Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

Google is a web company; they want people to use the web. They made a laptop/desktop operating system built around their web browser, because they want everything to be on the web. It does most of the things you list, including synchronizing between devices since your data is all "in the Cloud".

As for market share, I'm not sure what power you think Google has, but getting 10% of the desktop OS market has got to be pretty difficult for anyone. I do not know what share of the market Chrome OS has.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that relying on a for-profit third party entity like Google is a good idea due to the conflict of interest, even if their OS is FOSS. Just look at what Google has done throwing its weight around as the big-man in browsers, even though the browser engine is FOSS.

Incidentally, this might be of interest to you:

https://github.com/probonopd/hello

Not much there yet, but I believe Probonopd's intent is to gather a community of people like ourselves.

I've got Plasma setup to take advantage of a decade of Mac muscle memory, and think it does "macOS" better than macOS itself.

> Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iOS

Install firejail, and its wrapper scripts. The wrapper will automatically wrap common commands and apps in a sandbox, and you can use the firejail CLI to launch apps that it doesn't wrap.

I agree with your other points, however I lament that BSD-style licensing will prevent a lot of cool things from having their sources see the light of day or be upstreamed.

If Google or some similar company were to make a desktop OS, it would probably be packed with so many monetization "features" that the free software community wouldn't be very interested and may even see it as a threat. Chrome OS already demonstrated most of this pattern.

The elementary project has done some great work with their UI, but the limitations of a decentralized funding model mean that it just isn't as complete as the major OSes. Meanwhile the jousting between Red Hat and Canonical over control of the GNOME ecosystem alienates a lot of users. Meanwhile corporate control of Qt has limited KDE's popularity. In all three cases the organizational problems associated with developing a truly freedom-preserving OS in a profit-oriented world crop up in different ways. Google taking over doesn't sound like a solution to me.

Some kind of alliance between free software developers and hardware manufacturers has long been dreamt about but hasn't materialized over the last two decades. All too often, Linux OEMs attach a half-baked homegrown distribution and their hardware tries to rely on it. We've also hoped that democratic countries will decide that a free and open-source operating system would be good for national security and fund development. In practice, interest has mostly come from Russia and China, with user freedom off the priority list.

Google isn't a deity. They don't exist to serve humanity but rather their investors. The organization problem continues to be difficult.

Sandboxed apps are a no-go on a productive desktop. Have you tried using Snaps? They're sandboxed by default, and it's extremely annoying having barriers in the way sharing data between them. Sandboxing is the sworn enemy of composition. It's like keeping all the interior doors of your house locked.

Clearly defined platform / guaranteed to work: Linux-the-kernel provides a binary-compatible ABI. This is entirely sufficient, if you bundle everything including libc. If you don't want to do that, well glibc is backwards-compatible so you can just build against some reasonably old version of glibc and it'll work on any recent distro. This isn't some obscure method - lots of software is binary-distributed this way (Firefox, Blender).

Easily make a commercial product: well, I'm currently using Pointwise and Mathematica on Linux, so it doesn't appear to be that hard.

Developers flat out rejected it because of the smartphone-like sandboxing.

Is there any evidence google can pull this off or wants to? I’d think they would want you in a browser.

Linux really does miss an SDK though. Realistically if you target Ubuntu you'll reach the majority of Linux users but the community of power users (ugh, hate that phrase but can't think of a better one) and developers is scattered any number of desktops and Linux varients.

Are iOS/Android SDKs good examples of stable platforms? They are just as much a moving target as anything else and the only thing certain about them is that they _will_ require maintenance.

What would be the financial incentive?

- It requires a massive centralized investment. Microsoft/Apple/Google can do that. But Linux is run by amateurs (not talking about skills but rather guys who are not on a payroll).

- Linux is for people who have rather weird setups. Apple uses limited hardware (ie: You have few Macbook Pros, etc...). Windows is supported by manufactures because it is the standard of Desktop computing for most of the world (and still can be a mess). Linux, on the other hand, has to do all that work alone.

- Linux professional and profitable market is still in servers/deployment where you don't need a desktop space.

> One person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff described the effort simply: "It’s a senior-engineer retention project."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/google-te...

Fuchsia’s greatest value is letting senior devs solve fun puzzles without the burden of shipping anything customers want.

IoT devices have a big problem with software updates. The people who make them are primarily interested in selling hardware, not supporting it for the many years it will probably be in your home. (You might replace a smartphone every two years, but how often do you replace a light switch or thermostat?)

Google says Fuchsia is built to be easy to update. Different components are able to be upgraded independently. There is a stable binary API for drivers.

Imagine a world where IoT devices are built to some Fuchsia-based standard which allows them to continue to be updated even when the manufacturer inevitably abandons the devices and their users. You could get more out of the devices, and you could worry less about security.

It wouldn't solve 100% of the problem, though, because there would always be some device-specific code, including device drivers and any software that enables unique capabilities of the device.

What was the market for php when it came out ? It was just a few helpers to write web pages, simpler to use than perl that already existed at the time

What was the market for go when it came out ? Yes, it did have a few modern things built-in, but there were already tons of widely deployed languages.

And yet here we are. I don't need to tell you how successful each of those is today. I don't mean to say that Fuchsia will definitely be useful or deployed in any large fashion; just that "there is no market" is not a valid counterpoint to the development of a new project.

Strange argument. Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well.

So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google. There are many phone makers not that many phone OS makes. And with chinese manufacturers already pounding them they have no leverage on Google.