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Comment by nish__ | Hacker News Reader

Someone should make a new mobile OS like android but based on FreeBSD.

We need to say goodbye to the unix philosophy. From the security point of view there are much better options. Also text based tooling is cumbersome compare to the alternatives. We should aim higher than just the cathedral approach of unix alternatives.

Fair tbh

Like so many things in life, there are so many variables/criteria and different ways to weigh them that I do not think one can make a claim like "text based tooling is cumbersome compare to the alternatives".

What are the alternatives? I had to do a little windows shell programming when working on Chef orchestration to set up windows servers.

There was "flow" programming in WebMethods I had to work on that tried to provide a snap in place component GUI to program data transformation.

I would say that there is something limiting in all the GUI based interfaces I have had to work with. Some option you can not get to, or it is not apparent how two things can communicate with each other.

Text based options have always seem more open to inspection, and, hence, easier to reason about how it works. YMMV.

FreeBSD is notoriously bad with modern hardware especially Bluetooth/wifi/etc so I can’t think of a worse base OS for mobile tbh

Vibe coding could change that. Porting drivers from Linux got much easier.

Good point.

Why a whole new mobile OS? Linux is the least important part of Android. It could be replaced. Probably will be, by Fuschia.

Simplicity. Also maybe use Go for apps instead of Java.

The idea is it would be nice to have an OS that is a little easier to learn for the next generation of devs.

Simplicity how? It would require a great deal of complex work.

Simplicity in the sense that BSD is a much smaller codebase than linux and therefore less complex and easier to onboard new devs.

It wouldn't be a smaller codebase if you built an Android-like mobile OS on top of it.

I'm not an expert here, but I this is pretty unlikely at this point.

Google has been working on Fuschia for a decade, and far as I can tell, the only place it was ever deployed was to a Google smart home hub 5 years ago. The only Fuschia news I've heard since then was about layoffs and killing projects related to it (e.g. Chrome on Fuschia).

If Google isn't moving any of their own phones over to Fuschia after a decade of work, it's hard to imagine them unilaterally flipping Android to it and forcing the hand of every Android OEM to follow suit.

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