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Another project designed to get L7-9s promoted at Google. Ambition and the ability to wave hands are all you need. I like cool stuff, like capabilities, as much
by 7e 3y ago
Another project designed to get L7-9s promoted at Google. Ambition and the ability to wave hands are all you need. I like cool stuff, like capabilities, as much as the next person, but nobody needs a new OS. Linux will evolve sufficiently anyway. A new OS isn’t compelling for users.
- edgyquant 3y agoIf people followed this logic there would be no Linux to “evolve sufficiently”
- lmm 3y agoHuh? Linux solved a real problem, at the time there really wasn't an alternative (386BSD was under a lawsuit cloud, GNU didn't run, Minix didn't perform well enough for daily driver use and was opposed to the kind of changes that would be needed to fix that).
- calderwoodra 3y agoAgree on the first point, L7+'s are often looking for technical ways to transform the business. Fuchsia and Dart are still big technologies though touching many other projects, so back-tracking on speakers doesn't quite mean fuchsia is a failure/not necessary.
- hollerith 3y ago>A new OS isn’t compelling for users. I'm a user (and in particular a Linux user) and a new OS which has Chromium ported to it is compelling to me because I expect that Linux will never evolve to be secure enough.
- kelnos 3y agoLinux security (another desktop user here) is... fine? You can get pretty great security on it, if you want, by running Wayland instead of X11 and running all your apps via Flatpak or Snap (assuming you only choose apps that aren't intentionally allowed to break out of their sandbox). And none of these things require Linux (the kernel) to change all that much. Hell, Android has decent security by running all apps with different user IDs and restricting the parts of the filesystem it can access. Obviously your default Linux desktop install doesn't work like this, but some motivated individuals could do it, if they wanted. Writing an entire new OS is hardly necessary. Google just wanted something it could control, when it comes to Fuchsia. And they're the last company that I would trust to build an OS that doesn't end up being user-hostile.
- fbdab103 3y agoI think the world is destined to move to a microkernel OS eventually. I am just mad that there is not national level funding of sel4, which is audited and available today.
- candiddevmike 3y agoMicrokernels work great for virtualization guests, yet they aren't taking off in this kind of low friction environment. I don't think there's a killer app for them that justifies leaving behind Linux.
- justapassenger 3y agoYou can have secure monolith and insecure microkernel. It’s not a silver bullet, and security nowadays is really complicated.
- LargeTomato 3y agoThere are some technologies that are so good they can fix everything, almost as if by magic. Functional programming, micro kernels, RISC (or, depending on the decade, CISC), cryptocurrency, etc.
- abrookewood 3y agocryptocurrency has fixed nothing.
- prmoustache 3y agoYour sarcasm detector is broken.
- saithound 3y ago> You can have secure monolith and insecure microkernel. Superficially, that claim sounds reasonable, but I'd have a hard time substantiating it. There is exactly one secure microkernel ready for production use today, and zero secure monolithic kernels. There's not even a "here's how one could secure a monolithic kernel in principle" whitepaper.
- candiddevmike 3y agoSecure for who, you or Google? What are the privacy implications of Google owning the entire stack?
- CameronNemo 3y agoSecure for whoever has the keys to the device.
- hulitu 3y agoHa ? You think an OS which exfiltrates all your data is "secure" ?
- o1y32 3y agoEven if what you say makes sense, there are maybe around three people in the world who are interested in a new OS because of this reason, which is not really the "users" that people talk about.
- dmvdoug 3y ago> At that time, Fuchsia was never originally about building a new kernel. It was actually about an observation I made: that the Android team had their own Linux kernel team, and the Chrome OS team had their own Linux kernel team, and there was a desktop version of Linux at Google [Goobuntu and later gLinux], and there was a Linux kernel team in the data centers. They were all separate, and that seems crazy and inefficient. > The architectures were all different, which meant that outside developers couldn’t actually do work and attack all the platforms Google was offering. You had to do bespoke work. https://9to5google.com/2022/08/30/fuchsia-director-interview-chris-mckillop/ https://9to5google.com/2022/08/30/fuchsia-director-interview...
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago> They were all separate, and that seems crazy and inefficient. From an organizational-design perspective: That's the whole point. Decentralization means they can all move more quickly — each team can cater to the needs of its local customers. In moving quickly and solving local problems, they end up repeating some work. That's the price of velocity. Good local leaders should counter-balance this by creating informal forums for idea exchange and cross-pollination. Sadly, overly-ambitious office-politicians see this happening, flag it as "inefficient," and roll the headcount up into a centralized team. Centralization puts an end to all the local ideas and excitement, instead routing it through a centralized committee that "plans" and "decides" which customers are worthy of how much innovation. In a way, this is the pendulum of life at a big company. But in another way... this pursuit of "efficiency" sure seems like it explains a lot of why Google moves so slowly.
- fomine3 3y agoI don't want to stuck at old Unix-like forever. There are very few diversity of OSs.
- canucker2016 3y agoData point:L7 annual salary and bonus are $718k and $603k if the data from this article is accurate. See https://nypost.com/2023/07/21/leaked-google-pay-data-reveals-fat-salaries-for-top-engineers/ https://nypost.com/2023/07/21/leaked-google-pay-data-reveals... L8+ would be more obviously.
- JustLurking2022 3y agoBased on the large discrepancy with levels.fyi, I'm betting that person either put down their total comp as salary, or they are a very specialized researcher in an extremely hot area (probably AI).
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoAgree with this. 700k base does not make sense. Look at the TC numbers on levels: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer/levels/l7?sortBy=total_compensation&sortOrder=DESC https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... The total is actually somewhat comparable to what's reported, but the breakdown from the article seems completely wrong.
- npteljes 3y ago>A new OS isn’t compelling for users. Yes it is. Not directly, of course, nobody cares about the OS. But in case of Android distributions, if they could exchange the Linux layer to Fuchsia, while keeping most of the Android userland in terms of UX, and deliver gains such as increased battery life, then suddenly people would be interested. It would be similar to Apple's development and adoption of ARM architecture.
- ergocoder 3y agoIn this case they could not.