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Comment by jwrallie | Hacker News Reader

This provokes the same feeling as running Wine on Windows for me: ultimately useful but outright chaotic in nature.

BTW Chrome is also run through the same layer now, to speed up the updates. Albeit is more integrated into the OS, but it's no near the wine you are talking about.

they should just make an awesome FirefoxOS

FirefoxOS was too ahead of its time. Robust in idea, lacking in proper marketing and objective understanding.

Now we've got direct USB to browser capabilities and no web first OS. Backwards but true.

For those not aware: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

> FirefoxOS was too ahead of its time

I think it was just-in-time but competing against incredible odds. It was perfectly usable as a first step (I had a cheap ZTE phone [1]) but it came out as the craze for ever more powerful mobiles for taking selfies and sliding down media on social media was reaching feverish levels.

I think of the intervening decade as a lost decade. Imagine if the project did not fold and had iterated this entire time...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open

I won a dev phone on a competition near my uni (the competition was who will be the fastest to create a simple app for FFOS and I just created a simple html page with a hello world in <p> tags lol), some ZTE one I think. Developed a few games just for myself, it was a fun tech tbh, but the phone was pretty unstable so after a time it just collected dust on my shelf and I sold it to someone.

ps.: it was this one not a ZTE: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/01/announcing-the-firefox-os-...

FirefoxOS sort of lives on through the KaiOS fork, unfortunately many devices come locked which prevents from installing homebrew apps. I have a rooted Nokia 2720 Flip, and while the hardware is abysmal (KaiOS is targeted at emerging markets) you can get quite a bit of functionality out of it (including openstreetmap, podcast/music players, rss readers, google-authenticator-compatible TOTP etc).

They tried to make a FirefoxOs for mobile in the past. It even shipped with some phone then in true Mozilla fashion (am I being harsh ?) they dumped it and then it became a hit, rebranded as KaiOs in developping countries for unpowerful smartphones

There's /e/os now. I stand to be corrected but a lot of the privacy issues are more about the ubiquity of 'Google Play Services' rather than Android as a base OS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki//e/_(operating_system)

Not sure why this gets recommended over LineageOS. It forcefully comes with Micro G, which can't really be removed, unlike Lineage where you can just choose not to install any gapps of any kind and use the device fine.

I think shipping microG by default is a fine choice nowadays. In default setup, it doesn't connect to Google servers at all (/e/ might have different configuration though), but it enables maps and geolocation in apps (using different APIs, not Google). It is also relatively small (4 MB should not be a problem on most devices). That said, I think a no-gapps build would be nice to have, too.

(I use LineageOS as well, though. It works with microG too, but you need to get a build from here instead of the official one: https://lineage.microg.org/)

I gave /e/OS and microG a whirl when I bought my Fairphone (Murena preinstalls it on the phones they sell in the US), and it was cool how much it was able to do without the "real" gApps, but two snags ended up being showstoppers and pushed me to my usual LineageOS+gApps:

1. The Google account for my day job has various security settings that block authentication under various circumstances, including (I guess) Google services running under different signatures/IDs than expected

2. The App Lounge was really crashy for reasons I was never able to discern, and there was little rhyme or reason to certain Play Store apps being missing or uninstallable (namely: my banking app and T-Mobile's voicemail app)

Yeah, I've ran into a fair share of integrity-related problems on microG myself. Notably, apps for most banks I use work fine, but e. g. McDonalds app outright refuses to run. No discounted burgers for me I guess!

The Flame phone was hot garbage. I had one gifted to me at a Mozilla conference. I wanted to offer it to my girlfriend at the time but it was just too terrible for me to do that to her.

Its battery died three weeks later. I still have it if someone in Europe wants it for a museum or some such…

It's alive in some smart TVs too. Pretty sure at least Panasonic runs a fork.

FirefoxOS was a full OS made on web technologies, like Palm/HP/LG's WebOS. That means apps like Contacts or Dialer were JS apps. I believe the other comment about a new FirefoxOS was more about an equivalent to ChromeOS: a simple native UI shell and a browser on laptops.

As a volunteer in an association helping people that have difficulties with new technologies, an OS with just Firefox would really make everything simpler. Just like ChromeOS, you'd only get a browser (more than enough for 95% of non-professional use cases), but without the Google crap (telemetry and the Google account)

> a full OS made on web technologies

I think that's not unlike what ChromeOS is trying to be? With the APIs like WebSerial and WebUSB enabling web apps to do the same things native apps could for years now. (Of course, you can use these in the standalone Chromium, too.)

> an OS with just Firefox would really make everything simpler

It's relatively easy to build a Linux distro that boots straight into Firefox! You can try Cubic, which allows you to create a custom ISO for Debian or Ubuntu with a pretty straightforward GUI wizard. I once used it to create an ISO for an arcade machine.

[1]: https://github.com/PJ-Singh-001/Cubic

Sure, but the shell is still native.

> which allows you to create a custom ISO

That works for me, but not for most people that need automatic updates and some support (which ChromeOS or Windows provide)

Have you heard about Ubuntu-Web?

It tries to do this with Firefox instead of Chrome and uses other web technologies. https://ubuntu-web.org/

I hadn't, thanks for the recommendation! It seems to be exactly what I want, I'll test it one of these days.

Firefox OS was too ahead of its time. It made web technologies a first class citizen for mobile app development, well before mobile browsers were as capable as they are today.

Back then, Apple and Android used their million-app inventory to eliminate rival platforms....you needed an app to do anything on a phone back then. Today, nobody's installing new apps if the function can be done on the website.

What's the purpose of running Wine on Windows?

wine sometimes has superior compat for some XP/vista era vidya than modern windows.

90% of legacy 90s/00s 32 bit era programs won’t launch no matter what on windows, so I’ll have to give this a try.

PCem is also very good.

PCem is intended for things before the Pentium II released in 1997. PCem will go up to Pentium MMX.

I didn’t even know you can run WINE on Windows

DXVK in particular is one of the recommended ways to get Fallout 3/NV working reasonably well, too.

This : winevdm http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/otvdm.html

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