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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
by 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 agoNot 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
- rrdharan 2y agoSaying Google didn’t have to reinvent containers when Google invented containers is .. something (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups).
- kccqzy 2y agoIt's somewhat unusual for Google to open source and mainline this bit of functionality. Last time I heard, Google's internal production Linux kernel still has 9000+ patches[0] on top of vanilla Linux. And I'm still waiting for them to open source switchto[1]. [0]: https://lwn.net/Articles/871195/ https://lwn.net/Articles/871195/ [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXuZi9aeGTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXuZi9aeGTw
- rrdharan 2y agoThey tried, it died: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/7/22/1204 https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/7/22/1204
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoAnd for a brief couple years Google had an offering the world could use that exposed that invention. Via the stock, well respected LXC tool. They created something, only to never ever use it in public eye. To go keep reinventing and keep NIH'ing. The android virtualization stack is fucking wild, and hardly used, offers such a meager fraction of what ChromeOS was doing. Not a bad callout, but this seems like a particularly glorious & vicious slam... that doesn't change the big picture on iota.
- surajrmal 2y agoAndroid is reusing the ChromeOS vmm, crosvm. How is it less capable?