is a specification. Implementations are
| implementations, not clones.
|
| And most of the systems you listed aren't even aiming for
| POSIX-compatibility.
|
| Can you please clarify what your intent was by using the
| word "clones"?
| pjmlp wrote:
| That was it, if you want to be pedantic, be my guest.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Right on the money! Interesting/scary times ahead. But maybe
| there will be unexpected gifts in the form of open source dev
| around zircon
| rvz wrote:
| > Today, instead of excitement, I am wondering how this thing
| is going to push me in some walled garden, how I will be
| tracked, how my data will be fetched and sold, what will be the
| trick used to move people away from free Web...
|
| Since Chrome came along, the 'Web' became less free from the
| start and the moment Google forked WebKit (called Blink) to use
| it in their own browser, it has turned the web more into a
| walled garden each time apps use specific Chrome features and
| it is getting worse. Even in that early decade, we knew about
| how Google and others were tracking us since the PRISM program
| leaks.
|
| Later DRM was added with reasons and votes unknown, devs have
| to keep telling users to switch from any other browser to
| Chrome to use their apps and now this forked engine is in tons
| of Electron apps with Microsoft jumping in and using it in
| their Edge browser. The time to complain was 10 years ago and
| now it is almost too late.
|
| Now Google is doing it again with Fuchsia which will eventually
| replace ChromeOS and Android. Fuchsia is highly dependent on
| Flutter and those apps will run on Fuchsia devices on day 1.
| There is an extremely low chance of that being abandoned so I'm
| afraid it will continue.
| vinkelhake wrote:
| There's so much here that I don't really know where to start.
| Maybe some history could be useful?
|
| When Chrome came along, the dominant browser was Internet
| Explorer 7. It had been out for two years when Chrome 1.0 was
| released. Before IE7, the world ran IE6 for _five_ years. Web
| development was largely stagnant. That was the world that
| Chrome came into.
|
| Before DRM support was added to browsers, you needed to
| install plugins to watch protected content. Despite what
| detractors might think, the content producers were never
| going to go YOLO and release their content without any
| protection. There are a lot of us that are happy that we can
| watch Netflix, Prime or whatever in our browsers.
|
| That a ton of desktop apps use Electron is an indictment of
| the state of native toolkit. Saying that Fuchsia is highly
| dependent on Flutter is like saying Linux is highly dependent
| on GTK. With that said, maybe your crystal ball on the future
| of Fuchsia isn't so clear.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| This is a valiant (and appreciated) effort, but I think
| you're misunderstanding the point of the thread. It's been
| _years_ since HN talking about Google has been nothing more
| than an enormous circlejerk, completely disconnected from
| reality.
| rvz wrote:
| And so, the web has just switched hands from one behemoth
| to another. Nothing has changed since then. Now everyone
| depends on Chromium for almost everything. That is the
| point.
|
| The alternatives have no chance in doing anything about it.
| Firefox is entirely dependent on Google for funding (and
| has been for years), Microsoft recently switched to
| Chromium for Edge and Safari is again years behind (Just
| like IE.). There are only really two competitors here.
| (Apple and Google once again!)
|
| So let's sit back and just watch Google continuously adding
| more superfluous features into the Web like Web(USB,
| Bluetooth, NFC, etc) and the web-devs will force you to use
| Chrome again (which indirectly helps Electron apps);
| leaving the rest of the non-Chromium browsers in the dust.
|
| > Saying that Fuchsia is highly dependent on Flutter is
| like saying Linux is highly dependent on GTK.
|
| False equivalence.
|
| You're the one that just compared a kernel with full
| operating system. Oh dear. I'm definitely sure that the
| device in the article is running Flutter right now.
|
| > With that said, maybe your crystal ball on the future of
| Fuchsia isn't so clear.
|
| Given that Fuchsia also has the intention of running
| unmodified Android apps as well, my crystal ball could not
| be any more clearer of its future. Perhaps you getting
| confused on your last sentence was an indication that your
| crystal ball has just malfunctioned.
| vinkelhake wrote:
| > Nothing has changed since then.
|
| There's a massive difference. Back then you had a single
| company that kinda-sorta didn't care about the web. They
| already had an application platform they were happy with.
| There wasn't really an incentive for them to evolve it
| once they had the dominant position. The web was
| stagnating for years.
|
| Nowadays we actually have multiple players that are very
| active in the development of the web. The situation is
| not at all comparable.
|
| > So let's sit back and just watch Google continuously
| adding more superfluous features into the Web like
| Web(USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc) and the web-devs will force
| you to use Chrome again
|
| Superfluous to you. If developers are using it, then it's
| obviously filling some need. What do you say to
| developers who are asking for those features? "Sorry,
| that's not compatible with my idea of what the web is. Go
| write a {Windows,Linux,MacOs} application and tell your
| users to download it".
|
| It always comes back to this. People want progress in the
| areas they care about, but no progress in other areas.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If it wasn't for Safari, the Web would be a synomim for
| ChromeOS outside Chromebooks.
|
| Firefox is getting irrelevant and the latest news show their
| focus isn't surely in turning the tide, UI revamp, really?
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| With how Google is acting, I am fairly certain that I well
| never willingly buy a device that runs Fuchsia. I will have to
| find a better alternative device/OS or keep my current Android
| phone going forever.
|
| There is however a huge issue of being locked-in to only
| officially-sanctioned OS versions, and I fully expect Google to
| try and completely replace everything that is still open in
| Android with proprietary replacements, making the Fuchsia-based
| phone OS the only accepted version.
|
| As an example of the lock-in, the primary mobile payments app
| where I live has the following list of
| requirements/restrictions: - Android or iOS
| only (there is no PWA or other web-based version) -
| Minimum version is currently Android 6.0 or iOS 11 -
| Device must not be jailbroken or rooted - Device must not
| run a non-official ROM, such as LineageOS
|
| The use of this app is pervasive in society here, if you
| buy/sell _anything_ second-hand, people will expect you to use
| it and will be surprised, annoyed, and /or suspicious if you
| prefer to use cash instead.
|
| And this is by far not the only app with these restrictions.
| Banking apps, streaming services, there are a large number of
| apps with these restrictions, all under the guise of security
| concerns. Thankfully most of them have web-based versions or
| alternatives, but it can present enough of a hurdle that even
| tech-savvy people either will not or cannot use anything but a
| recent Android or iOS device.
|
| Almost as bad are websites that would work perfectly well in a
| mobile browser, but practice "soft" lock-in by condescendingly
| pointing you towards the official Play Store/App Store if you
| try to load the site in a mobile browser. Facebook Messenger is
| a huge and obvious offender here, there is nothing about
| instant messaging that wouldn't work perfectly well in a
| browser, after all the desktop version at messenger.com works
| just fine.
| SiVal wrote:
| Yes, now when Google's social enforcement algorithms label you
| an impediment, they can not only delete your YouTube video
| business and cut you off from your email, calendar, and Google
| Docs, they'll be able to turn the heat off in your house. The
| march of progress.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| and lock the doors
| protomyth wrote:
| Five years ago, I would have thought you were trolling, but
| now you are right. With this scorched earth mentality
| exercised by the big companies, this is a very real
| possibility.
|
| What scared me quite a bit was Apple blocking all services
| when an Apple Card wasn't paid. That leads me to believe that
| Google could via an algorithm's decision disable a Nest
| thermostat during winter. I don't see IoT as anything but a
| risk.
| ihsw wrote:
| Google would have the power to enact their racial equity
| agenda and turn down the heat in white households during
| winter. Just a few degrees because they "should feel
| uncomfortable" while black and brown bodies are suffering.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _What scared me quite a bit was Apple blocking all
| services when an Apple Card wasn 't paid._
|
| I'm not trying to sway your opinion of Apple, but you
| should know that Mr. Curtis's Apple ID problem was
| discovered to be unrelated. Apple doen't disable Apple ID
| services because of missed Apple Card payments.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-
| unrelated...
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Google is even worse. You can get banned (your entire
| google account) because of a random algo.
| https://9to5google.com/2019/11/09/google-account-bans-
| youtub...
|
| Or imagine, they can ban your because of speech their don't
| like i.e political opinions
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Moreover, they can arbitrarily ban you from their walled
| gardens and you're more or less screwed.
|
| When their control your email (GMail), business infrastructure
| (Google Business Apps / Servers etc.), Google Play (matters if
| you're a developer)... basically your entire digital existence.
|
| I really hope we add more regulations to protect people online.
| While it's not clear for everyone, your digital existence is an
| essential part of being part of the society.
| dkersten wrote:
| Don't worry, they'll abandon it in a year or two because not
| enough people use it.
| toyg wrote:
| Nah, it's an hardware-related project, so it will get
| entrenched even if it's fundamentally different from other
| hardware-related Google projects.
|
| Eventually you'll be able to buy Google devices that run
| Android, Google devices that run ChromeOS, and Google devices
| that run Fuchsia. It will be confusing, but that's fine,
| because it will all work great _as long as you stick to
| Google 's cloud-based services_, which is what really
| matters.
|
| Directly or indirectly, OS fragmentation actually _helps_
| Google 's business model.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Brillo => Android Things => dead after three years.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I think you are wrong that Gmail was revolutionary. It was a
| good service, but nothing special in my opinion.
|
| But yes, the license would allow Google to close the system
| down whenever they want. Still curious to know how Fuchsia
| would be a better choice for a system.
|
| Nest seems to be powered by Fuchsia...
| rerx wrote:
| The storage, the spam filtering, the interface were massive
| improvements over the status quo of the day.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Its so weird how fast history is forgotten. Gmail was a
| galactic leap forward in terms of mail clients. At school
| there was a grey market to sell gmail invites at 20 dollars
| per
| DrBazza wrote:
| > Gmail was a galactic leap forward in terms of mail
| clients
|
| Only in terms of storage and 'hive mind' spam detection.
| The UI was pretty shitty, and not much better than Hotmail.
| znpy wrote:
| Uh, I still use the no-javascript interface in my
| personal gmail.
|
| it's immensely fast when compared to modern crapware-
| gmail.
|
| and btw I remember hotmail too... the nicest thing was
| that you didn't have to refresh the whole page, e-mails
| just appeared (ajax probably).
|
| and the conversation view, that was really innovative. i
| mean, mail clients had been doing threading for like
| forever, but wemail mostly didn't.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| Webmail still doesn't.
|
| It does 'grouping' at maximum. Try reading a mailinglist
| in the gmail webinterface. A reply on a reply should be
| indented one level, not being shown at the same level as
| the mail it replies to.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| That's like saying the automobile was only ahead in terms
| of propulsion, the UI was pretty shitty and not much
| better than a horse.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >The UI was pretty shitty, and not much better than
| Hotmail.
|
| UI _performance_ was great due to early use of ajax. If
| you had bad connection, which was extremely common in
| 2000 's, then it worked way better than any alternative.
|
| Of course, now it's the other way around, static websites
| are fast and SPAs can be dogshit slow.
| nr2x wrote:
| Did you use hotmail? It was absolutely awful.
| rootsudo wrote:
| It really is. Things get comfortable and people assume
| that's always how it was.
|
| Like cell phones. Wow, over a decade of them and if you had
| one 15 years ago you were considered a early adapter, and
| 20 years ago you were way ahead the curve. If you had one
| in the 90's, wow.
|
| Still, mobile computer in your pocket, wow.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Symbian and PocketPC phones.
| znpy wrote:
| > Still, mobile computer in your pocket, wow.
|
| it really bothers me, you know?
|
| we've got so much storage and so many/good sensors, yet
| the software kinda pushes you to use the device for
| watching dumb videos and/or to argue worthlessly with
| other random people, so that you can get served ads in
| the meantime.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| What else do you think people ought to do with them?
| They're pretty small, so e.g. reading a book is a bit
| difficult, and using them as general purpose computers is
| difficult because they lack a keyboard (and thus an easy
| way to program them).
| handrous wrote:
| I dunno, mine sees tons of use as a:
|
| - Calculator
|
| - Bill-paying device
|
| - Flashlight (soooooo much use as a flashlight)
|
| - Thermostat adjuster ("smart" thermostats saved us
| running a wire for a second-floor zone, so, whatever,
| we've got them, they're OK)
|
| - Level
|
| - Document scanner
|
| - Note taking/reading device
|
| - Timer (kitchen; any board or party game that has an
| hourglass that you've misplaced)
|
| - iPod-alike for the car (replaces burned CDs)
|
| - Alarm clock
|
| - Takeout/delivery orderer
|
| - Check depositing device
|
| - Shopping list displayer
|
| - Navigation aid
|
| - Taxi hailer
|
| - Probably other stuff I'm forgetting
|
| I don't think I'm even particularly "in to" using it as
| much as some people do--I can't bring myself to trust
| Apple Pay to work, so it doesn't replace my wallet and in
| fact I think I've only used that feature once ever; I
| don't really game on it; I read on an e-ink reader or on
| a huge iPad, not my phone; I don't do any "smart home"
| stuff aside from the thermostat; my use of Siri is
| limited to setting reminders and alarms, and putting
| addresses into navigation to save having to type them; in
| about a decade of smartphone ownership I think I can
| count the movies or episodes of something that I've
| watched on my phone on one hand; I don't do workout
| tracking or any of that sort of thing.
|
| [EDIT] oh, right, camera, obviously. It replaces the
| family camera and camcorder of my youth, completely.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Spam blocking was on another level, I've managed setups with
| e.g. Spamassassin (?) back then and Gmail was something else.
| techrat wrote:
| Reading email within a usable UI where you didn't have to
| download the spam first before it could be sorted was a
| pretty fucking big deal.
|
| It's still my preferred method of dealing with email to
| this day. I never want to deal with POP/SMTP local client
| email ever again.
| Tomte wrote:
| A gigabyte mailbox space was revolutionary when many
| competitors only gave 20 megabytes for free (and you could
| pay and upgrade to 150 megabytes or so).
|
| That was an example where a simple change in a number turned
| into a qualitatively different service.
| blackoil wrote:
| IIRC Hotmail was only 2MB at the time of announcement.
| hewrin10 wrote:
| I'm wondering when it will be cancelled or replaced with
| something else
| Black101 wrote:
| > Today, instead of excitement, I am wondering how this thing
| is going to push me in some walled garden, how I will be
| tracked, how my data will be fetched and sold, what will be the
| trick used to move people away from free Web...
|
| I've been worried about it since they announced it which feels
| like it was 10 years ago.
| mszcz wrote:
| Seconded. However, you forgot to worry about the inevitable
| shutdown just when you would start to enjoy or rely on it.
| vbsteven wrote:
| What is interesting about Fuchsia is how Google first created
| Flutter and made it popular for Android/iOS and to a lesser
| extent the web. And now they start releasing Fuchsia OS/devices
| and developing apps/software for it will immediately feel
| familiar to many mobile developers.
|
| This could help adoption instead of yet another GUI framework to
| learn from scratch.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Huawei is doing the same kind of approach, make android apps
| compatible with their Harmony system. I think everybody has
| learned from Microsoft and Samsung's experience trying to
| launch a new ecosystem without support for current application
| android ecosystems.
| SSLy wrote:
| FWIW Harmony OS is just an AOSP skin.
| hollerith wrote:
| Similarly, free software running on proprietary Unix OSes
| became (during the years 1983 through 1991) very popular before
| any free Unix kernel started getting traction.
| roland35 wrote:
| I am planning on not purchasing any new google smart home
| hardware. I am annoyed that my nest thermostat no longer has a
| way to interface with their API. I purchased it right before the
| Google acquisition and I would have gone with an Ecobee if I knew
| the Nest would be inaccessible to a regular user.
|
| I believe having an open API is an important part of smart home
| hardware, even if most users don't use it.
| usbfingers wrote:
| I'm almost more excited because of the proxy network affect this
| will have on microkernel popularization and alternatives like
| Dahlia OS (https://dahliaos.io/) that are looking to be
| independent distros of Fuchsia.
|
| I understand peoples concern about a walled garden situation
| here, but I'd argue to only become worried if Fuchsia suddenly
| stopped being committed to openly and someone needed to maintain
| a fork. The working code for both the microkernel and the OS is
| all open source.
| RavlaAlvar wrote:
| Would this solve the extreme UI lag and make google hub finally
| useable?
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| It really depends on the polish of Fuchsia for Nest Hubs.
| Getting a few more FPS out of the 1st gen hardware is something
| I'm actually hoping for because it's gotten really slow and I
| rarily touch the screen anymore because of the lag.
| mholm wrote:
| Seriously, this device is only a few years old and it runs
| like a 2013 windows netbook. Apps crash all the time,
| bluetooth glitches, unresponsive UI, etc.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| What's the community-driven alternative?
| Google234 wrote:
| There is no other micro kernel OS being developed with similar
| effort.
| zibzab wrote:
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/blog/the-power-of-
| zephyr-...
| gpderetta wrote:
| GNU Hurd will be released any time now!
| 3v1n0 wrote:
| /s?
| gpderetta wrote:
| Nooo, completely serious!
|
| /s
| loudmax wrote:
| There is seL4: https://sel4.systems/
|
| The resources going into seL4 appear to be nowhere near
| "similar effort" to what Google is putting into Fuchsia, but
| it is a legitimate alternative.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Sadly CSIRO axed entire seL4 team, "to focus on AI".
| snvzz wrote:
| Sadly yes, but it only happened after seL4 Foundation[0]
| was established, and thus seL4 became independent from
| CSIRO.
|
| [0]: https://sel4.systems/
| iib wrote:
| I guess GNU Hurd [1], jokingly speaking, but correct from an
| architecture (ukernel) point of view.
|
| The real community-driven alternative is Linux, which started
| and still is a monolithic kernel, but the multiple features it
| got along the years may make the distinction even less clear
| [2]. It seems it will also accept some Rust code in the future,
| so the difference may drop even in languages used. [3]
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
|
| [2] https://qconlondon.com/system/files/presentation-
| slides/thom...
|
| [3]
| https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CANiq72khBa2GcB6-PHM3A44Y90d6vz...
| nicoburns wrote:
| Linux
| cookguyruffles wrote:
| This is the correct answer. Do not allow a subtly different
| technical design distract you from the largest switcheroo
| here: this is a single-vendor enterprise OS delivered under
| the guise of open source, it comes with all the trappings of
| a single-vendor enterprise OS.
|
| Let's not be too quick to forget when Android first started
| out, all the idealism about the wonders of a free software
| mobile OS. A decade later, it's almost impossible to buy an
| Android phone that hasn't been strongarmed (no pun intended)
| into including Play Services, Chrome and Gmail, often
| including through threats to the manufacturer's unrelated
| businesses.
|
| We're older and wiser, avoid this garbage like the plague,
| and don't fall for all the same old tricks.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Android would be dead in the water today if it wasn't for
| Play Services. Developing for Android is still painful
| today because but Play Services at least meant that you
| could expect a certain range of features spanning multiple
| major releases of Android.
|
| I'm pretty sure that Play Services wasn't something Google
| really wanted to have but were forced to implement because
| so many OEMs just shit the bed w/r/t their Android forks.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only because they didn't licensed Android in a way that
| would have prevented that in first place, nor have proper
| clauses on their Play Store contracts.
| [deleted]
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yes, although at least both Android and Fuchsia are
| released under genuinely open source licenses, even if they
| development model isn't open.
| cookguyruffles wrote:
| These licenses are totally meaningless when Google make
| anti-competitive threats to their partners for attempting
| to exercise that license. They benefit from all the
| marketing of their vendor ecosystem in the public eye
| using the open thing, while quietly holding a gun to
| everyone's head in the background. That is the absolute
| antithesis of what "genuine open source" is supposed to
| be about, it is a marketing ruse and you've fallen for
| it.
| eingaeKaiy8ujie wrote:
| I have a Pixel phone and run GrapheneOS on it. No Play
| Services, no Google apps, only open source software from
| F-Droid. Works really well.
| c01n wrote:
| That is because you are clearly a Computer person. The
| average person has their entire digital life owned by
| Google.
| eingaeKaiy8ujie wrote:
| My point is that it's totally possible to have an Android
| phone without any proprietary Google software components,
| thanks to Android being open source.
|
| Same with Fuchsia - its license should allow to make a
| fully FOSS privacy-respecting variant, and maybe it would
| be something I could recommend to my friends or family to
| replace Windows on their desktop for example (if Fuchsia
| becomes popular enough). At least such option exists,
| unlike in the case of Windows, so I don't see Fuchsia as
| a bad thing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Good luck with Android 12, ART is now also part of GSI
| images and delivery over Play Store.
| eingaeKaiy8ujie wrote:
| I'm not familiar enough with Android internals, but as I
| understood from a quick research this means that it will
| be possible now to upgrade the Android Runtime through
| the Play Store (which was handled by phone
| manufacturers?). Is it a problem for distributions
| without the Play Store like GrapheneOS or LineageOS? Why?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends how they manage to have Play Services running on
| them.
|
| https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/modular-
| syst...
|
| The information on the link is outdated, it was presented
| at Google IO that Android 12 will now also ship ART as
| APEX module.
|
| Most likely by then the AOSP documentation will be
| accordingly updated.
| snvzz wrote:
| Genode[0], which you can follow on the Genodians[1] blog.
|
| [0]: https://genode.org/
|
| [1]: https://genodians.org/
| tormeh wrote:
| Redox OS is pretty cool, but without at least one big corporate
| sponsor it won't be able to amass the ecosystem needed to be
| viable for most use-cases. That said, I believe it's almost
| self-hosting now, so definitely a real OS that you can run
| software in today.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Does anyone know if Fuchsia, or any higher-level environment
| built on top of it like this new software for the Nest Hub,
| includes a screen reader for blind users? This will be necessary
| before Fuchsia can be considered a full replacement for Android,
| Chromium OS, etc.
| kerneis wrote:
| Yes, Nest displays have a screen reader feature:
| https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9167457
|
| As explained in the article, the release of Fuchsia should not
| change any supported feature (please report a bug via the "send
| feedback" option if you notice otherwise!).
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Thanks for the response. I know what the article said, but I
| also tend to assume that accessibility will be overlooked or
| treated as not very important.
|
| I'm tempted to buy a first-generation Nest Hub, maybe off
| eBay, to find out for myself.
| cbracken wrote:
| Yes, the Home Hub includes both a screen reader and touch
| exploration mode.
| bionade24 wrote:
| Having a smart speaker with a display doesn't make sense for a
| bling person imao.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| It might make sense for a blind person with sighted family
| and friends.
| bondolo wrote:
| Given that this describes my family and we have a first gen
| Nest Hub I expect to be able to soon report whether Fushcia
| is as accessible as the prior Linux stack.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Thanks. If you find that there's a regression in
| accessibility with this update, I'd appreciate it if you
| would email me (my email address is in my HN profile), to
| make sure I get the message even if I forget to check
| this thread, so I can help sound the alarm.
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