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rcMgD2BwE72F

What's the community-driven alternative?

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There is no other micro kernel OS being developed with similar effort.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/blog/the-power-of-zephyr-...

GNU Hurd will be released any time now!

/s?

Nooo, completely serious!

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.

Sadly CSIRO axed entire seL4 team, "to focus on AI".

Sadly yes, but it only happened after seL4 Foundation[0] was established, and thus seL4 became independent from CSIRO.

[0]: https://sel4.systems/

Linux

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.

Yes, although at least both Android and Fuchsia are released under genuinely open source licenses, even if they development model isn't open.

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.

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.

That is because you are clearly a Computer person. The average person has their entire digital life owned by Google.

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.

Good luck with Android 12, ART is now also part of GSI images and delivery over Play Store.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Genode[0], which you can follow on the Genodians[1] blog.

[0]: https://genode.org/

[1]: https://genodians.org/

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...

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.

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