25 ms·

ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack

325 points by feross 2y ago

xnx 2y ago
Hugely infeasible because of binary blob device drivers, but I'd love to see something like ChromeOS Flex for phones to bring a clean version of Android to older phones.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Project Treble was supposed to do that... and might actually work, with caveats?
999900000999 2y ago
Chrome OS should be available as an Android applications. Let me use either AR glasses or a next dock with my phone. Looks like Google might do this since they just enable display out on the Pixel 8.
- ActorNightly 2y ago
  You can already do this with Samsung Dex. I've been on S23 and now S24, Dex is mature and works great. Don't have a laptop anymore. Simply boot up code_server in termux and use a web browser. It will likely be at least a year before Google manages to get a good version out the door. You can preview the desktop mode with floating windows on beta, but it's very buggy. May not even come to Pixel 8 officially, only for Pixel 9.
  - skiman10 2y ago
    Google is also currently experimenting with booting ChromeOS inside a VM on Android. https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/modules/Virtualization/+/main/docs/custom_vm.md https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/modules/V...
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Weirdly, that once existed for Windows: https://web.archive.org/web/20150323075241/https://www.howtogeek.com/179980/how-to-use-the-chrome-os-desktop-on-windows-8-and-why-it-exists/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150323075241/https://www.howto... was basically Chrome OS as a Windows 8 app, but you'd launch it and it went fullscreen and gave you basically a Chrome OS interface. It was weird but I seem to recall it working okay.
tapoxi 2y ago
I wonder what this means for Lacros (Chrome as a Wayland application compositing to Ash-Chrome). Would this just be using Surfaceflinger and the Android version of Chrome? Does this deprioritize regular Chrome for Linux?
- k8svet 2y ago
  I think these are quite interesting questions. Chromium just spent a lot of effort to get stock Chromium working as a ChromeOS client, rather than it purely being available as part of ChromeOS itself. Is that ... pointless now in the face of a rebase on Android? Seems like it will end up being a win for a narrow window of devices?
  - k8svet 2y ago
    (I was thinking about this, and maybe it's intentional. Make Chrome a first class citizen on formerly-ChromeOS. Make ChromeOS a generic base for AVF VMs. Maybe they even have cros working so well that they can do crostini inside an AVF VM? So it would be Android, Chrome-on-ChromeOS in an AVF VM, Linux-on-ChromeOS in another AVF VM, Windows in a third AVF VM, etc.
- pxeger1 2y ago
  I reckon Google will want to keep supporting Chrome on Linux, because winning developers over is important for them to win control of the web.
a1o 2y ago
> we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks (...) for Chrome OS Uhm, is there any plan to bring some openess to it so one can actually run python and do ML without using some alternative hack? How is the state of these things nowadays for chrome os? Haven't played with it in ages.
- RadiozRadioz 2y ago
  Semi-related question: Why did the ML people choose Python and make it so intertwined with ML? It seems like a bad choice because it's slow and bad at integrating with hardware, the actual hardcore ML stuff gets offloaded to C, which creates a weird system with two languages and a weird build step to achieve one thing. If I knew nothing about the ecosystem of available libraries and was asked to pick a language to use for ML, Python would be fairly low down the list. Is it just because it's easy, somebody picked it a while ago, made something influential, and now everybody uses it because everybody uses it?
  - buildbot 2y ago
    IMO, it makes more sense to think about Python or another high level language as glue code for all these C/Rust/Cuda/OpenCL kernels. Why would you choose something like Rust to also write the glue code in? Most people will be slowed down quite a bit by the language overhead, and the people writing this code need results last month.
  - logicchains 2y ago
    Python is a great language for ML because it allows gluing stuff together quickly. Using a 100% statically compiled language would slow things down, and the typing wouldn't help much because most languages can't properly type check tensor operations, and ones that can (like C++) tend to have awful compile times. The state of the art is tracing the execution and compiling it to a ML-specialised compiler (XLA for Jax, torch.compile for Torch), which is much harder or impossible to do in a compiled language.
  - csours 2y ago
    Worse is better. Also, python is just the glue, the work happens in libraries.
malkia 2y ago
I only wish for more powerful Chromebook - like 32GB or even 64GB of RAM, 3-4TB of SSD - maybe proper accelerated GPU, maybe discrete one.
- hollerith 2y ago
  Framework has a Chromebook that can be stuffed with RAM and storage.
  - MostlyStable 2y ago
    They can have up to 64 gigs of RAM, but internally apparently they only support up to 1TB hard drive [0], and while you can have "external" hard drives in the expansion modules, you are giving up IO to have it (half the IO slots if you wanted to get all the way to 3 TB) I don't quite understand why it couldn't accept a larger internal hard drive, but if it could I don't know why "up to 1 TB of NVME storage" would be their marketing copy. [0]https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop-chromebook-edition https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop-chr...
    - hollerith 2y ago
      Here is the paasage. My interpretation of it is different from yours. >Memory and storage are socketed, enabling you to load up whenever you’d like. The pre-built configuration comes with 8GB of DDR4 and 256GB NVMe storage and can be upgraded to up to 64GB of DDR4 and 1TB of NVMe storage.
      - MostlyStable 2y ago
        I suppose the "up to" might only refer to the ram, and not the NVME storage, which would admittedly make more sense.
        somat 2y ago
        Hard to say but the "up to" may be only the limit the framework company wants to stock and sell. With regards to the memory I went looking and the framework has 2 ddr5 laptop dimm slots. The largest I was able to find were 48 gb modules so the physical limit may be 96gb. And as a closing note, this was the first time I really looked at the framework laptop page. And while I am still not sure about the build quality or the usefulness of the "ports". the number of guides and photos of laptops under surgery sold me, I think I found my next machine.
pjmlp 2y ago
Translated, the merge of both OS is happening.
nolist_policy 2y ago
Wow, this is a big announcement for sure. Not much details but I'll definitely following chromium's code review system[1] closer now (Large parts of ChromeOS are developed in the chromium monorepo). [1] https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wip https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:w...
buildbot 2y ago
No details on why the Android stack is somehow more magical for AI? ... Or did they just fire all the ChromeOS devs and need to share resources with Android now? Why not Fuscia for something new?
- eco 2y ago
  Probably more of an internal mandate that everything needs to consider how it can integrate/improve on AI so they included some lip service in case a VP reads this.
- joseda-hg 2y ago
  I thought Fuchsia was the one that got hit with the larger cuts?
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    While true it wasn't as large as folks seem to imply.
- summerlight 2y ago
  Probably CrOS team doesn't have enough manpower to implement necessary local ML infrastructure and want to borrow Android's. Or at least they're using this as an excuse for paying off long standing organizational tech debts.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Wrote a comment a week or two ago on this you might be interested in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580163 TL;DR: Google is consolidating behind the whims of the hardware org, which are orthogonal to OS' that can't ship (what ppl outside Google call Fuschsia), and here, OS' that can't sell premium 1st party hardware. The old platform org head left recently, combine that with the CEO's eagerness to display Efficiency™ and the lack of interest the CEO has in practical work, that means VP shuffle people around to keep constant/shrinking headcount and the CEO loves it.
  - 2y ago
tonymet 2y ago
Does this imply that Crostini/ Crouton / Linux developer mode will go away? I'm quite proud of the development I've done on a $200 chromebook and it was one of my favorite features.
- modeless 2y ago
  Why would it imply that?
  - tonymet 2y ago
    They don't provide a lot of detail, but moving to a new OS platform would mean migrating functionality, and often that means dropping less popular features. Crouton / Chrostini seem to have a lot of dependencies on the current ChromeOS platform that would be costly to migrate.
    - ajross 2y ago
      > Crouton / Chrostini seem to have a lot of dependencies on the current ChromeOS platform that would be costly to migrate. Being careful not to make any pronouncements here since I do work in the group, but no, not really. Crostini is just a fairly standard VM manager with a handful of custom virtio and IPC mechanisms (some of which are really clever, to be fair). It doesn't require much of anything that hasn't been in the upstream kernel for years. And Crouton is just a community-maintained Linux chroot. People (including me) were doing exactly that kind of hack on rooted android devices more than a decade ago.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
        If anything, the work on top of pKVM has very nearly brought the same feature to Android already, though they haven't to my knowledge finished executing on that vision.
        ignoramous 2y ago
        As it understand it, pKVM is mostly to run privileged vendor bits and not user apps.
k8svet 2y ago
Well, this is a slap in the face. ChromeOS has had a long-standing tradition of requiring device kernels to be in their tree. Giving them a better shot at long-term/community/Linux support. It's hard to not cynically read this as "we're making it easier for our partners to ship devices with vendor kernels". I'm pretty shocked. I would've bet good money at this having gone the opposite direction, with ARC already on ChromeOS, etc.
- nolist_policy 2y ago
  I don't think this will go away since Google makes the call about what core hardware you are allowed to put into a Chromebook. After all they have to provide 10 years of updates.
- sounds 2y ago
  Most likely something like Qualcomm (or another similar vendor) saying that they refuse to provide the vendor kernel, and will just ship Windows on ARM instead.
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-linux-kernel-support-for-the-snapdragon-x-elite https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...
    - fowl2 2y ago
      > "supporting Linux on laptops with Windows on Snapdragon" blinks rapidly edit: I guess if you squint really hard to read "Windows" as "PC-style operating systems" (or "general purpose computing") it makes sense?
      - arghwhat 2y ago
        Hmm, maybe they are referring to a specific branding used on recent models, e.g. a "Windows on Snapdragon" sticker similar to "Windows 8 Ready" and stuff. Linux laptops still tend to be special order or niche brands, but there is nice positive traction in that space.
88j88 2y ago
kinda makes sense to not develop a whole other os just for Chromebook when they have all the engineering effort for Android.
hakanderyal 2y ago
Before reading the article I somehow immediately assumed this will be about adding AI features. I wonder why. Next 5 years will be much more interesting than the 2 years before.
khanan 2y ago
Preferably without Google, but... seems kind of hard.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Wow uhh this is horrifying. ChromeOS was becoming a very competent capable FreeDesktop style host, with excellent work in cros (for secure virtualized access to sound, GPU, encoders, storage) and moving towards standard Wayland compatibility. As the Linux ecosystem got better, so too did ChromeOS. There's so much Google didn't have to reinvent, so much driver work & projects like LXC containers they could benefit from. Throw all that out, I guess. Catastrophizing maybe a little bit, but this sounds like turning their back on the broader ecosystem to go wander off for good in the 3rd rate sandbox they built themselves. Android has spent years trying to figure out our to have a secondary display, and the only thing they could manage was to mirror the display, almost certainly in sizable part because Android's boutique homebrew display services are so absurdly constrained. Marrying yourself to this boat anchor of a tech stack is the worst possible move ChromeOS could be doing. Google's Not Invented Here has always been exceedingly high. ChromeOS has been one of the only attempts Google has made to play well with others, to carve some kind of middle path. It's hard to read this as anything but Google giving up & deciding to go it alone. They should have done the exact opposite. They should have made Android start using ChromeOS. Or just stay the course. Yeah it's costly having parallel efforts, yeah, but holy heck these feel like existential stakes if you get it wrong, and no longer having anything that interoperates with the rest of technology seems like an obviously hideously bad idea, trusting everyone will adopt your stuff seems bad; Microsoft for example has finally dug themselves out of this hole with WSL, but Google already has a very respectable sensible option they seem like they are about to kill. Also, seems likely Google was lying a month ago when they said ChromeOS on Android was just a demo. This announcement shows it was their battle plan. Just, not to users benefit, not as a "your phone can also...". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40380022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40380022 https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-proof-of-concept-3443722/ https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-proof-... It only took two months since teams were merged for this awful no good way to throw away so much greatness to go public. https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/android-and-pixel-teams-merge-in-huge-google-ai-shakeup-what-it-means-for-you https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/android-and-pixel-teams-merge-i...
- tomComb 2y ago
  Not sure you can make this move an example of them having a very high ‘not invented here’ thing going on, given that Androids’ commercial competitors are windows and iOS
MBCook 2y ago
The timing of this really makes it feel like a “I’m still here!” message after Apple’s announcements. If this was planned before Apple’s announcements I would think there would be more details. Google has obviously been working on AI stuff for quite a while. I mean Gemini exists, to pick the most obvious example. And since the industry is so gung ho on AI you know they were going to be pushed on device/OS integration pretty soon no matter what. Microsoft recently announced their new Copilot PCs. In some ways that was a hardware announcement but they also got something of a blackeye for the recall feature. Two days after Apple announces all sorts of AI features on all their OSes (except vision) coming to many of their devices soon this announcement suddenly shows up? They’re the only big company with a consumer OS who hasn’t announced their plan yet. This feels a little bit like a “don’t forget about us“. I will be very curious to see what they do when they put out more concrete information.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
summerlight 2y ago
https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/androids-bluetooth-stack-fluoride-comes-to-chromeos https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/androids-bluetooth-stack-fluor... Looks like we can try to infer the real intention of the convergence from this project. It might make business sense to maintain 3~4 different OS, each targeting different user segments. But there is no reason to have one more different tech stack per each OS across everything.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, as part of the foundation of ChromeOS. Ew. ChromeOS was always a beautiful contrast to Android, running mainline kernels instead of Android's hacked up mess. Actually that was pretty much true of the rest of the stack as well - ChromeOS was almost a normal(ish) GNU/Linux, running Chrome on Wayland on ~Gentoo. Android, in the meantime, NIHed the whole stack. I had always dreamed that one day Google would rebase Android to use a ChromeOS base running apps through a compatibility layer. This... feels like the Bad outcome.
- fidotron 2y ago
  > Ew. ChromeOS was always a beautiful contrast to Android, running mainline kernels instead of Android's hacked up mess. This is at least partly because the two are distributed very differently, with Chrome OS on a much shorter leash than Android, even with Play services. With Chrome OS devices Google can push updates to any device whenever they want, whereas with Android it was often up to the manufacturer, or even carrier, which many Googlers (not all) considered to be a mistake. But this is also the Chrome OS achilles heel because support for esoteric third party hardware blocks is the Android killer feature and now more important than ever.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    I tend to not believe that it's just that, because even Google's own phones have never run mainline kernels outside of experiments that never actually shipped to end users.
  - hawski 2y ago
    That made it possible to give 10 years of updates. That's the main reason for me to want Android to base on ChromeOS, not the other way around.
- kaba0 2y ago
  It cuts both ways. Desktop linux NIHed a bunch of basic features in some buggy, insecure C code that barely works. Like, it has absolutely zero security, no accessibility, no fine-grained permissions system, no normal cross-application communication, no userspace resource control (cgroups are cool, but they are not exposed)..
fidotron 2y ago
This is an obvious precursor to the rumoured desktop mode coming to Pixel phones. It is also going to be a bitter pill for many Chrome OS people, who were often defined by a distaste for Android that verged on the absurd, and caused an awful lot of political nonsense. Android is far from ideal, but Chrome OS was better in one sense only: security. Controversially I believe the most viable future Linux desktop is likely to be based on the Android stack, especially the app packaging, but with the entire “java” layer removed.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  > Chrome OS was better in one sense only: security. Don't you think this is a pretty major feature?
  - fidotron 2y ago
    Not if the price is confining yourself to only loading web pages with the odd api extension. Android does a huge amount more, especially around media and general hardware support (such as nn accelerators) which make security much harder but are also necessary for deploying modern applications.
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      I don't develop on Android so I have no perspective on whether it's a better situation, but as a user of both Android and ChromeOS on the daily, my impression of ChromeOS is that it is minimally intrusive, updates instantly, sleeps and wakes instantly, switches users instantly. My impression of Android is updates take forever, there are 90 minutes of hideous jank after a restart, and it takes 15+ minutes to take a bug report. But I have no way of telling from this announcement which parts of the Android tech stack are responsible for it being a pyramid of jank. However it sounds like Android has won an internal turf war and it seems inevitable that their user-oblivious development and release process will eventually tarnish ChromeOS.
      - fidotron 2y ago
djfergus 2y ago
Is this Google acknowledging the same thing that Apple has: that x86 is a dead end and ARM is required for high-quality, portable device experiences? Hence optimising for an Android tech stack vs going further down the ChromeOS/Linux path.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  ChromeOS works fine on ARM.
- chx 2y ago
  I think the first proclamation about how x86 has reached its end I read was in 1992 when the DEC Alpha came out. (It's possibly of course there were even earlier ones.) The chorus became louder when Intel successfully convinced the entire world IA64 will work just as well as it is shown in a PowerPoint despite the failure of Multiflow, Cydrome and their own i860. The new shiny is always shiny... but it doesn't mean it's that much better. You mistake a very tight integration of the stack from silicon all the way up to UI for some miraculous efficiency of ARM vs x86. This is not so.
- rcleveng 2y ago
  "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated ..." x86 has been pronounced dead many times, yet hasn't yet happened. Maybe this will be the one but against all odds, and reason, x86 has continued to thrive.
ratiolat 2y ago
Would be great if chromeos flex would start supporting organisation provided wifi credentials - currently only device generated keys are an option, meaning one has no idea whatsoever if keys generated are actually good enough or are just looking random while generated might be generated predictably. No idea, as it's a black box. Allow organisations to generate keys off device and allow these to be uploaded to the device, and then we can start considering it. The other problem is that other vendors do not provide chromeos versions of their tools. Looking at you Fortinet and your vpn.
jabedude 2y ago
somewhat related, I'm curious what the future of fuchsia is? I would have imagined that transitioning Chromebook to fuchsia would be possible at some point, but going to android makes it seem less likely?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Animats 2y ago
Does this mean that multi-threaded Chromebook applications go away? Android doesn't really do threads in the usual sense. It mostly uses a hack involving multiple processes. And the "main thread" is very special.
- ignoramous 2y ago
  Android has had multi-threading for as long as I can remember. In fact, Binder RPC, that runs in every app process, itself is multi-threaded. What's special in Android is multi-process. All (Kotlin/Java) apps fork from the same base runtime image, regions of which are CoW'd when mutated.
- roywashere 2y ago
  This is not really moving ChromeOS to Android, but rather using their Android Bluetooth component over the crusty Linux blueZ-thingy. And they even talk about the possibility of running the Android Bluetooth component on normal Linux. So there would be no ‘threading’ like repercussions as far as I would see?
- veeti 2y ago
  How do you mean? You can spin up threads using stock Java API or pthread on NDK. (If you intend to run them in the background your app will need an active foreground service to not get killed, though). As far as the "main thread", I don't think that's unusual for most user interface frameworks.
beaned 2y ago
Whatever happened to Fuchsia? Is that still a thing?
- MisterTea 2y ago
  From what I have heard from Google employees, no one at Google really cares about it. It is used in one of their smart speakers and maybe another nest thing. I would not at all be surprised if it winds up in the google graveyard.
  - anotherhue 2y ago
    Contrast this to something like the Zig or FreeBSD Foundation, which are specifically created to further a technical system and immune to quarterly re-orgs. Let's stop begging at the table of big-tech for software scraps.
    - nineteen999 2y ago
      > Let's stop begging at the table of big-tech for software scraps. There's been plenty of HN readers on here over the years touting Fuschia as the next big thing to displace Linux/MacOS/Windows due to the Pure Microkernel Design(TM), mish-mash of C++/Golang/Rust in said microkernel, and the fact that it's a Google Product. All the things HN loves.
  - Grazester 2y ago
    it seems like Fuchsia will be for their smart devices only
localfirst 2y ago
Would be great to see a Desktop mode like you had on Samsung Its neat to be able to just carry around a mini desktop computer
xrd 2y ago
If I had to choose, I would much rather do HTML+JS apps than Android+Java/Kotlin. I know there are a million good reasons why someone could say Android is a better platform than the web, but after working as a Java/Android developer for 5 years, I still don't believe that. I'm a little saddened to hear this, but I imagine there is more to the story. And, I was thrilled when Android apps could run on Chromebooks.
- multimoon 2y ago
  Why do you believe that? Kotlin is probably the best language I’ve ever come across - and compose multiplatform is _fantastic_ and solves a lot of problems that nothing yet has.
  - xrd 2y ago
    I agree, Kotlin is great. It's just the Android platform that I find really frustrating. Now that you ask, I am struggling to say concretely what I dislike about it as a developer, maybe that is the trauma. It is my daily driver as a phone and I definitely prefer the openness of Android to iOS. After a bit of reflection, here are a few of the things I recall hating: * Really difficult to intercept HTTP requests, especially when testing. JS makes this easier, and obviously much more insecure, but getting things done... * The permissions landscape always felt like it was shifting. Chrome apps have their own issues, but I still get confused when I see a permissions dialog on Android. I am sure there are good privacy reasons for all of the permutations, but I bet the permissions were not created by the same PM at Google each time. * When I last did Android the layout system was converging to constraint layout, and it was an improvement over the prior ones. But, when I compare that to the simplicity of flex or grid layouts in HTML, I prefer those. * All the damn targets for compilation. It is so much easier to just have to build to a webview that runs on whatever architecture you need than to figure out arm or x64.
- dudus 2y ago
  I agree, Modern web development is both enraging and endearing. And the latest APIs are very sexy. https://web.dev/blog/new-in-the-web-io2024?hl=en https://web.dev/blog/new-in-the-web-io2024?hl=en
frithsun 2y ago
Linux community really dropped the ball by not creating a distro that was basically chromeOS, but without the propriety limitations. Thousands of distros and not the one that would take off. Sad! And now, with this announcement, the moment has passed.
- janice1999 2y ago
  > but without the propriety limitations. ... that would just be Linux then? GalliumOS was Ubuntu for Chromebooks (with ChromeOS patches for touchpads etc). Mainline Linux is good enough nowadays for most things. Several companies offer custom ChromeOS images with their own tools and one was even purchased by Google, but they focused on centralised management for classrooms etc.
  - hawski 2y ago
    ChromeOS-like implies an immutable image with the AB partition scheme for me. Other than Fedora Silverblue there is nothing like it as far as I know.
    - luyu_wu 2y ago
      VanillaOS would be another great example (arguably cooler than silverblue imo).
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      There's MicroOS from the OpenSUSE corner, including its respins with GNOME or KDE. IIRC that uses BTRFS snapshots/filesystems instead of A/B root filesystems, but same broad idea.
      - leetnewb 2y ago
        Technically, the Gnome spin is now named Aeon: https://aeondesktop.github.io/ https://aeondesktop.github.io/
        2y ago
roywashere 2y ago
I use Linux and have problems with Bluetooth-connections to my headphones all the time. Looked into BlueZ to see if I could file bug reports or patches but it looked like a hot mess. Running the Android stack on Linux might actually be nice!
- maxhille 2y ago
  IIRC Android uses a regular Linux Bluetooth stack. Also WRT your problems: In case you did not yet, switch to Pipewire. When I did that a couple of years ago, my BT Audio experience went from bad to really good.
  - vetinari 2y ago
    It can be very device dependent, or even on which mode the device is in dependent. For example, I have JBL headphones, that work perfectly in the A2DP mode; but switch to HFC for the mic, they will work for a few minutes, then drop off and stay that way until reboot. That's with Ubuntu. With Android, no such problem.
  - written-beyond 2y ago
    I don't think android uses Bluez, android moved away from bluez a long time ago for their own custom bluetooth stack. https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/bluetooth https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/bluetooth
  - kernal 2y ago
    Android uses Fluoride - which coincidently has now come to ChromeOS. And yes, they named the migration "Project Floss". https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/androids-bluetooth-stack-fluoride-comes-to-chromeos https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/androids-bluetooth-stack-fluor...
type0 2y ago
Actually I'm more surprised they haven't done this earlier
ssahoo 2y ago
"To continue rolling out new Google AI features to users at a faster and even larger scale, we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack". So AI is the main reason to go android?
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Nah, just eyewash in an otherwise unneeded blog post that required rationale larger than "because Sundar loves Efficiency™, and this lets the new platform head consolidate things fully, so everyones happy." They had to get ahead of rampant internal rumors that were leaking externally (c.f. comment of mine a couple weeks back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580163)
chem83 2y ago
IMO Android architecture does offer an advantage relative to vanilla Linux in the way that it creates a well-defined separation between kernel (+ drivers) and user space development, somewhat fixing the OS fragmentation. It helps prevent users getting locked out of the latest version of the OS just because the device manufacturer didn't update their BSP. It's the reason why Samsung offers 5 years of device updates and Pixel offers 7 now. https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/generic-kernel-image https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/gen...
- modeless 2y ago
  ChromeOS was already guaranteeing 10 years of updates for every device. Has any Android phone ever gotten that many updates?
  - moneywoes 2y ago
    Highest I could find is 6
    - mortos 2y ago
      The Pixel 8 is promised 7, which I believe is the highest of any phone.
      - nordsieck 2y ago
        I guess we'll see how things shake out. Unless something drastic changes, I'm sticking with Apple because of their demonstrated long-term support. Every phone since 2015 has been supported for 6-7 years. And that's actual support, not a "technically correct" mix of real support and security patches only. https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility/ https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...
        wasabinator 2y ago
        That's overlooking the fact that Apple does not release the full featureset of new iOS versions on older devices and as years pass the number of feature omissions increases.
tempnow987 2y ago
I'm trying to remember why Android forked from Linux in the first place. Or was it always it's own thing? My memory was maintainers on the linux side had an issue with wakelocks maybe? At one point google going to some pretty serious lengths to try to integrate / upstream some stuff and it getting totally shot down. My own view was there was a bit of a missed opportunity there
- runjake 2y ago
  It was always the Linux kernel, plus some misc OSS, plus their own software on top of the Linux kernel.
- randomifcpfan 2y ago
  That’s certainly how it seemed from the Android side at the time. The Linux side was hoping that they could adapt the desktop Linux stack to work well on mobile devices, without introducing new concepts like wakelocks. It took them a long time to give up on that approach.
- ndesaulniers 2y ago
  Wakelocks and allocation of physically contiguous memory allocations (ashmem, dumped now in favor of dmabuff). All upstreamed now. At this point, Androids kernel is only a fork of upstream Linux kernel because Google employs so many kernel devs that some features are developed downstream first, then upstreamed once kinks are worked out after shipping in devices on tighter deadlines than upstream.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    > allocation of physically contiguous memory allocations (ashmem, dumped now in favor of dmabuff). ashmem is user space shared memory with permission controls. It was replaced(ish) with memfd with the addition of F_SEAL_FUTURE_WRITE in 5.1 (it took a shockingly long time for that to finally have feature parity but hey better late than never) ION is the special allocator that was replaced with dmabuf. Also ARM, qcom, etc... all love playing with the scheduler or making other changes which typically happens downstream first for time-to-market reasons before being upstreamed. eg, ARM's EAS / energy aware scheduling I think actually shipped to users prior to upstream accepting it.
haolez 2y ago
Maybe this will finally solve input lag on Android. Every desktop Android experience I've ever touched had an incredible amount of input lag, both on mouse and keyboard.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  Are you doing gaming or something really sensitive to input lag? I've never really had an issue with Samsung Dex, and I have used that quite often over the years. My use cases have been pretty basic though - basically just programming and chatting.
  - haolez 2y ago
    I've used Dex with a high-end tablet and the input lag shows. You can see that the letter drag a little before being rendered. Quickly doing stuff like changing windows is not reliable and often makes you go to the wrong window if you do it fast. It's usable, of course, but it's far from the experience of a "normal" laptop.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
londons_explore 2y ago
So, the ChromeOS kernel is being thrown out, probably with it's A/B update mechanism, filesystem layout, secure boot, etc. The question is will they also throw out the ChromeOS userspace components and replace them with the android userspace? If so, this is effectively an announcement that ChromeOS is discontinued but those devices will now be migrated to run android.
- moondev 2y ago
  I really wish they would announce the opposite, that crostini would be coming to Android and phones would launch ChromeOS "desktop mode" when attached to a monitor. ChromeOS feature flags have been seriously fun and innovative the past few years.
  - kernal 2y ago
    The Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) [0] includes crosvm support, so you can run virtually any OS you want. An Android engineer has also done a POC running ChromeOS on Android [1]. [0]https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architecture https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architec... [1]https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-hands-on-2-3442510/ https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-hands-...
- theanonymousone 2y ago
  Given the big difference between mobile and desktop Chrome, and the fact that this is "Chrome"OS, it can be an interesting story. I don't many people (anyone?) want to run mobile Chrome on a laptop screen.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    I suspect it wouldn't be a lot of effort to make android chrome have the full desktop UI. The Chromium codebase is all one piece, and rendering of the UI is already unified between mac/windows/linux, so making the android build render a desktop-like UI is probably a simple job. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the right set of build flags can do it already.
rcleveng 2y ago
I'd love to stop carrying my chromebook to work along with my andoid phone, and just plug the phone into a docking station to use ssh/chrome browser/remote desktop which is really all I used daily.
- sebmaynard 2y ago
  Sounds like you could try a Samsung S phone with Dex and a lapdock?
  - scirob 2y ago
    yea but look at any long term review of these systems. There are always subtle UX issues that kill your productivity
    - creesch 2y ago
      It is possible to run a Linux distro through Termux afaik. For example: https://github.com/phoenixbyrd/Termux_XFCE https://github.com/phoenixbyrd/Termux_XFCE There are also tools available like Andronix. I personally haven't tried them, just figured I'd leave the information here for people interested in it who want to explore the options.
      - prettyStandard 2y ago
        The problem I generally run into those with is they have trouble getting root or simulating root. Particularly on Samsung. That limit's running things in containers on the phone as well. But last time I looked at it it did look like there were some promising projects. I forget what.
  - rcleveng 2y ago
    Possibly, I don't want the lapdock, really just plug usb-c into a docking station and have enough usable tools to do work. I think this one is more about execution than concept
- fsflover 2y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
New project: Chromebook from scratch The Google userland programs are removed but the kernel and drivers are retained. This frees up lots of storage space to be filled with the owner's choice of open source userland programs.^1 Read-only filesystem, "powerwashing" system recovery, open source bootloader. Chromebook without the Chrome. Not for commercial use but for recreation and experimentation. For commercial/educational use people can use a Chromebook from Google. I have heard that some people own more than one computer. What some (not all) computer users want is an inexpensive portable computer that has excellent hardware support in the Linux kernel. These users users are capable of administering their own computer and have no inclination to let a so-called "tech" company remotely install software on their computer at any time ("updates"), use a web browser distributed a so-called "tech" company, store their personal files in "the cloud", i.e., data centers belonging to so-called "tech" companies, remain "logged in" to servers operated by so-called "tech" companies 24/7, and so on. These users want a "Chromebook from scratch". Source-based, but Google does not control the source. 1. If an owner wanted to retain some of those Google-authored userland programs, it may be possible for the owner to compile them herself, e.g., https://github.com/google/minijail https://github.com/google/minijail
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
alg0rith 2y ago
More JVM. Just what we needed
seankurtz 2y ago
[dead]
sandGorgon 2y ago
they should have done this in the first place. there was absolutely no reason to have parallel initiatives in android-on-the-desktop, fuschia, android and chromeos. Google's operating system is android. it has won. extend that architecture to the chromeos.
- rvnx 2y ago
  Possible causes: The court case with Oracle regarding programming APIs and the underlying uncertainty probably didn’t help. And in some way to launch 5 times the same product allowed Googlers to grow internally as product launches are highly rewarded, while preserving the company’s interests by not putting all eggs in one basket.
  - fidotron 2y ago
    Actual cause was the chrome vs android turf war. There was a time when the chrome team were walking around telling everyone native android development was a dead end and chrome would take over everything. Then Google had some reorgs, certain people ascended to control both android and chrome, and suddenly android was a good thing.
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      It's funny to hear that from the other side. When there I saw how the Android team would throw around its own biases. I seem to recall that "Chromecast with Google TV" ended up having to be per-unit subsidized out of the Android PA's budget because they needed a heftier and more $$ SoC to be able to run Android on it than the dirt cheap ones we shipped Chromecast on. There's technical merits to both platforms. The fact that Google had/has multiple Linux distributions all competing is ridiculous. I personally worked on HW products that used... (counts fingers) 4 of them? And then toss Fuchsia in there, too...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mike_d 2y ago
xvilka 2y ago
As more and more of Android parts are rewritten in Rust, it might be a good thing long term.
- didip 2y ago
  Is there a source on this? I’d love to read it.
  - kernal 2y ago
    https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build/rust/building-rust-modules/overview https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build/rust/building-ru... https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/*.rs https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/*.rs
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
trustno2 2y ago
The random mention of AI is a bit comical, but it's 2024 so we need that. Simplifying engineering effort and merging the stacks, that I can understand.
dtx1 2y ago
This could be pretty awesome. I've been looking for some form of Desktop OS that can hold a candle to the Privacy and Security Features of GrapheneOS and they are intimately tied to the Pixel Chipsets. Now, a ChromeOS Notebook or even better an Android Tablet with a ChromeOS style Desktop mode getting the GrapheneOS Treatment would be an instant buy for me.
TheRealPomax 2y ago
Does that also mean that we're finally getting android dev tools that run on android so we don't need a separate, second computer to create apps for the computer we want the app to run on? (because even back in the day, if the phone was powerful enough to run java, it was powerful enough to compile java)
zer0zzz 2y ago
Not sure but does bionic get fewer Abi breakages than glibc? I think that alone could make this worth it.
- ndesaulniers 2y ago
  Do web apps running on CrOS care about the system's ABI?
  - zer0zzz 2y ago
    No but if they want to expand the platform to more than web apps I think it does.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  glibc is fine at backwards compatibility, just not forward compatibility, so it really shouldn't be a problem. It doubly shouldn't matter on ChromeOS where the whole OS is built and shipped together; AFAIK there just aren't any external binaries to worry about compatibility with.
  - zer0zzz 2y ago
    > AFAIK there just aren't any external binaries to worry about compatibility with. That’s true today but what about in the future
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      If in the future they decided to completely change the model upon which their system is built, they would merely have to build against the oldest glibc version that they want to support, in just the same way that you can target all modern versions of Debian by building on a Debian 10 box.
      - zer0zzz 2y ago
        Is this strictly the case? I thought glibc does break this from time to time.
westurner 2y ago
Android Binder is already rewritten in Rust. "Industry forms consortium to drive adoption of Rust in safety-critical systems" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40680722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40680722
westurner 2y ago
ChromiumOS, ChromeOS Flex, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998964 : > Students can't run `git --help`, `python`, or even `adb` on Chromebooks. > (Students can't run `git` on a Chromebook without transpiling to WASM (on a different machine) and running all apps as the same user account without SELinux or `ls -Z` on the host). > Students can run `bash`, `git`, and `python` on Linux / Mac / or Windows computers. > There should be a "Computers for STEM" spec. Docker containers can be run on Android with root with termux: - https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d74bd770dce27 https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d... Podman and podman-desktop run rootless containers (without having root). containers/container-selinux: https://github.com/containers/container-selinux/tree/main https://github.com/containers/container-selinux/tree/main .spec: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/container-selinux/blob/rawhide/f/container-selinux.spec https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/container-selinux/blob/ra... "The best WebAssembly runtime may be no runtime" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38609105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38609105 : google/minijail, SyscallFilter=, E.g. https://vscode.dev/ https://vscode.dev/ runs in a browser tab on a Chromebook and supports Pyodide and IIUC hopefully more native Python in WASM support soon? Hopefully Bash, Git, and e.g. Python will work offline on the kids' Chromebooks someday.

325 points by feross 2y ago

xnx 2y ago

Hugely infeasible because of binary blob device drivers, but I'd love to see something like ChromeOS Flex for phones to bring a clean version of Android to older phones.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Project Treble was supposed to do that... and might actually work, with caveats?

999900000999 2y ago

Chrome OS should be available as an Android applications. Let me use either AR glasses or a next dock with my phone. Looks like Google might do this since they just enable display out on the Pixel 8.

ActorNightly 2y ago
You can already do this with Samsung Dex. I've been on S23 and now S24, Dex is mature and works great. Don't have a laptop anymore. Simply boot up code_server in termux and use a web browser. It will likely be at least a year before Google manages to get a good version out the door. You can preview the desktop mode with floating windows on beta, but it's very buggy. May not even come to Pixel 8 officially, only for Pixel 9.
- skiman10 2y ago
  Google is also currently experimenting with booting ChromeOS inside a VM on Android. https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/modules/Virtualization/+/main/docs/custom_vm.md https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/modules/V...
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Weirdly, that once existed for Windows: https://web.archive.org/web/20150323075241/https://www.howtogeek.com/179980/how-to-use-the-chrome-os-desktop-on-windows-8-and-why-it-exists/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150323075241/https://www.howto... was basically Chrome OS as a Windows 8 app, but you'd launch it and it went fullscreen and gave you basically a Chrome OS interface. It was weird but I seem to recall it working okay.

tapoxi 2y ago

I wonder what this means for Lacros (Chrome as a Wayland application compositing to Ash-Chrome). Would this just be using Surfaceflinger and the Android version of Chrome? Does this deprioritize regular Chrome for Linux?

k8svet 2y ago
I think these are quite interesting questions. Chromium just spent a lot of effort to get stock Chromium working as a ChromeOS client, rather than it purely being available as part of ChromeOS itself. Is that ... pointless now in the face of a rebase on Android? Seems like it will end up being a win for a narrow window of devices?
- k8svet 2y ago
  (I was thinking about this, and maybe it's intentional. Make Chrome a first class citizen on formerly-ChromeOS. Make ChromeOS a generic base for AVF VMs. Maybe they even have cros working so well that they can do crostini inside an AVF VM? So it would be Android, Chrome-on-ChromeOS in an AVF VM, Linux-on-ChromeOS in another AVF VM, Windows in a third AVF VM, etc.
pxeger1 2y ago
I reckon Google will want to keep supporting Chrome on Linux, because winning developers over is important for them to win control of the web.

a1o 2y ago

> we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks (...) for Chrome OS Uhm, is there any plan to bring some openess to it so one can actually run python and do ML without using some alternative hack? How is the state of these things nowadays for chrome os? Haven't played with it in ages.

RadiozRadioz 2y ago
Semi-related question: Why did the ML people choose Python and make it so intertwined with ML? It seems like a bad choice because it's slow and bad at integrating with hardware, the actual hardcore ML stuff gets offloaded to C, which creates a weird system with two languages and a weird build step to achieve one thing. If I knew nothing about the ecosystem of available libraries and was asked to pick a language to use for ML, Python would be fairly low down the list. Is it just because it's easy, somebody picked it a while ago, made something influential, and now everybody uses it because everybody uses it?
- buildbot 2y ago
  IMO, it makes more sense to think about Python or another high level language as glue code for all these C/Rust/Cuda/OpenCL kernels. Why would you choose something like Rust to also write the glue code in? Most people will be slowed down quite a bit by the language overhead, and the people writing this code need results last month.
- logicchains 2y ago
  Python is a great language for ML because it allows gluing stuff together quickly. Using a 100% statically compiled language would slow things down, and the typing wouldn't help much because most languages can't properly type check tensor operations, and ones that can (like C++) tend to have awful compile times. The state of the art is tracing the execution and compiling it to a ML-specialised compiler (XLA for Jax, torch.compile for Torch), which is much harder or impossible to do in a compiled language.
- csours 2y ago
  Worse is better. Also, python is just the glue, the work happens in libraries.

malkia 2y ago

I only wish for more powerful Chromebook - like 32GB or even 64GB of RAM, 3-4TB of SSD - maybe proper accelerated GPU, maybe discrete one.

hollerith 2y ago
Framework has a Chromebook that can be stuffed with RAM and storage.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  They can have up to 64 gigs of RAM, but internally apparently they only support up to 1TB hard drive [0], and while you can have "external" hard drives in the expansion modules, you are giving up IO to have it (half the IO slots if you wanted to get all the way to 3 TB) I don't quite understand why it couldn't accept a larger internal hard drive, but if it could I don't know why "up to 1 TB of NVME storage" would be their marketing copy. [0]https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop-chromebook-edition https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop-chr...
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Here is the paasage. My interpretation of it is different from yours. >Memory and storage are socketed, enabling you to load up whenever you’d like. The pre-built configuration comes with 8GB of DDR4 and 256GB NVMe storage and can be upgraded to up to 64GB of DDR4 and 1TB of NVMe storage.
    - MostlyStable 2y ago
      I suppose the "up to" might only refer to the ram, and not the NVME storage, which would admittedly make more sense.
      - somat 2y ago
        Hard to say but the "up to" may be only the limit the framework company wants to stock and sell. With regards to the memory I went looking and the framework has 2 ddr5 laptop dimm slots. The largest I was able to find were 48 gb modules so the physical limit may be 96gb. And as a closing note, this was the first time I really looked at the framework laptop page. And while I am still not sure about the build quality or the usefulness of the "ports". the number of guides and photos of laptops under surgery sold me, I think I found my next machine.

pjmlp 2y ago

Translated, the merge of both OS is happening.

nolist_policy 2y ago

Wow, this is a big announcement for sure. Not much details but I'll definitely following chromium's code review system[1] closer now (Large parts of ChromeOS are developed in the chromium monorepo). [1] https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wip https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:w...

buildbot 2y ago

No details on why the Android stack is somehow more magical for AI? ... Or did they just fire all the ChromeOS devs and need to share resources with Android now? Why not Fuscia for something new?

eco 2y ago
Probably more of an internal mandate that everything needs to consider how it can integrate/improve on AI so they included some lip service in case a VP reads this.
joseda-hg 2y ago
I thought Fuchsia was the one that got hit with the larger cuts?
- surajrmal 2y ago
  While true it wasn't as large as folks seem to imply.
summerlight 2y ago
Probably CrOS team doesn't have enough manpower to implement necessary local ML infrastructure and want to borrow Android's. Or at least they're using this as an excuse for paying off long standing organizational tech debts.
refulgentis 2y ago
Wrote a comment a week or two ago on this you might be interested in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580163 TL;DR: Google is consolidating behind the whims of the hardware org, which are orthogonal to OS' that can't ship (what ppl outside Google call Fuschsia), and here, OS' that can't sell premium 1st party hardware. The old platform org head left recently, combine that with the CEO's eagerness to display Efficiency™ and the lack of interest the CEO has in practical work, that means VP shuffle people around to keep constant/shrinking headcount and the CEO loves it.
- 2y ago

tonymet 2y ago

Does this imply that Crostini/ Crouton / Linux developer mode will go away? I'm quite proud of the development I've done on a $200 chromebook and it was one of my favorite features.

modeless 2y ago
Why would it imply that?
- tonymet 2y ago
  They don't provide a lot of detail, but moving to a new OS platform would mean migrating functionality, and often that means dropping less popular features. Crouton / Chrostini seem to have a lot of dependencies on the current ChromeOS platform that would be costly to migrate.
  - ajross 2y ago
    > Crouton / Chrostini seem to have a lot of dependencies on the current ChromeOS platform that would be costly to migrate. Being careful not to make any pronouncements here since I do work in the group, but no, not really. Crostini is just a fairly standard VM manager with a handful of custom virtio and IPC mechanisms (some of which are really clever, to be fair). It doesn't require much of anything that hasn't been in the upstream kernel for years. And Crouton is just a community-maintained Linux chroot. People (including me) were doing exactly that kind of hack on rooted android devices more than a decade ago.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      If anything, the work on top of pKVM has very nearly brought the same feature to Android already, though they haven't to my knowledge finished executing on that vision.
      - ignoramous 2y ago
        As it understand it, pKVM is mostly to run privileged vendor bits and not user apps.

k8svet 2y ago

Well, this is a slap in the face. ChromeOS has had a long-standing tradition of requiring device kernels to be in their tree. Giving them a better shot at long-term/community/Linux support. It's hard to not cynically read this as "we're making it easier for our partners to ship devices with vendor kernels". I'm pretty shocked. I would've bet good money at this having gone the opposite direction, with ARC already on ChromeOS, etc.

nolist_policy 2y ago
I don't think this will go away since Google makes the call about what core hardware you are allowed to put into a Chromebook. After all they have to provide 10 years of updates.
sounds 2y ago
Most likely something like Qualcomm (or another similar vendor) saying that they refuse to provide the vendor kernel, and will just ship Windows on ARM instead.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-linux-kernel-support-for-the-snapdragon-x-elite https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...
  - fowl2 2y ago
    > "supporting Linux on laptops with Windows on Snapdragon" blinks rapidly edit: I guess if you squint really hard to read "Windows" as "PC-style operating systems" (or "general purpose computing") it makes sense?
    - arghwhat 2y ago
      Hmm, maybe they are referring to a specific branding used on recent models, e.g. a "Windows on Snapdragon" sticker similar to "Windows 8 Ready" and stuff. Linux laptops still tend to be special order or niche brands, but there is nice positive traction in that space.

88j88 2y ago

kinda makes sense to not develop a whole other os just for Chromebook when they have all the engineering effort for Android.

hakanderyal 2y ago

Before reading the article I somehow immediately assumed this will be about adding AI features. I wonder why. Next 5 years will be much more interesting than the 2 years before.

khanan 2y ago

Preferably without Google, but... seems kind of hard.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Wow uhh this is horrifying. ChromeOS was becoming a very competent capable FreeDesktop style host, with excellent work in cros (for secure virtualized access to sound, GPU, encoders, storage) and moving towards standard Wayland compatibility. As the Linux ecosystem got better, so too did ChromeOS. There's so much Google didn't have to reinvent, so much driver work & projects like LXC containers they could benefit from. Throw all that out, I guess. Catastrophizing maybe a little bit, but this sounds like turning their back on the broader ecosystem to go wander off for good in the 3rd rate sandbox they built themselves. Android has spent years trying to figure out our to have a secondary display, and the only thing they could manage was to mirror the display, almost certainly in sizable part because Android's boutique homebrew display services are so absurdly constrained. Marrying yourself to this boat anchor of a tech stack is the worst possible move ChromeOS could be doing. Google's Not Invented Here has always been exceedingly high. ChromeOS has been one of the only attempts Google has made to play well with others, to carve some kind of middle path. It's hard to read this as anything but Google giving up & deciding to go it alone. They should have done the exact opposite. They should have made Android start using ChromeOS. Or just stay the course. Yeah it's costly having parallel efforts, yeah, but holy heck these feel like existential stakes if you get it wrong, and no longer having anything that interoperates with the rest of technology seems like an obviously hideously bad idea, trusting everyone will adopt your stuff seems bad; Microsoft for example has finally dug themselves out of this hole with WSL, but Google already has a very respectable sensible option they seem like they are about to kill. Also, seems likely Google was lying a month ago when they said ChromeOS on Android was just a demo. This announcement shows it was their battle plan. Just, not to users benefit, not as a "your phone can also...". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40380022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40380022 https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-proof-of-concept-3443722/ https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-proof-... It only took two months since teams were merged for this awful no good way to throw away so much greatness to go public. https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/android-and-pixel-teams-merge-in-huge-google-ai-shakeup-what-it-means-for-you https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/android-and-pixel-teams-merge-i...

tomComb 2y ago
Not sure you can make this move an example of them having a very high ‘not invented here’ thing going on, given that Androids’ commercial competitors are windows and iOS

MBCook 2y ago

The timing of this really makes it feel like a “I’m still here!” message after Apple’s announcements. If this was planned before Apple’s announcements I would think there would be more details. Google has obviously been working on AI stuff for quite a while. I mean Gemini exists, to pick the most obvious example. And since the industry is so gung ho on AI you know they were going to be pushed on device/OS integration pretty soon no matter what. Microsoft recently announced their new Copilot PCs. In some ways that was a hardware announcement but they also got something of a blackeye for the recall feature. Two days after Apple announces all sorts of AI features on all their OSes (except vision) coming to many of their devices soon this announcement suddenly shows up? They’re the only big company with a consumer OS who hasn’t announced their plan yet. This feels a little bit like a “don’t forget about us“. I will be very curious to see what they do when they put out more concrete information.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

summerlight 2y ago

https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/androids-bluetooth-stack-fluoride-comes-to-chromeos https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/androids-bluetooth-stack-fluor... Looks like we can try to infer the real intention of the convergence from this project. It might make business sense to maintain 3~4 different OS, each targeting different user segments. But there is no reason to have one more different tech stack per each OS across everything.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

> we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, as part of the foundation of ChromeOS. Ew. ChromeOS was always a beautiful contrast to Android, running mainline kernels instead of Android's hacked up mess. Actually that was pretty much true of the rest of the stack as well - ChromeOS was almost a normal(ish) GNU/Linux, running Chrome on Wayland on ~Gentoo. Android, in the meantime, NIHed the whole stack. I had always dreamed that one day Google would rebase Android to use a ChromeOS base running apps through a compatibility layer. This... feels like the Bad outcome.

fidotron 2y ago
> Ew. ChromeOS was always a beautiful contrast to Android, running mainline kernels instead of Android's hacked up mess. This is at least partly because the two are distributed very differently, with Chrome OS on a much shorter leash than Android, even with Play services. With Chrome OS devices Google can push updates to any device whenever they want, whereas with Android it was often up to the manufacturer, or even carrier, which many Googlers (not all) considered to be a mistake. But this is also the Chrome OS achilles heel because support for esoteric third party hardware blocks is the Android killer feature and now more important than ever.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  I tend to not believe that it's just that, because even Google's own phones have never run mainline kernels outside of experiments that never actually shipped to end users.
- hawski 2y ago
  That made it possible to give 10 years of updates. That's the main reason for me to want Android to base on ChromeOS, not the other way around.
kaba0 2y ago
It cuts both ways. Desktop linux NIHed a bunch of basic features in some buggy, insecure C code that barely works. Like, it has absolutely zero security, no accessibility, no fine-grained permissions system, no normal cross-application communication, no userspace resource control (cgroups are cool, but they are not exposed)..

fidotron 2y ago

This is an obvious precursor to the rumoured desktop mode coming to Pixel phones. It is also going to be a bitter pill for many Chrome OS people, who were often defined by a distaste for Android that verged on the absurd, and caused an awful lot of political nonsense. Android is far from ideal, but Chrome OS was better in one sense only: security. Controversially I believe the most viable future Linux desktop is likely to be based on the Android stack, especially the app packaging, but with the entire “java” layer removed.

jeffbee 2y ago
> Chrome OS was better in one sense only: security. Don't you think this is a pretty major feature?
- fidotron 2y ago
  Not if the price is confining yourself to only loading web pages with the odd api extension. Android does a huge amount more, especially around media and general hardware support (such as nn accelerators) which make security much harder but are also necessary for deploying modern applications.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    I don't develop on Android so I have no perspective on whether it's a better situation, but as a user of both Android and ChromeOS on the daily, my impression of ChromeOS is that it is minimally intrusive, updates instantly, sleeps and wakes instantly, switches users instantly. My impression of Android is updates take forever, there are 90 minutes of hideous jank after a restart, and it takes 15+ minutes to take a bug report. But I have no way of telling from this announcement which parts of the Android tech stack are responsible for it being a pyramid of jank. However it sounds like Android has won an internal turf war and it seems inevitable that their user-oblivious development and release process will eventually tarnish ChromeOS.
    - fidotron 2y ago

djfergus 2y ago

Is this Google acknowledging the same thing that Apple has: that x86 is a dead end and ARM is required for high-quality, portable device experiences? Hence optimising for an Android tech stack vs going further down the ChromeOS/Linux path.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
ChromeOS works fine on ARM.
chx 2y ago
I think the first proclamation about how x86 has reached its end I read was in 1992 when the DEC Alpha came out. (It's possibly of course there were even earlier ones.) The chorus became louder when Intel successfully convinced the entire world IA64 will work just as well as it is shown in a PowerPoint despite the failure of Multiflow, Cydrome and their own i860. The new shiny is always shiny... but it doesn't mean it's that much better. You mistake a very tight integration of the stack from silicon all the way up to UI for some miraculous efficiency of ARM vs x86. This is not so.
rcleveng 2y ago
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated ..." x86 has been pronounced dead many times, yet hasn't yet happened. Maybe this will be the one but against all odds, and reason, x86 has continued to thrive.

ratiolat 2y ago

Would be great if chromeos flex would start supporting organisation provided wifi credentials - currently only device generated keys are an option, meaning one has no idea whatsoever if keys generated are actually good enough or are just looking random while generated might be generated predictably. No idea, as it's a black box. Allow organisations to generate keys off device and allow these to be uploaded to the device, and then we can start considering it. The other problem is that other vendors do not provide chromeos versions of their tools. Looking at you Fortinet and your vpn.

jabedude 2y ago

somewhat related, I'm curious what the future of fuchsia is? I would have imagined that transitioning Chromebook to fuchsia would be possible at some point, but going to android makes it seem less likely?

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Animats 2y ago

Does this mean that multi-threaded Chromebook applications go away? Android doesn't really do threads in the usual sense. It mostly uses a hack involving multiple processes. And the "main thread" is very special.

ignoramous 2y ago
Android has had multi-threading for as long as I can remember. In fact, Binder RPC, that runs in every app process, itself is multi-threaded. What's special in Android is multi-process. All (Kotlin/Java) apps fork from the same base runtime image, regions of which are CoW'd when mutated.
roywashere 2y ago
This is not really moving ChromeOS to Android, but rather using their Android Bluetooth component over the crusty Linux blueZ-thingy. And they even talk about the possibility of running the Android Bluetooth component on normal Linux. So there would be no ‘threading’ like repercussions as far as I would see?
veeti 2y ago
How do you mean? You can spin up threads using stock Java API or pthread on NDK. (If you intend to run them in the background your app will need an active foreground service to not get killed, though). As far as the "main thread", I don't think that's unusual for most user interface frameworks.

beaned 2y ago

Whatever happened to Fuchsia? Is that still a thing?

MisterTea 2y ago
From what I have heard from Google employees, no one at Google really cares about it. It is used in one of their smart speakers and maybe another nest thing. I would not at all be surprised if it winds up in the google graveyard.
- anotherhue 2y ago
  Contrast this to something like the Zig or FreeBSD Foundation, which are specifically created to further a technical system and immune to quarterly re-orgs. Let's stop begging at the table of big-tech for software scraps.
  - nineteen999 2y ago
    > Let's stop begging at the table of big-tech for software scraps. There's been plenty of HN readers on here over the years touting Fuschia as the next big thing to displace Linux/MacOS/Windows due to the Pure Microkernel Design(TM), mish-mash of C++/Golang/Rust in said microkernel, and the fact that it's a Google Product. All the things HN loves.
- Grazester 2y ago
  it seems like Fuchsia will be for their smart devices only

localfirst 2y ago

Would be great to see a Desktop mode like you had on Samsung Its neat to be able to just carry around a mini desktop computer

xrd 2y ago

If I had to choose, I would much rather do HTML+JS apps than Android+Java/Kotlin. I know there are a million good reasons why someone could say Android is a better platform than the web, but after working as a Java/Android developer for 5 years, I still don't believe that. I'm a little saddened to hear this, but I imagine there is more to the story. And, I was thrilled when Android apps could run on Chromebooks.

multimoon 2y ago
Why do you believe that? Kotlin is probably the best language I’ve ever come across - and compose multiplatform is _fantastic_ and solves a lot of problems that nothing yet has.
- xrd 2y ago
  I agree, Kotlin is great. It's just the Android platform that I find really frustrating. Now that you ask, I am struggling to say concretely what I dislike about it as a developer, maybe that is the trauma. It is my daily driver as a phone and I definitely prefer the openness of Android to iOS. After a bit of reflection, here are a few of the things I recall hating: * Really difficult to intercept HTTP requests, especially when testing. JS makes this easier, and obviously much more insecure, but getting things done... * The permissions landscape always felt like it was shifting. Chrome apps have their own issues, but I still get confused when I see a permissions dialog on Android. I am sure there are good privacy reasons for all of the permutations, but I bet the permissions were not created by the same PM at Google each time. * When I last did Android the layout system was converging to constraint layout, and it was an improvement over the prior ones. But, when I compare that to the simplicity of flex or grid layouts in HTML, I prefer those. * All the damn targets for compilation. It is so much easier to just have to build to a webview that runs on whatever architecture you need than to figure out arm or x64.
dudus 2y ago
I agree, Modern web development is both enraging and endearing. And the latest APIs are very sexy. https://web.dev/blog/new-in-the-web-io2024?hl=en https://web.dev/blog/new-in-the-web-io2024?hl=en

frithsun 2y ago

Linux community really dropped the ball by not creating a distro that was basically chromeOS, but without the propriety limitations. Thousands of distros and not the one that would take off. Sad! And now, with this announcement, the moment has passed.

janice1999 2y ago
> but without the propriety limitations. ... that would just be Linux then? GalliumOS was Ubuntu for Chromebooks (with ChromeOS patches for touchpads etc). Mainline Linux is good enough nowadays for most things. Several companies offer custom ChromeOS images with their own tools and one was even purchased by Google, but they focused on centralised management for classrooms etc.
- hawski 2y ago
  ChromeOS-like implies an immutable image with the AB partition scheme for me. Other than Fedora Silverblue there is nothing like it as far as I know.
  - luyu_wu 2y ago
    VanillaOS would be another great example (arguably cooler than silverblue imo).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    There's MicroOS from the OpenSUSE corner, including its respins with GNOME or KDE. IIRC that uses BTRFS snapshots/filesystems instead of A/B root filesystems, but same broad idea.
    - leetnewb 2y ago
      Technically, the Gnome spin is now named Aeon: https://aeondesktop.github.io/ https://aeondesktop.github.io/
      - 2y ago

roywashere 2y ago

I use Linux and have problems with Bluetooth-connections to my headphones all the time. Looked into BlueZ to see if I could file bug reports or patches but it looked like a hot mess. Running the Android stack on Linux might actually be nice!

maxhille 2y ago
IIRC Android uses a regular Linux Bluetooth stack. Also WRT your problems: In case you did not yet, switch to Pipewire. When I did that a couple of years ago, my BT Audio experience went from bad to really good.
- vetinari 2y ago
  It can be very device dependent, or even on which mode the device is in dependent. For example, I have JBL headphones, that work perfectly in the A2DP mode; but switch to HFC for the mic, they will work for a few minutes, then drop off and stay that way until reboot. That's with Ubuntu. With Android, no such problem.
- written-beyond 2y ago
  I don't think android uses Bluez, android moved away from bluez a long time ago for their own custom bluetooth stack. https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/bluetooth https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/bluetooth
- kernal 2y ago
  Android uses Fluoride - which coincidently has now come to ChromeOS. And yes, they named the migration "Project Floss". https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/androids-bluetooth-stack-fluoride-comes-to-chromeos https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/androids-bluetooth-stack-fluor...

type0 2y ago

Actually I'm more surprised they haven't done this earlier

ssahoo 2y ago

"To continue rolling out new Google AI features to users at a faster and even larger scale, we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack". So AI is the main reason to go android?

refulgentis 2y ago
Nah, just eyewash in an otherwise unneeded blog post that required rationale larger than "because Sundar loves Efficiency™, and this lets the new platform head consolidate things fully, so everyones happy." They had to get ahead of rampant internal rumors that were leaking externally (c.f. comment of mine a couple weeks back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580163)

chem83 2y ago

IMO Android architecture does offer an advantage relative to vanilla Linux in the way that it creates a well-defined separation between kernel (+ drivers) and user space development, somewhat fixing the OS fragmentation. It helps prevent users getting locked out of the latest version of the OS just because the device manufacturer didn't update their BSP. It's the reason why Samsung offers 5 years of device updates and Pixel offers 7 now. https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/generic-kernel-image https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/gen...

modeless 2y ago
ChromeOS was already guaranteeing 10 years of updates for every device. Has any Android phone ever gotten that many updates?
- moneywoes 2y ago
  Highest I could find is 6
  - mortos 2y ago
    The Pixel 8 is promised 7, which I believe is the highest of any phone.
    - nordsieck 2y ago
      I guess we'll see how things shake out. Unless something drastic changes, I'm sticking with Apple because of their demonstrated long-term support. Every phone since 2015 has been supported for 6-7 years. And that's actual support, not a "technically correct" mix of real support and security patches only. https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility/ https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...
      - wasabinator 2y ago
        That's overlooking the fact that Apple does not release the full featureset of new iOS versions on older devices and as years pass the number of feature omissions increases.

tempnow987 2y ago

I'm trying to remember why Android forked from Linux in the first place. Or was it always it's own thing? My memory was maintainers on the linux side had an issue with wakelocks maybe? At one point google going to some pretty serious lengths to try to integrate / upstream some stuff and it getting totally shot down. My own view was there was a bit of a missed opportunity there

runjake 2y ago
It was always the Linux kernel, plus some misc OSS, plus their own software on top of the Linux kernel.
randomifcpfan 2y ago
That’s certainly how it seemed from the Android side at the time. The Linux side was hoping that they could adapt the desktop Linux stack to work well on mobile devices, without introducing new concepts like wakelocks. It took them a long time to give up on that approach.
ndesaulniers 2y ago
Wakelocks and allocation of physically contiguous memory allocations (ashmem, dumped now in favor of dmabuff). All upstreamed now. At this point, Androids kernel is only a fork of upstream Linux kernel because Google employs so many kernel devs that some features are developed downstream first, then upstreamed once kinks are worked out after shipping in devices on tighter deadlines than upstream.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  > allocation of physically contiguous memory allocations (ashmem, dumped now in favor of dmabuff). ashmem is user space shared memory with permission controls. It was replaced(ish) with memfd with the addition of F_SEAL_FUTURE_WRITE in 5.1 (it took a shockingly long time for that to finally have feature parity but hey better late than never) ION is the special allocator that was replaced with dmabuf. Also ARM, qcom, etc... all love playing with the scheduler or making other changes which typically happens downstream first for time-to-market reasons before being upstreamed. eg, ARM's EAS / energy aware scheduling I think actually shipped to users prior to upstream accepting it.

haolez 2y ago

Maybe this will finally solve input lag on Android. Every desktop Android experience I've ever touched had an incredible amount of input lag, both on mouse and keyboard.

Zambyte 2y ago
Are you doing gaming or something really sensitive to input lag? I've never really had an issue with Samsung Dex, and I have used that quite often over the years. My use cases have been pretty basic though - basically just programming and chatting.
- haolez 2y ago
  I've used Dex with a high-end tablet and the input lag shows. You can see that the letter drag a little before being rendered. Quickly doing stuff like changing windows is not reliable and often makes you go to the wrong window if you do it fast. It's usable, of course, but it's far from the experience of a "normal" laptop.
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londons_explore 2y ago

So, the ChromeOS kernel is being thrown out, probably with it's A/B update mechanism, filesystem layout, secure boot, etc. The question is will they also throw out the ChromeOS userspace components and replace them with the android userspace? If so, this is effectively an announcement that ChromeOS is discontinued but those devices will now be migrated to run android.

moondev 2y ago
I really wish they would announce the opposite, that crostini would be coming to Android and phones would launch ChromeOS "desktop mode" when attached to a monitor. ChromeOS feature flags have been seriously fun and innovative the past few years.
- kernal 2y ago
  The Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) [0] includes crosvm support, so you can run virtually any OS you want. An Android engineer has also done a POC running ChromeOS on Android [1]. [0]https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architecture https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architec... [1]https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-hands-on-2-3442510/ https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-hands-...
theanonymousone 2y ago
Given the big difference between mobile and desktop Chrome, and the fact that this is "Chrome"OS, it can be an interesting story. I don't many people (anyone?) want to run mobile Chrome on a laptop screen.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  I suspect it wouldn't be a lot of effort to make android chrome have the full desktop UI. The Chromium codebase is all one piece, and rendering of the UI is already unified between mac/windows/linux, so making the android build render a desktop-like UI is probably a simple job. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the right set of build flags can do it already.

rcleveng 2y ago

I'd love to stop carrying my chromebook to work along with my andoid phone, and just plug the phone into a docking station to use ssh/chrome browser/remote desktop which is really all I used daily.

sebmaynard 2y ago
Sounds like you could try a Samsung S phone with Dex and a lapdock?
- scirob 2y ago
  yea but look at any long term review of these systems. There are always subtle UX issues that kill your productivity
  - creesch 2y ago
    It is possible to run a Linux distro through Termux afaik. For example: https://github.com/phoenixbyrd/Termux_XFCE https://github.com/phoenixbyrd/Termux_XFCE There are also tools available like Andronix. I personally haven't tried them, just figured I'd leave the information here for people interested in it who want to explore the options.
    - prettyStandard 2y ago
      The problem I generally run into those with is they have trouble getting root or simulating root. Particularly on Samsung. That limit's running things in containers on the phone as well. But last time I looked at it it did look like there were some promising projects. I forget what.
- rcleveng 2y ago
  Possibly, I don't want the lapdock, really just plug usb-c into a docking station and have enough usable tools to do work. I think this one is more about execution than concept
fsflover 2y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

New project: Chromebook from scratch The Google userland programs are removed but the kernel and drivers are retained. This frees up lots of storage space to be filled with the owner's choice of open source userland programs.^1 Read-only filesystem, "powerwashing" system recovery, open source bootloader. Chromebook without the Chrome. Not for commercial use but for recreation and experimentation. For commercial/educational use people can use a Chromebook from Google. I have heard that some people own more than one computer. What some (not all) computer users want is an inexpensive portable computer that has excellent hardware support in the Linux kernel. These users users are capable of administering their own computer and have no inclination to let a so-called "tech" company remotely install software on their computer at any time ("updates"), use a web browser distributed a so-called "tech" company, store their personal files in "the cloud", i.e., data centers belonging to so-called "tech" companies, remain "logged in" to servers operated by so-called "tech" companies 24/7, and so on. These users want a "Chromebook from scratch". Source-based, but Google does not control the source. 1. If an owner wanted to retain some of those Google-authored userland programs, it may be possible for the owner to compile them herself, e.g., https://github.com/google/minijail https://github.com/google/minijail

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alg0rith 2y ago

More JVM. Just what we needed

seankurtz 2y ago

[dead]

sandGorgon 2y ago

they should have done this in the first place. there was absolutely no reason to have parallel initiatives in android-on-the-desktop, fuschia, android and chromeos. Google's operating system is android. it has won. extend that architecture to the chromeos.

rvnx 2y ago
Possible causes: The court case with Oracle regarding programming APIs and the underlying uncertainty probably didn’t help. And in some way to launch 5 times the same product allowed Googlers to grow internally as product launches are highly rewarded, while preserving the company’s interests by not putting all eggs in one basket.
- fidotron 2y ago
  Actual cause was the chrome vs android turf war. There was a time when the chrome team were walking around telling everyone native android development was a dead end and chrome would take over everything. Then Google had some reorgs, certain people ascended to control both android and chrome, and suddenly android was a good thing.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    It's funny to hear that from the other side. When there I saw how the Android team would throw around its own biases. I seem to recall that "Chromecast with Google TV" ended up having to be per-unit subsidized out of the Android PA's budget because they needed a heftier and more $$ SoC to be able to run Android on it than the dirt cheap ones we shipped Chromecast on. There's technical merits to both platforms. The fact that Google had/has multiple Linux distributions all competing is ridiculous. I personally worked on HW products that used... (counts fingers) 4 of them? And then toss Fuchsia in there, too...
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mike_d 2y ago

xvilka 2y ago

As more and more of Android parts are rewritten in Rust, it might be a good thing long term.

didip 2y ago
Is there a source on this? I’d love to read it.
- kernal 2y ago
  https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build/rust/building-rust-modules/overview https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build/rust/building-ru... https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/*.rs https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/*.rs

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[deleted]

trustno2 2y ago

The random mention of AI is a bit comical, but it's 2024 so we need that. Simplifying engineering effort and merging the stacks, that I can understand.

dtx1 2y ago

This could be pretty awesome. I've been looking for some form of Desktop OS that can hold a candle to the Privacy and Security Features of GrapheneOS and they are intimately tied to the Pixel Chipsets. Now, a ChromeOS Notebook or even better an Android Tablet with a ChromeOS style Desktop mode getting the GrapheneOS Treatment would be an instant buy for me.

TheRealPomax 2y ago

Does that also mean that we're finally getting android dev tools that run on android so we don't need a separate, second computer to create apps for the computer we want the app to run on? (because even back in the day, if the phone was powerful enough to run java, it was powerful enough to compile java)

zer0zzz 2y ago

Not sure but does bionic get fewer Abi breakages than glibc? I think that alone could make this worth it.

ndesaulniers 2y ago
Do web apps running on CrOS care about the system's ABI?
- zer0zzz 2y ago
  No but if they want to expand the platform to more than web apps I think it does.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
glibc is fine at backwards compatibility, just not forward compatibility, so it really shouldn't be a problem. It doubly shouldn't matter on ChromeOS where the whole OS is built and shipped together; AFAIK there just aren't any external binaries to worry about compatibility with.
- zer0zzz 2y ago
  > AFAIK there just aren't any external binaries to worry about compatibility with. That’s true today but what about in the future
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    If in the future they decided to completely change the model upon which their system is built, they would merely have to build against the oldest glibc version that they want to support, in just the same way that you can target all modern versions of Debian by building on a Debian 10 box.
    - zer0zzz 2y ago
      Is this strictly the case? I thought glibc does break this from time to time.

westurner 2y ago

Android Binder is already rewritten in Rust. "Industry forms consortium to drive adoption of Rust in safety-critical systems" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40680722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40680722

westurner 2y ago

ChromiumOS, ChromeOS Flex, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998964 : > Students can't run `git --help`, `python`, or even `adb` on Chromebooks. > (Students can't run `git` on a Chromebook without transpiling to WASM (on a different machine) and running all apps as the same user account without SELinux or `ls -Z` on the host). > Students can run `bash`, `git`, and `python` on Linux / Mac / or Windows computers. > There should be a "Computers for STEM" spec. Docker containers can be run on Android with root with termux: - https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d74bd770dce27 https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d... Podman and podman-desktop run rootless containers (without having root). containers/container-selinux: https://github.com/containers/container-selinux/tree/main https://github.com/containers/container-selinux/tree/main .spec: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/container-selinux/blob/rawhide/f/container-selinux.spec https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/container-selinux/blob/ra... "The best WebAssembly runtime may be no runtime" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38609105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38609105 : google/minijail, SyscallFilter=, E.g. https://vscode.dev/ https://vscode.dev/ runs in a browser tab on a Chromebook and supports Pyodide and IIUC hopefully more native Python in WASM support soon? Hopefully Bash, Git, and e.g. Python will work offline on the kids' Chromebooks someday.