Android: The word Google didn't say during the Pixel 3 event | Hacker News Reader

Android: The word Google didn't say during the Pixel 3 event

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122 pointstelotortium68 comments

I'm using the Chromebook Pixelbook as my primary development device. I love it ergonomically: great keyboard, love the ability to flip the keyboard behind and use as a touchscreen.

ChromeOS could be really big, and it makes sense as a brand to switch again from Android for the reason.

But, the fact that I lose access to the sound services almost every single time I use the machine is crazy.

The response from Google is not encouraging.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!top...

Basically:

Reboot

Or, just wipe all your data!

If they really expect people to use these as their primary machines or even as just a browsing device, you MUST have sound working 100% of the time.

Mine is setup as a developer machine so it could be that I'm bleeding edge. But I'm loathe to switch back, lose all my data, just to see if that fixes things.

It could be worse.

I had a low-end Chromebook that I bought to put Linux on it. Part of the reason for this was that I needed a wi-fi repeater and extra screen for my dev machine.

A long time later my needs changed and I switched back to running ChromeOS. This install was because I wanted to gift the Chromebook to a friend. So we tested YouTube and the Chromebook was mute. It turned out that installing Linux fried something inside and only a new motherboard would fix that.

Luckily I was still on the right side of the warranty expiring, therefore, with no love for the shop I bought it from, I decided to try my luck at getting it repaired. The machine came back box fresh with superb sound. So I was able to gift a 'brand new' machine (which happens to still be on sale) rather than some hand-me down.

I am still on Chromebook Pixel 2013 vintage and very happy with it, the Pixelbook was 'meh' to me even though I think I really need one. I was disappointed that they did not go 8th generation Intel with the CPU during this year's product launches for the Pixelbook. So I am now viewing my Pixel (2013) as a future classic, not that computers have this status (Apple 1, Altair excepted). I think Pixelbooks will also have this status but I don't see an 'investment opportunity' in getting one in the hope it will be worth $$$ in decades to come.

lol. something fried because google hardware is notoriously bad, not "because you installed linux". Hardware is not supposed to fry because the software told it to.

I wasn't clear there as I didn't want to namedrop the brand of the $300 machine, it began with the first letter of the alphabet and was a four letter name.

It is not the hardware that is a problem with Google products, there is no 'you must be holding it wrong' nonsense. The problem Google have is in the support. Utterly awful. They have absolutely no idea, as if they are not able to empathise with the customer in any way whatsoever. A budgerigar is as much help.

Fortunately my five year old Pixel is as good as new, not a scratch. Despite its age it still impresses people whether they know what it is or not. Few computers do that these days. The wow factor isn't quite up to 'SGI' standards but I always say it is just 'a cheap really old Chromebook'.

The room filling sound from the speakers under the keyboard is something I can't believe the newer Pixelbook has to quite the same level of 'high fidelity', I would be gutted if that died due to some upgrade. This won't happen though as updates no longer happen (as of a week ago) due to the age of it.

The 2560x1700 'retina plus' native screen mode is also a true delight, particularly with dev tools open. People struggle to read the text and, with them not used to having pinch-to-zoom on their Applebooks, they are amazed that the zoom works just like on a phone.

edit: mistake but too late to delete.

I think they meant Pixelbook.

Many of us were very careful to avoid frying our monitors while configuring X Windows on BSD/Linux back in the old days.

"not supposed to" is pretty idealistic, the goal. Anyone working on firmware, drivers, or other low level SW will assure you that SW can fry, shorten the lifespan of, or otherwise brick HW.

Sometimes it's a little of hardware and software's fault: https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln186332/dist...

That is 100% the hardware's fault. I'm including firmware and drivers for the audio card in "hardware".

> So we tested YouTube and the Chromebook was mute. It turned out that installing Linux fried something inside and only a new motherboard would fix that.

I have a $3K Dell XPS 9550 on which I run Debian. One of the things many reviewers noted was "wow those inbuilt speakers are loud". And indeed they are loud, it turned out too loud as they burn out. The fix from Dell was new Windows drivers.

As a consequence I've had my speakers replaced under warranty twice now. The second time I swear it was only seconds before I frantically turned the sound down. Alas it was too late. I can't imagine Dell replacing them for free more many few times, so now I'm paranoid about what is really a hardware bug.

I'm in the same boat. My original pixel is awesome and never had an issue with it. Of course, can't run containers in it but otherwise it's perfect.

Are you saying that you are in beta or Canary channel? I'm on Canary Channel to get access to crostini, but there are definitely some bugs I've hit over the last few months because of being on Canary.

Crostini is now in stable and works well there.

Switching back to stable (I was on dev) has made audio work reliably for the last 48 hours. And, I can still use crostini/containers now that it is in stable. Crossing fingers!

I think the issue is that if you set your device up for Android Studio and want to connect an external device via USB (https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/development-environm...) this command will break your sound:

sudo crossystem dev_enable_udc=1

It's a PITA, but you can always enable USB, set your device to TCPIP, connect via network, and then turn off dev_enable_udc=0, and reboot...

I'm in the market for a new development machine, and wholly afraid of the new Macbooks. What do develop on the Pixelbook? Are you using Linux or Cloud IDEs?

i recommend you get the xps 13 or 15. once you swap out the killer wifi card for an intel solution, you have a solid machine that's ready to run your favorite distro out of the box. or you can get the developer addition that actually has dell support for ubuntu. idk why you would prefer the pixelbook to this unless you really like chromeOS.

My only word of caution with the xps is to mind the keyboard layout. I returned an xps 15 because I was constantly needing to use the Fn key to get what I wanted. Stopped back in the store and the xps 13 key layout solved all those problems. Just not sure I can handle that small a screen all day.

Well that's interesting, I did the opposite. I bought the xps 13 9350, and the Intel 8260 in there was terribly unstable. I opened it up and put in a killer 1525, which also was unstable. Then I replaced it with a killer 1535 and it's worked perfectly ever since. Perhaps the 8260 was just a bad model?

This is the annoying thing - I've got the 9350 and I had to swap the Broadcom card for an Intel card to get any kind of stability in Windows.

Well known error: https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General-Read-Only/bcm...

At one point, the crashes even managed to corrupt my filesystem. What I will say is that it's super easy to swap out the wifi and M.2 SSD - took 2 screwdrivers and about 10 minutes. I may have lost Miracast but does anyone actually use that?

YMMV but a former coworker had a 2016 XPS 13" and swapped out the wifi card for some Intel one and Miracast still worked for him.

I have a the i7 pixelbook for dev work and I love it. I use both a cloud ide (CoCalc) and Crostini for local Linux and Docker dev work. This is an awesome machine. Very ergonomic, fast, etc. and 2.4 pounds weight. I use the stable channel also and do not use crouton. I don't have trouble with sound.

Wait wait wait wait wait wait. ChromeOS is Linux now? Is it as good as using a full blown Linux distro for development?

What languages can you program in?

Bash?

Is Docker running natively?

My head is spinning. I don't want to buy a MacBook, but I'm unhappy with the polish of the Linux world. Is ChromeOS a legitimate alternative?

Project Crostini. "Native" Linux is Debian, run inside of a container, which is in turn run inside of a restricted VM. You don't get root in the VM, but you get access to commands for manipulating containers. Inside the container you have full access, but no devices.

Current limitations: you don't get accelerated graphics, no sound, and can't access USB or SD storage from the Linux container (yet). Things that look really good, you can install .apt packages from the Chrome file manager, and anything with a .desktop file shows up in the Chrome launcher. Looks like there are a bunch of patches with accelerated graphics coming in, and audio should be coming sometime too. Better storage should be available once they re-baseline on kernel version 4.18+, as that has non-root fuse mounts.

BTW, the reason for a lot of limitations of for security, so that a Linux app can't possibly negatively affect the rest of the system. For that reason, they don't have a mechanism to run Linux programs on system startup -- you have to purposely launch any apps.

Ah, sounds like a way to go before it's a serious contender as a daily development machine

Yes, you can run any Linux program on it. It has Wayland which converts x11 to the Chromeos windowing metaphor. You can install things using apt-get on your local instance of Linux or use -X with ssh and it just works. It's amazing.

But the sound issues, sigh.

Is it regular x11 apps with ChromeOS' own window manager / skin theme or some weird hack?

I don't fully understand it all but I don't think it is a hack. It's the "new way" to do x11 type applications. I'm not at liberty to read the article on Wayland right now (alone with the three kids tonight and bedtime looms...). But I remember reading and thinking it wasn't complicated to understand and that this way of doing things is the future.

It makes ChromeOS into a really powerful terminal. You can run stuff locally that's best to be run locally. Then you can run applications that don't run locally (like that need access to special hardware like a gpu) on the machine itself via x11 forwarding. It's very flexible and works.

As a separate issue from mine (faulty ChromeOS sound), currently you can't use the sound hardware inside the container. But that'll get fixed soon. Just means there is no way to run Linux music making apps yet.

x11 apps talk to XWayland, which then talks to Sommelier (a Wayland forwarding agent), which then talks to the Wayland server running on Chrome OS. Other communications between Chrome OS and the Crostini system happens using the gRPC protocol. There is a program called Concierge on the Chrome OS side, that talks to Maitred inside the VM, to get it to do things. And apps inside the container use Garcon to talk to a service called Cicerone on the Chrome OS side (again, both these are over the gRPC protocol). All this is layed out here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...

That sounds a little saner though still convoluted. I hope they eventually don't have to run through so many hoops to run Linux apps.

Hey, it's still less of a hack than using crouton was!

ChromeOS has always been based off Gentoo. It's still a slapped on browser, but if I remember correctly there are things you can do to toggle regular Linux apps on, or you know, you could also just install another distro over it.

This is not really accurate, especially nowadays...

* Based on Gentoo- it was actually based on Ubuntu during development, and I believe it switched to a Debian base (from Gentoo) a year or two ago.

* A slapped on browser - it's a lot more than that. It has its own window manager and many other things. It's closer to normal Linux than Android is, but there's quite a lot of differences.

* Toggling Linux apps on - you have been able to install a chroot unofficially and can run Linux apps that way, but integration with the GUI is pretty janky. Official support for Linux apps is very new and not supported on a lot of hardware.

* Install another distro - not always an option. A lot of the machines have spotty driver and/or firmware support, e.g. my Acer Chromebook is a big headache to get working. Some are supported pretty well though.

I just use Thinkpads or Asus laptops.

Emacs. ;)

But I've used Android Studio successfully as well as vscode and atom. They are pretty heavy and it does show on these machines.

So, sound sub-system f-ckery. Google is indeed become the new Microsoft.

I wouldn't be surprised if these problems intersect continuing DRM clampdown efforts. (I've no actual knowledge of what is going on -- just suspicions based upon product designs and behaviors.)

I'm just as surprised that in this whole article the word "Fuchsia" appeared exactly a single time (and that occurrence was in parentheses).

Couldn't the primary reason be just that? They are currently maintaining three distinct OS stacks - Android, Chrome OS and now Fuchsia - and there have been numerous messages in the past that they would likely to unify them.

So my guess is they either want to de-emphasize Android to not have the OS fragmentation leak into marketing or they really plan to drop Android even as a technical foundation at some point.

They are just as dysfunctional as Microsoft with their WinDev vs DevTools political issues.

It is not only the multiple OSes, also the developer stacks.

Android, Web/PWAs, Flutter, with each one presenting themselves as the solution for delivering software on Gooogle's platforms.

Totally agree. There is massive confusion in the space...the tooling appears hard to maintain and often unloved. There is a whole push to get Android devs using Kotlin...I'd love to know the stats on actual usage. Personally, I see Kotlin as movement rather than progress.

At some point I think it would make sense to have a clean break. Personally, I'd love to see something like rust encouraged (possibly with JS frontend to ensure huge adoption). Probably never going to happen...so with that said, we'll probably end up with dart...suitable for writing macros around machine learning code.

There was a recent blog post following KotlinConf 2018, saying 27% of top 1000 google play apps use Kotlin. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/kotlin-mom...

If you don't mind me asking - do you still feel that way (multiple incoherent stacks) about the Windows development ecosystem as it is today?

Yes, completely.

.NET is all about VB.NET and C#. F# doesn't get to play with all the toys, namely GUI tooling, .NET Native, EF.

C++ on UWP is on transition fase from C++/CX to C++/WinRT. Which is a good thing as C++/WinRT is a C++17 framework, but maybe that could have been the original design to start with, without having an external MVP push for it (Kenny Kerr).

.NET gets access to DirectX only via third party bindings, the closest it gets with Microsoft own tooling is the Visual Layer on UWP. A victim of the usual WinDev vs DevTools, because we should all be using DirectXTK instead.

Ideally they would like everyone to be on .NET Core, but even with the upcoming .NET Core 3.0, not everything is going to be supported, so we keep targeting .NET Framework for our Windows deployments, as we use Java/C++ instead on multiplatorm projects.

Then it looks like the JS folks took over DevTools with VSCode, Skype on React Native, VS 2017 installer on Electron, UWP Hosted Apps are now PWAs.

However I could rant equally well over other ecosystems that I know well.

Developer tooling from OS vendors is just another product like everything else they do sell, so naturally they fall under the same sales/marketing/support/politics.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as incoherent, though. This is how I would sort it into buckets:

Cross-platform UI - HTML/JS/Electron

Backend and services - .NET Core

Low-level graphics and other high-perf / low-level stuff - C++

Within each of those there are transitions in progress, like .NET -> .NET Core or C++/CX -> C++/WinRT, but it's fairly clear which one is legacy and which one is taking over; it just takes time. The buckets themselves are also fairly well defined.

The only clear overlap is between all three stacks when it comes to UWP apps. But none of them try to position itself as the "one true stack" for that platform - they're presented as choices, depending on one's existing skills, perf requirements, and cross-platform needs or lack thereof.

So in which bucket do you place Xamarin or C++ tooling for mobile OSes for example?

С++ tooling for other mobile platforms isn't really a Microsoft stack. It's more of an attempt to get into someone else's stack with tooling, with a side effect of encouraging writing a larger part of your typical mobile app in portable C++ (which then makes it easier to port to UWP).

Xamarin is weird, you're right. It's partly the same as above, just s/C++/C#/ - but that doesn't seem to be working so well in practice. And then there's Visual Studio for Mac (nee Xamarin Studio), which in practice competes against Visual Studio Code. I think it's just one of those acquisitions that broadly felt like a good idea, but no-one properly figured out the details of how it fits in the big picture.

(But, curiously, Xamarin and VSCode are both DevDiv.)

I've never seen any evidence that Google intends to release a new consumer os called Fuschia.

I'm reasonably convinced that Fuschia is a testbed for a new kernel that will eventually replace the hacked up Linux kernel underpinning chromeos and possibly Android. End-users will (theoretically) never notice that anything happened other than a normal os upgrade.

That's just my take, though.

The word Google didn't say is "Android".

This title has been edited, but its still unclear what word wasn't said. #stopclickbait

One possible interpretation is that someone simply decided the presentation should keep things simple and avoid confusing people by mentioning more than one brand.

This is a pretty common strategy in communication: pick one main idea you want to get across, and stick to that only. If you throw in everything that you can think of but the kitchen sink, the distraction does more harm than good.

Following that reasoning, Pixel is the brand of those specific phones, so that is the brand you mention on that occasion.

Is this because of Fuschia? Maybe, but after Google released a phone with both a notch and a chin, I have absolutely no faith in their ability to succeed in bringing that OS to market.

I hear no one talking about possible privacy issues when using a ChromeBook for your work. Is that a non-issue (i.e well addressed)?

I assume since Fuschia will be replacing Android soon as the all-in-one OS of Google, that they're sidelining the Android name.

Is Fuchsia considered to be Unix?

No, I don't think so.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuchsia/comments/7pywqu/how_unixlik...

https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/04/google-fuchsia-zircon-ear...

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/concepts...

Any OS w/o a POSIX interface is probably a non-starter at this point. Anything POSIX is arguably UNIX. This said, who cares about the kernel? Android is not about the kernel. There are 100x more difficult problems up the stack than the kernel. My guess nothing will happen there. It has been too hard to get Android where it is.

My pet theory is that Google intends to eventually port the existing userspace for chromeos and Android to the Fuschia kernel.

As long as your apps run inside Chrome's runtime, or interact with the Android APIs instead of the low level POSIX APIs, they'll never know the difference. (And we all know that Android's existing POSIX support is minimalistic, to say the least.)

In a twisted way, POSIX is C's runtime that the committee wasn't willing to make part of ISO C.

So unless one is coding in straight C there is very little pressure to care about POSIX anyway, as all other languages, including C++, have a better OS independent standard library.

An important question as the OIN Patent Pool is directed toward a "Linux System"

Just makes sense. They will move to Fuchsia and is starting the process of moving away from the "Android" brand.

We have seen it already with Wear OS and other places.

Thanks, I hadn't yet heard of Fuchsia.

More info for any others who are interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

I’d heard of it but didn’t know it was open source.

Is Fuchsia in a state where you can boot it in a VM?

Wikipedia mentioned how to develop applications for it with Dart. Did anyone try developing applications for it?

In a talk [1] by Sam Altman I saw on the YC channel on YouTube, Sam said that an advantage that startups have over big corp is that the latter are not able to “turn their battleship around” as fast, developing software for new platforms. Hmmm... (pondering).

[1]: I think it was this one: https://youtu.be/0lJKucu6HJc

One of the writers at ARS got it to work: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-os-o...

I've not seen it in a VM (and I am not a low level hacker) but the getting started docs outline the build process so it would assume it's doable...

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/getting_...

why move away from the android brand? why not call "fuchsia" "android 10"? It would seem to me a waste of branding of a well known term around the world even if on a technical level, it is not the same. Or is there a plan to continue the use of android in some way.

The Android brand is used (among other things) for cheap phones which never receive updates. Maybe Fuchsia would be a restart, trying to beat more of Apple who is quite well positioned in the upper class market.

Another competitor that is doing some amazing work is Tizen.

Only if you mean spectacular bad business decisions, given how many times they switched the SDK design between JS, C, C++ and .NET Core, and the amount of security exploits they are known for.

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