Google's Fuchsia gets a UI

Mira Yurizaki · May 9, 2017

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smartphone-os-dumps-linux-has-a-wild-new-ui/

Quote

This all leads us to an interesting point right now: the Fuchsia interface is written with the Flutter SDK, which is cross-platform. This means that, right now, you can grab chunks of Fuchsia and run it on an Android device. Fuchsia first went public in August 2016, and but back then compiling it would get you nothing more than a command line. Thanks to Hotfixit.net for pointing out that the Fuchsia System UI, called "Armadillo" is actually pretty interesting now.

It's possible to download the source and compile Fuchsia's System UI into an Android APK and install it on an Android device. It consists of a wild reimagining of a home screen along with a keyboard, a home button, and (kind of) a window manager. Nothing really "works"—it's all a bunch of placeholder interfaces that don't do anything. There's also a great readme in the Fuchsia source that describes what the heck is going on.

...

With any new project at Google, it's hard to know what the scale of the project will be. Is this a "20 percent" project that will be forgotten about in a year or something more important? Luckily, we have a direct statement from a Fuchsia developer on the matter. In the public Fuchsia IRC channel, Fuchsia developer Travis Geiselbrecht told the chat room the OS "isn't a toy thing, it's not a 20% project, it's not a dumping ground of a dead thing that we don't care about anymore."

While article show cases Google's new OS's UI, it's probably important to note what it exactly is. Google's making a new mobile OS called Fuchsia, based on a ground-up built kernel called Magenta (i.e., it's not Linux based). The reason for doing this is that Android is held up by decisions made a long time ago before anyone knew how to do a smartphone OS. It's Google answering the question of "If we could do Android today, how would we do it?" It also allows them to remove themselves from the Linux distro line, which has its own problems. So in some sense, Google is going the Apple route by doing everything it wants to do rather than rely on anyone else or decisions made in the past.

The good news for those FOSS people is that Google is licensing Fuchsia under a combination of BSD3, MIT, and Apache 2.0. Which makes me wonder if they'll expand Magenta to take over not only Android, but Chrome OS. Given that Google has a significant footprint in personal computers, could this be a breath of fresh air for a new OS?

Part of me is excited to see where this'll go.

Mira Yurizaki · May 9, 2017

Oh fun, I got ninja'd.

WMGroomAK · May 9, 2017

Just now, M.Yurizaki said:

Oh fun, I got ninja'd.

I think we were typing/thinking just about the same thing at the same time... I would make a comment about great minds thinking alike, but I'm not quite sure my mind qualifies as being that great.

The Sloth · May 9, 2017

7 minutes ago, WMGroomAK said:

I think we were typing/thinking just about the same thing at the same time... I would make a comment about great minds thinking alike, but I'm not quite sure my mind qualifies as being that great.