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>Should we start calling them "Chromium/Linux"? Well, if chrome is the primary set of userspace tools, "chromebook" might be a reasonable name. I'm not sure h

>Should we start calling them "Chromium/Linux"? Well, if chrome is the primary set of userspace tools, "chromebook" might be a reasonable name. I'm not sure how to differentiate android/linux (or even Chrome/linux) from UNIX-philosophy/linux, whether UNIX-philosophy ends up being busybox or GNU or something else.

marcan_42 5y ago
Honestly, where do you even draw the line? Android has a shell, it has userland tools (toybox), it has a service manager (not unlike systemd), it has a compositor (not unlike Wayland) and an audio server (not unlike PulseAudio). Sure, we can look at it and say "this somehow doesn't look like a Linux desktop", but that's mostly based on lineage. It's the ship of Theseus story - if Linux desktops today are so different from those of old that we've basically replaced all the pieces, how are they different from an OS that made more of a clean break?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Your comment makes a very good point. Android really does seem like a Linux system when described in this way. I may need to re-evaluate my attitudes here.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Except most of that stuff is only visible via Java APIs, NDK userspace is hands-off to such tools A fact that termux people refuse to accept, hence why it doesn't run on the latest versions, unless they now finally accepted that POSIX isn't part of the official NDK stable APIs and have started calling into JNI. Plenty of Linux software won't be compilable just with these APIs, unless they are game based, https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    That's an upper level platform policy question, which is rather difficult to compare to because... Linux doesn't really have anything like that. Try running a dynamically linked executable with more than the basic dependencies on a Linux distro 2 years newer and see how many missing dependency libraries you run into due to ABI changes and soname bumps... FWIW, Termux works perfectly fine on the latest version of Android - what they can't do is push updates through the Play Store, because the minimum required API level now imposes security restrictions (no running executables from your data directory) that break it. But that doesn't make Android not a Linux system; you can still adb shell into it and run commands and shell scripts and copy new binaries in and run them. This is not unlike Linux container systems, which also break various apps. It comes with the territory of containerizing applications that you have to break insecure legacy APIs; this is not unique to Android.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Fork() is not part of the API, that is one of their issues. Regular users don't have any idea what adb is, and it requires developer mode to be enabled.

marcan_42 5y ago

Honestly, where do you even draw the line? Android has a shell, it has userland tools (toybox), it has a service manager (not unlike systemd), it has a compositor (not unlike Wayland) and an audio server (not unlike PulseAudio). Sure, we can look at it and say "this somehow doesn't look like a Linux desktop", but that's mostly based on lineage. It's the ship of Theseus story - if Linux desktops today are so different from those of old that we've basically replaced all the pieces, how are they different from an OS that made more of a clean break?

selfhoster11 5y ago
Your comment makes a very good point. Android really does seem like a Linux system when described in this way. I may need to re-evaluate my attitudes here.
pjmlp 5y ago
Except most of that stuff is only visible via Java APIs, NDK userspace is hands-off to such tools A fact that termux people refuse to accept, hence why it doesn't run on the latest versions, unless they now finally accepted that POSIX isn't part of the official NDK stable APIs and have started calling into JNI. Plenty of Linux software won't be compilable just with these APIs, unless they are game based, https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
- marcan_42 5y ago
  That's an upper level platform policy question, which is rather difficult to compare to because... Linux doesn't really have anything like that. Try running a dynamically linked executable with more than the basic dependencies on a Linux distro 2 years newer and see how many missing dependency libraries you run into due to ABI changes and soname bumps... FWIW, Termux works perfectly fine on the latest version of Android - what they can't do is push updates through the Play Store, because the minimum required API level now imposes security restrictions (no running executables from your data directory) that break it. But that doesn't make Android not a Linux system; you can still adb shell into it and run commands and shell scripts and copy new binaries in and run them. This is not unlike Linux container systems, which also break various apps. It comes with the territory of containerizing applications that you have to break insecure legacy APIs; this is not unique to Android.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Fork() is not part of the API, that is one of their issues. Regular users don't have any idea what adb is, and it requires developer mode to be enabled.