Hacker News Reader

Comment by Unkechaug | Hacker News Reader

What is this supposed to become, exactly? Google hasn't said much about it and speculators are making big claims like how this will replace ChromeOS and Android. I don't see that happening any time soon considering how deeply entrenched both OSes are, but Google's dedication mixed with the lack of comments makes me think again.

View on HN

Depending on the future direction they take this, it might end up replacing OpenBSD for me.

Mac OS X and OpenBSD are my daily drivers, but at their core, they are BSDs, and less and less I find myself using the NeXTSTEP portion of Mac OS X and more and more time in BSD-land, which is leading me to move more and more of my overall computer time to OpenBSD which is a great operating system but is still largely a continuation of the UNIX/POSIX/BSD model which I appreciate like fine wine but do not love.

If Fuschia ends up being the answer to the question of what would happen if we built a new operating system from scratch today, taking the best lessons we were able to learn in the past 50 years, then I might be using it as my daily driver in 10 years.

Or maybe not. Nobody can really say what it will be right now.

Don’t hold your breath. The zircon API isn’t innovative in any modern sense. Additionally it’s bloated and not clean like L4. It’s just in house IP for Google.

(HN won’t let me directly reply to the comment below so here it is:

Nothing in zircon doesn’t already exist on Linux or any other modern kernel. Additionally it has bloat, like 3 distinct IPC mechanisms.

Even further, if it ends up being any technical person’s main driving OS it will surely sport a POSIX API and at that point it’s just another implementation of POSIX with similar a security model.)

Could you explain what you mean? I'd like to understand your point of view.

You think the lack of technical innovation is what makes products fail? Seems to me that it's actually the opposite that's true.

Never said it was going to fail. I just don’t expect it to be more appropriate as a hacker’s OS than OpenBSD or Linux.

This is interesting: I thought they had taken a lot of care to implement very clean concepts.

Fuchsia docs says POSIX lite and Web runtime, under Backwards compatibility. More info at https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/HEAD/book.md#zircon-... You can fire up the fuchsia in qemu, as it requires hardware graphics, you can't run the desktop, but you can have multiple shell open. I've had a play and it has vim and sql_shell and a bare bones top.

Probably something more architecturally sound for future platforms in augmented and virtual reality among other things. One of the biggest issues with Android is managing permissions for apps to system resources. Proper sandboxing of 3rd party code is a big deal, especially if the next generation experiences are so much more immersive.

Given the amount of activity in porting Chromium to Fuchsia [x], my bet is on Fuchsia eclipsing Chromeos. A possible reason for this would be to get out from under the linux kernel; Fuchsia/Zircon enables google to make changes quickly.

[x] http://bit.ly/2EBckRk

well, based on the demo there, I'd almost only want it is a Google Assistant version of Amazon's Show where it could be an assistant for various users (and guests). Outside of that, I'm not sure.

Obviously, it has to be more with all of the aspects of it, but in its current state, that's the only thing I can envision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com