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Comment by senki | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget that 2010 is the year of the Linux desktop!

Well, there may be no "year of the Linux desktop", but someday the "desktop" will become a thing of the past, and whatever comes next may be running Linux.

Hey, I meant to be sarcastic, but actually you are right! The smartphones and tablets are already here, lots of them running Android, and Microsoft really is an underdog.

2010 is the Year of Linux on the Phone.

Linux is outselling Apple and Microsoft.

Android is not recognizably Linux and you know it. It's using the Linux kernel about as minimally as they could get away with, they patch it to expose all kinds of things directly to userland through hacked-together APIs. The userland bears no resemblance to POSIX, and developers don't get to write for it (Dalvik or JNI only). It's even less Linux than a TiVO.

Compare Android: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/100221.html with WebOS: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/111453.html from a linux kernel developer's perspective

I wouldn't call Android even less Linux than a TiVO just from the links you gave. The guy says that he is disappointed that the power management is jacked up, especially when Linux already provides normal interfaces for that kind of thing, but other than that I didn't see anything hugely awful. As the author of those posts says, the other stuff has no prospect of going upstream anyway so it doesn't really matter. There's certainly still a lot of Linux running under the covers there.

The userspace is different, but if you want Gnome on your phone get Maemo/Meego.

Google is using the 2.6 kernel. Yes, a lot of user land stuff is missing, probably to keep the footprint small. Google will be contributing their changes back to the Linux kernel. They are feeding the Linux ecosystem.

http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.ht...

And you're right, WebOS and Nokia(Meego) have Linux phones too. Linux is the the future of smartphones is one form or another.

Throw in the iPhone and we can say Unix, the past, has become the future of smartphones.

my understanding is that while Google is following the letter of the GPL and giving back their changes to the GPL'd code, they are not putting fourth the effort to get those changes integrated with the rest of the linux kernel, so practically speaking, you aren't going to be seeing much of the android changes outside of android.

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html

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