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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

Friend, android on servers sounds like a nightmare.

But, chromeos is sort of like that and GKE nodes use it to run k8s stuff. I can see it being used to run containers like that, although with much disdain.

I can see an android inspired thing but android with it's app stores and rather peculiar administrative burden would make a bad fit imho.

Fyi: there are android laptops and desktops but nobody likes them.

I mean, I hate android but I hate all populat mobile OSes compared to desktop and server variants because of UI , walled garden and severe restrictions.

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I see the walled gardens and restrictions as fairly separate from Android itself.

Most of the worst of it isn't Android at all, it's all just Play Store related, but other app stores don't need those restrictions.

I could see something like F-Droid, but with a cloud or local portal to be able to install things remotely on headless servers.

I'm not sure what the extra administrative burden is, Android is designed for as little administration as possible, I'm not sure if it's explicitly documented anywhere, but they seem to have a philosophy of "You should never have to configure one thing to get some other thing to work, everything should either be one size fits all or automatic".

Admin burden is lack of docs and tooling to maintain stuff. You need to introspect and debug things and measure performance, manage logs, networking,etc... and there needs to be a pool of potential people that can do that job of maintaining it.

If you have an ngnix apk, it might need to talk to a php and mysql apk and a bunch of other apks and each of them have configs and require management. Essentially, my problem is that you would need to port everything servers now are doing to it but to what benefit? It makes more sense to import features you like in android/dalvik to gnu/linux. Less work/burden.

Well, if you were really doing things in a fully "Androidish" way, you wouldn't just be straight porting PHP into an APK.

You'd probably have a DatabaseProvider interface that your MySQL would implement, that would have all the stuff to auto-configure that interaction, and the SQL app would probably include its own backups and related admin stuff.

If you were really going all the way, PHP and nginx probably wouldn't be a thing, you'd just be writing apps in straight Dart and putting your content as markdown files or something, to stay consistent and not add any extra layers of frameworks that aren't closely managed by the OS.

But yeah, I agree, if you just straight ported existing architecture to Android you probably wouldn't get much benefit.

> chromeos is sort of like that and GKE nodes use it to run k8s stuff

I'm not sure where you got that impression, but the default OS for GKE is Container-Optimized OS[1]. It's a Linux distribution maintained by Google for the purpose of running containers. I don't think ChromeOS is an option you can select for your nodes.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/docs

You don't select it. Just create a pod/workload and ssh to the compute node and see. It's based in chromeos but not the exact chromeos on chromebooks.

Ah, you are correct. It's based on Chromium OS, which is the open source base for Chrome OS. I somehow missed it, but it's also mentioned on the page I linked.

On a server without a GUI, Android would basically be JVM running on Linux.

Except no package manager, none od the typical gnu/linux utils and a custom kernel.

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