A lot has already been said about them copying or borrowing or just getting their inspiration from Apple, so I'll skip that.
Unless they fully opensource the code it is unlikely to get any traction. And if it is really based on Linux we're likely going to see UI and UX issues, An OS is more than just a some fancy icons and modded apps. The transitions that they show in the demo are not easy to achieve as in stability of the software.
It looks very clean but unlike elementary OS, it doesn't feel authentic. I don't know what obsession people have with Apple but they aren't the only company getting designs and UX right. These avenues are unfortunately killing independent and new design ideas.
I don't know why people think Apple even has a good UI. Because it all looks the same? None of it makes any sense if you have any experience other than Mac/iOS.
I don’t think there’s an obsession with Apple so much as there is an obsession with the minimalism and an alignment of the design goals into an ecosystem that Apple has demonstrated.
There definitely is an obsession with Apple in a subset of the "design community" - I've seen lots of aping of aesthetics with no functional justification (such as web sites with brushed aluminum and linen textures which became popular after OS X releases that featured the same cues)
I find the minimalism to become frustrating, when it involves burying things that were so easily accessed before. In windows you used to be able to right click the desktop to get to display settings.
I agree. I don't use apple products but my partner does, but whenever I use one of his products he has to keep explaining these arcane rituals of triple clicking, pressing and holding on unexpected icons, navigating through menus with a limited number of buttons, etc.
It's all well and good trying to hide the complexity, but not if you can't find the features unless you've already got someone who knows the product talking you through it.
What version of windows are you on? I just opened my pc to check and sure enough, display settings is still in my desktop menu. But I do get what you mean, that's one of the reasons my windows usage at this point is basically only for video games. And even that won't be true when I build a new rig with AMD CPU & GPU.
You're not wrong about the alignment of design but it is definitely not minimalist design. I've been using and upgrading iPads for the last 6 years and with each release the menus and options are becoming more convoluted. But there is a certain consistency across all Apple devices which does make it easy.
JingOS seems heavily inspired as in a massive lack of any original concept. Even the browser shown in the demo looks so much like safari. The notifications on the corner. The swipe up gestures etc.
Even the design story of icons is heavily inspired.
> with each release the menus and options are becoming more convoluted. But there is a certain consistency across all Apple devices which does make it easy.
Honest question, how do you add more features + abilities to an OS without adding more menus in more places?
I am not saying that new features don't need menus but maybe they could be simplified? The copy, paste select system on iOS is poor IMO. The new tab/ new private tab has been done better on chrome.
What I wished to say in the original comment was that if new ideas aren't given a chance we might never see something different, might be radically different and we might just like some things about it.
I think it will get traction because there are tonnes of low end windows tablets out there that only have 2 gb ram and 32 gb storage that can barely even run windows and jing os which is using a modified plasma mobile will be way faster on these low end windows tablets
The low end tablets will meet the same fate as the low end android ones. Applications developed using the high end devices in mind will run painfully slow or perform miserably on the lower end ones. The higher end tablets might come with extra graphics support and such which would leave developers flummoxed on which devices to target.
Of course gaining traction as a closed source Chinese OS would be very difficult and unless we can see some code ourselves and run it locally, its all just speculation.
I wonder if this is going to be the OS of choice for flea-market iPad counterfeits/knockoffs... the Files screen even says "On my Pad" in the shown screenshot. Everything looks close enough to be able to possibly fool an untrained eye.
And the makers of JingOS, Jingling, are a China-based company working on the JingPad, an ARM tablet designed to run Linux OOTB. I'm sure we'll see a lot of variants of that quite soon after their release in July, and many people having fun hacking them.
They have dominion of the word “Apple” in the context of consumer electronics, and “Pad” is easy to misread in context as “iPad”, leaving open the reasonable possibility of customer confusion. That’s basically what trademarks are both for and there to prevent.
Most Android "tablet" apps are upscaled phone apps, if even that. The last time I checked, apps specifically developed for Android tablets were far fewer (and worse) than apps specifically made for iPads.
The company has an account on Bilibili[0], where its Chinese name is specified as 鲸鲮. 鲸, romanised as Jing, means "whales" (the animal). So JingOS would be "WhaleOS".
(鲮, romanised as Ling, is another water animal known as "mud carp".)
I did know what jingoism is, but only barely, and mostly from history lessons and didn't think about it at all looking at the OS name.
I agree that is still used, but arguably in very specialized contexts, and has many better and less idiomatic alternatives that make it a poor choice in many publication, helping it become rarer.
I expect a lot of concept names not directly bound to the concept itself to slowly disappear, the same way calling dinnerware "china" won't stand for a lot more generations I think.
Obviously "pretty common" is, just like "obscure", completely subjective. I consider it obscure, but all I can say from looking it up is that at least according to Google Ngram, it's about 1/10 as common as "patriotism", which is saying something as that's been a declining word for a century. It's less common than "chauvinism", "sectarianism" and "xenophobia". In fact, tripling the popularity of "jingoism" still wouldn't make it as popular as any of those. It also peaked in the early 1900s and has since been on a low plateu, which again, I consider a marker of obscurity.
To me the fact that Ngram shows the word “patriotism” on the decline throws doubt on using it for any measure like this. Within the US “patriotism” is used very commonly. It leads me to wonder whether Ngram leans too heavily on scientific or academic literature and not on the words that people actually use in everyday conversation.
Does Ngram scan social media, TV or (to a lesser extent) newspapers? If not I’m dubious about the utility here.
Unless there's a Google Ngram distinct from the Google Books Ngram Viewer https://books.google.com/ngrams/ , their statistics are entirely based on material available in Google Books, which might include some newspapers, but probably not social media or TV.
I'm a Brit, pushing 40. I'm educated to degree level (1st class, FWIW), and very well read (including the venerable Pratchett, though I don't think I have read Jingo yet).
I think I heard the word "jingoism" for the first time ever around 5 years ago. It is not a word one hears very often, and it certainly didn't come to mind from "JingOS".
If you often read high-brow political publications you may come across "jingoism" on the daily, but that is obviously not a huge cross-section of the public.
TBH, kind of bizarre how strongly this jingoism thing is being pushed in this thread.
I have used English as my daily working language in software development for over 20 years and had never heard it before.
Well, we don't discuss a lot of politics in international teams, that's a taboo topic especially when working with Chinese colleagues. And for Trump we have only one word, that I don't want to repeat here.
> I highly doubt they named it after some obscure English expression.
It's not that obscure if a nonnative speaker's first reaction is to think "why would anyone want to call a distro by that name"?
It doesn't matter that there is a perfectly reasonable alternative motivation for it ... It's just, you'll never find me wanting to be heard saying "I think you should use jingos!"[1]
Interestingly, it turns out, someone else thought it would be a good brand name too.[2] So you are not alone.
It's odd though how names just stick. IPad is the ugliest of names and so are most of the other IPrefixed names. I get some of these choices were to break from dictionary words, but I find them vile! In my mind I placate by saying info-pad.
My initial allergy does fade over time. That's advertising/normalisation for you.
It's still staggeringly elitist and unaware to assume that "genuinely" literate people (whatever that means) should not only know of Pratchett but also know his entire bibliography by heart. While it may come to a shock for English speakers from the UK and the US, not everyone that speaks English are American or British, and may not be primarily interested in literature from those countries.
Genuinely literate people mostly know Pratchett, it's a extremely well known author consistently topping charts whose books are available in nearly every language of the world, very popular in Russia as well as Finland as well as Czechia and elsewhere. It shocks me (a Czech person) you'd claim otherwise, some of his books are actually required reading here - we read foreign literature just as much as local. It never struck me as elitist, this is pure merit - you're making it about nations but it's just about Pratchett being that good.
Looked up that book on two different online stores in Sweden cdon and bokus. On both of them the book had zero reviews. Are swedish people not literate?
I am very sure Pratchett is well known even in Sweden. What are the reviews for Romeo and Juliet? And again - not knowing Pratchett doesn't say that one isn't literate. The statement is "most genuinely literate people will know Pratchett". Stop being so defensive for nothing, nobody is attacking your intellect here...
You're turning my statement around and perceive it as if I was suggesting Swedish people are not literate. That's not what I'm saying yet you're defending the Swedes.
It's clearly <Jing><Os>, and Jing sounds like something which is likely a Mandarin (or other Asian language) word.
And Os is a widely accepted name suffix for operating system.
Additionally Jingoism, isn't really that commonly used. Most non-native speaker which are not reading certain political news outlets likely have never heard about this word before (like me). It's definitely not part of the vocabulary thought in (non native) english school courses.
Lastly, where would we end up if we have negative sentiment, every time a wrongly pronounced word happened to sound similar to a word in another language which has negative sentiment attached with it. At that point we probably would need to remove a non small part of names and the english language because wrongly pronouncing it makes it sound like a bad word in some other language...
Their about page[1] says the jing in their company name (Jingling) is 鲸, meaning whale. I don't know if that extends to the OS name as well. (They use "JingOS" even in Chinese prose.)
It probably should and given the branding I thing it makes sense to not mix Hanzi and Latin Characters.
It's just that there is:
- Jing = 鲸
- Jing as simpl. of jīng = 精
- Jing as simpl. of jīng = 經
- ...?
I wouldn't be surprised if they did consider this similar words when creating JingOs as JingOs is the essence (精) which becomes the structure they wave their ecosystem and as such success around (like Warp~經 is for weaving fabrics).
Or this is just a nice coincidence ;=)
But either way interpreting <Jing><Os> as a call out to <jingo><-ism> is very far fetched.
It's not that simple, depending on the Mandarin writing it can also refer to "essence" and probably some other things.
It's appearing in traditional Chinese medicine and seems to be a fairly important concept there.
It also seems to be used as a name.
So Jing is a fairly wide spread well known mandarin word but a Jing + OS + wrong pronoun-cation sounds similar to a not that widely known english word which seems to have gone out of fashion quite a while ago...
I mean there are all kinds of protections of visual thinks like e.g. design patents.
I would be highly surprised if this doesn't violate at least one or two apple hold still valid design patents or other protection mechanisms.
Because lets be honest design/visual wise it's less iPad/iOs inspired but a bland clone of the iOs design on iPad with some/many minor but in the grater picture irrelevant changes.
Not a lawyer here but have UI design patents ever held up in court? All modern UI is derivative in some way. Apple lost a case to Microsoft on similar grounds.
>The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law].
Note that Apple was able to use their slide to unlock design patent and that Apple in the linked curt case tired to "get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface [..]".
In this case it's not about the idea about a GUI but the very specific way the GUI was made wrt. non-functional aspects of the GUI.
And even if there is no enforceable design patent there is still copyright and trademark protection. E.g. look at the settings icon which is basically screams "lets change the settings icons just enough to not be a copyright infringement". That icon is trademarked by Apple and the JingOs variant has still
quite many of the points which define the Apple trademark, enough to open potential for a case. (They have 3 connection from the gear ring to the center at the exact same position, a "dot" at the center, a inner ring (but just one color instead of an gear) and the gear background color doesn't stretch to the sides of the icon (I have no idea why they didn't change that, it would be more different and look better), they also replaced light silver with white. Anyway I would guess a trademark case for this detail has a good chance, especially given that this icon looks different enough to the other icons to not fit in, making it super clear that they somewhat forcefully wanted to make it look as much like Apple as possible. Instead of just using similar visual clues).
That case was a huge convoluted mess. If I understand it correctly the UI patent claims were rejected and the case came down to 3 hardware design patents, D618,677, D593,087, and D504,889. But the case is so involved you damn near need a law degree just to follow it.
Design patents can not be applied to purely functional aspects, so no you can keep you wheel round and on the for your country correct side.
But you can have a design patent for the "looks and feel" of your headsup display to some degree. You can't make it cover what is one the display or that important parts are highlighted. But you can potentially cover the color pallet and how exactly you arrange information of the same not high importance level.
I.e. in context of JingOs the way they cluster settings especially combined with the used color schema and similar aspects are very likely covered by design patents.
Similar that notifications are a list of swipe-able settings in a box can't be covered by design patents, but that it has that graish color with that level of transparence, rounded corners, and similar might very well be covered.
I personally don't like design patents but they are a thing which exists.
Lastly the copy is so close that it might not just cause conflicts with design patents but also with copyright on the visual parts (not the underlying code!) of iOs.
You are probably right, but all these constraints are going to make old people and visually impaired people confused when switching to a different brand.
Would it be allowed for a vendor to add a button which makes the interface looks like a competitor's interface?
Clone is a subset of familiar — you don’t need to call your story about a wizard school “Barry Trotter and the Alchemist’s Gem” just to set your audience’s expectations, for example.
(I’m not a lawyer so have no idea if this JingOS legally OK or not, but there is a difference between familiar and clone).
It probably won't be sold using large distributors in the USA, and Apple won't have a legal case in China.
In a way, the USA brought this upon themselves. Global intellectual property rights are prerequisite for international trade in services. But they also require international concorde on what they are.
America has shot itself in the foot by diverging from international standards of copyright and intellectual property. And it's really myopic: for example, Disney will marginally increase the value of their IP holdings by lobbying for a perpetual license to Mickey Mouse; but it will also preclude Disney from ever trading their IP on equal terms with China.
But practically you could just download it from idk. a server not in the US/EU/UK, or a server in the US/EU/UK which doesn't know (or care) about the problem. Or from
a torrent or similar.
Furthermore (assuming Apples sues and wins a case) I don't think they will bother trying preventing a (for them) small amount of private people from using it. Through if it becomes more successful it's likely another matter.
What they care about is that you can't buy a tablet of which the UI looks, feels and behaves like iOs.
I just fear this might be abused by Apple or other entities as an argument why devices should be looked down and users must not be allowed to install their own Os as this would lead to all kind of fraud and lost revenue. (Just to be clear I'm fully aware that for a tech aware person this argument makes no sense, but propose it to an old politician who doesn't really understand anything IT related and they might believe you, and at least in Germany we have way to many tech incompetent politicians...)
EDIT: Also in the parent post I probably should have used the term distribute inside of the EU/US/... Anyway I'm not a lawyer so the exact terminology might not be quite right.
Awesome! Its exciting to see new applications of *nix OSes that are design-forward and targeted towards modern computing paradigms / platforms.
I’m a grumpy graybeard who likes Arch on my laptop and Debian on my server...but cosmetics and familiar visual vocab and adopting industry ux practices—these are undeniable obstacles that must be overcome before “the year of the Linux desktop “ :)
I don't want to be too hard on this project, but is it really "design-forward" when it's blatantly and explicitly copying the look and feel of iOS/iPadOS? Originality seems like an important component of good design.
Sure, but I don't think this is "inspiration" so much as blatant, wholesale copying, at least if the screenshots and copy on the page are representative. ElementaryOS borrows heavily from Apple style without being an outright copy, that seems way less icky to me.
The only thing that matter to me is can it run a terminal and can it run emacs. With the ipad/iphone failing on both those, this is quite forward to me
I’m not advocating that you _should_ do this, but you definitely _could_ do _at least_:
Install an ssh app (they exist for iOS. I’ve used them. They’re ok! They’d be better w a paired Bluetooth keyboard, easy to come by)
Log into your server of choice—even just your personal machine on your LAN
Hack away in emacs
This has the added benefit of not requiring local access to files on your mobile device, or setting up yet another custom dev environment on a new system
This quote is not from Picasso, it is in fact much older[0].
The stealing part of this phrase was more about how great
artists make existing ideas their own("stealing"),
reinterpreting them on the way.
If you're gonna steal, better damn make sure your output is better than the original. Otherwise it'll have a cheap knockoff feel to it.
Copying Apple's style of e.g. the settings icon is just that, copying. Nothing to be proud of, and just tells me the developer has their priorities wrong if they think this style is part of what needs stealing to give the user a good experience.
>Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal'
I obviously can't say what Picasso thought that meant, but I have a theory on what it actually means:
"Copying" vs "Stealing" refers to how well you break it down and use the underlying components of a design. "Copying" is more or less just mimicking the feature with a few tweaks, whereas "stealing" is redesigning it from first principles based on what the best ideas in it seem to be, and making it your own.
For example (not necessarily a good one, I don't claim to be a "great artist"), take regenerating health in COD: the idea appears to be removing persistence between engagements, by resetting health back to full after you've stopped being shot.
Okay then, why not have regenerating ammo or regenerating grenades?
Well, it looks like it's a stealth nerf against really good players - after a few fights without being killed, you have to fight without grenades, VS freshly respawned players (who statistically are the players who die more often) who do get grenades. Unless the player was conserving grenades through early fights, which is also a disadvantage (if self-imposed).
Okay, what can we do with this?
Well, if you're playing a highly competitive game then perhaps add "regenerating grenades", else add some sort of bonus score for getting killstreaks.
If you're making a more casual game, then you can amp the regeneration effect up by giving more low/single-use items that are essentially a quiet buff for newbies who'll die before they get a kill anyway.
Maybe you could add a pool of none regenerating health to limit the effectiveness of it on pro players, without removing it entirely? Like armour that you spawn with, that blocks e.g. 10% of damage but slowly breaks as you take more and more damage?
Point is, this all started with regenerating health, yet now it's informing grenade stuff. If you'd just directly copy/pasted "perFrame: health++" with minimal changes then you'd miss out on a ton of useful tools here.
EDIT: also, you could take the mechanic in a different direction entirely - what would happen if everyone lost health outside of battle instead of gaining health? Maybe combine that with gaining some health after every kill, so people are forced to get into battles to stay alive?
Or, what if health was always regenerating, instead of only regenerating when you're not being shot at?
I guess "steal" means that it's a more advanced way of "copying", i.e. you can get away with grabbing others' idea without being noticed and can still be considered as "original".
To do that, one needs to get the essence, the principle, and the deep underlying logic of another work, rather than simply copying something at the surface level.
This. I use my iPad Pro as a glorified Netflix, YouTube, and sketching machine. It’s hardware is good and lays there under utilised.
If a tablet could get close iPad in usability and hardware and yet open it up to have a full terminal and ability to install local Linux apps. That’d be a great productivity tool, and an excellent mobility device.
Devs complain about XCode, but the libraries/frameworks are great. Publishing to the app store is pretty easy, and there are hundreds of millions of potential customers, which are there because the curation of the app store is good (enough). If you want to know what happens when your IDE is OK-ish, but the other aspects fail, look at Microsoft's presence in the mobile phone market.
If Microsoft kept WP 8 compatible with WP 7, just adding the C++ support game studios were asking about (NDK style), without rebooting the whole thing into an incompatible mess across mobile, tablets and desktop, it would have had much more developer love.
But Sinosfky and his supporters had to push their anti-NET agenda, followed by clever decisions like killing C++/CX as well, and here we are.
Well in my experience people who don't complain about the App store never used any other app store in their life. For what I know they even think that the app store is Apple's invention.
Because it actually is... Android Market was introduced months after App Store. Obviously programmers know that fundamentally it's extension of some ideas from the Linux world, but that is very irrelevant to the users, and the basics of "download an application from a registry" are not what makes the great App Store experience.
I had three Windows Mobile devices and 5 J2ME devices and not a single one had app store. Why - there wasn't any mobile internet connectivity back then, the Java devices didn't even have wifi. Apps were loaded over USB, downloaded as JAR files. Apps were normally bought on eshops od vendors.
That's not opinion, this has nothing to do with App Store, you can tell by the first look. App Store never was about the UI for downloading apps itself, that's just the front face of the App Store service that moderates and verifies content, sets standards and quality requirements. Not even Android Market/Google Play is close to App Store, though closer than random web shops shipping JARs.
I don't use any of this on an iPad and I miss every day some functionalities : a convenient terminal, a fully fledged text editor, a complete and free photo editor ...
Frankly whenever I use iOS (these days mostly on an iPad, since I switched phones to Android a few years ago), I miss that I don't have root privileges and full filesystem access.
Everything you mention would be possible if those were given :-(
For Linux users, we look for credible source for something as important as Operating Systems. Usually from known entity or open source community. It would be great if you can clarify.
Also since it is just getting started, you would be better off not using iPad, Apple kind of words. Instead use neutral terms like Linux OS optimized for Tablets, before it is too late.
Also heavy influence of Apple Marketing on your preview video, it would serve you well if you have the actual working copy of the OS on a tablet shown as demo as well. Hope you are making that video as well.
It's great to give feedback, it's also good to remember: not every distro (or project, in general) is trying to court every user or every audience. To me that's the beauty of FOSS, it's open ended.
Hard disagree on the “Apple kind of words” stuff. The iPad is the best tablet. I wish there were good competitors, I’d buy them, but there aren’t. To the extent someone can make a tablet OS with the look and affordances of iPadOS but with the added ability to do stuff iPadOS won’t allow (like writing/compiling code), they should absolutely be encouraged to do so.
Well, I think you know what I mean: allowing some degree of software freedom. I do not need a cli: ide and compiler though...
My iPad pro is fast enough to do my dev work but I cannot run the tools to do dev.
Your comment is a bit weird as you know very well what people here mean: iPad is generally seen as something you cannot produce things on. I do not agree with that: unlike others here, I type as fast on the keyboard of the pro (not the new one: not tried that) as on my MacBook and Lenovo. But it just misses the applications as they are forbidden. My wife is a writer and she needs nothing else. The only thing I am saying is that for me the walled gardens and particular not compiling restrictions make it a bitter sweet device: I love it but I cannot do my work on it.
Are there any android tablets with a decent chip in them? Almost everyone I’ve seen is using a very weak CPU.
The iPad chips just run away from even the top end android tablets. Maybe I wouldn’t care as much but my experience on android tablets is they are just laggy. Slow to open things, little stutters throughout the OS, etc.
1. This was about software, not about the hardware it runs on.
2. Vanilla android runs very, very smooth because the hardware is optimized for the way it works. If the android tablets you saw where laggy, that's most likely because of the abominations android has been warped into by the manufacturer. My android phone is four years old and still buttery smooth.
I'm scratching my head as to why they mentioned "iPad" as well.
Android is already a Linux tablet OS. It's like they ignored the elephant in the room. Ubuntu also runs on tablets. (edit: this is based in Ubuntu!)
Besides that point, Apple is pretty much the opposite of free computing. It's a gross comparison.
Edit: Looking at their Reddit timeline, it appears as though they've made a lot of progress in a few short months, so I applaud that. I just wish people would stop trying to copy Apple at everything. It's a turn off.
There are plenty of countries where iPads are out of reach for regular consumer, and Android Tablets are in practice phones with bigger screens, given how little the ecosystem cares about them, so that leaves Windows devices as only choice for consumers.
Desktop replacement for pen based workflows, like drawing, designing diagrams, architecture sketches, UI mockups,...
When coupled with keyboard, office like workflows, coupled with the pen to do the drawings instead of trying to use the mouse as pencil since many users have done during the last couple of decades.
Programming on the go with environments like Playgrounds, Pythonista, Continuous, Shaderific.
> Besides that point, Apple is pretty much the opposite of free computing. It's a gross comparison.
Isn't that what they said? They stated that one of the reasons to create a new OS is that Apple is a closed platform. You can't blame them to go further than that in a marketing video, it's not like they're posting anonymous comments on an internet forum.
“Apple's domination of the global tablet market continued in the third quarter of 2020, according to market research firm Canalys, with iPad shipments seeing an estimated 47% year-over-year growth rate thanks to coronavirus trends.”
The market is speaking, and consumers don’t care about what the OS is. They never have, and never will.
The reply that's missing for you is that the UI is clearly (to an iPadOS user) heavily inspired by that of the iPad - they are making that the selling point:
> iPadOS-like UI and UX
And WRT your other comments, you're probably not the target for this. I run dozens of Linux machines for work stuff but everything in my personal ecosystem is Apple because I don't find config fun. Different horses for different courses.
Comparing to a $GOOG tablet would raise privacy questions pretty quickly, I think
This isn't an A vs B thing to me, it's just that comparing to an ipad says something to a lot of users, and quickly. If this project succeeds, it will give some alternatives to closed-ecosystem things, to new/other people (with a cheaper cost to them). So the reservations about Apple are actually reasons to support this project, in that way. Thoughts?
The iPad is the only device I own that's not running Linux. It is so damn good for the price, the UI is so smooth, so well designed, there is just so much polish. I bought the 128GB version with a pencil for 350€ used.
I am longing for a Linux alternative, but any Android tablets of similarly high quality are just so much more expensive, and actual Linux is still far away in terms of usability.
What I want is an iPad, but with Linux. I'm sure I'm not the only one, and Jingling knows that.
Looking at the launch video [0], this looks very professional done. Which company is behind this? I can't find any info on the site. Is this team related to Huawei?
This is the only thing I found with some limited googling:
> Our team is very experienced in making gadgets. They are experts from Xiaomi/OPPO/Google/Ubuntu and other Consumer Electronic Companies. So what we are talking about here is not a low-end tablet for geeks and Linux users. It will be designed just like a tablet for consumers with the best quality we can achieve.
Trolltech, the creator of the Qt framework, became part of Nokia in 2008 and doesn't exist any more as a company since. So it's a rather strange reference.
Wouldn't be surprised as it seems to be based in China. There are no shortage of tech talents that used to work in these big IT companies. Be interested to see how they stay true the FOSS principles and make this OS support more devices.
OxygenOS is an Android fork (or reskin, if you're being less generous). It's much harder to get linux to behave reasonably on a tablet if you're not starting with Android.
Who from HN would install a Chinese OS by choice? We have our own privacy issues from western companies, but at least we can hold them (minimally) accountable.
I wouldn't say Europeans are powerless against american companies. Legally speaking, yes, but then so are Americans themselves. The only thing we can do nowadays is public outrage. Doesn't matter who writes the medium blog post, as long as it hits MAJOR_SOCIAL_NETWORK frontpage.
Well, if it is truly open source and has reasonably reproducible builds, I would absolutely use it.
Unfortunately most Chinese suppliers don't take their GPLv2 obligations very serious when it comes to Linux kernel drivers for example. If these new(?) players do, I can only applaud it.
So, is this going to be a paid for product? I am looking at what looks like is their GitHub page, and it's basically empty? https://github.com/JingOS-team
The popular web server Nginx started in Russia almost 20 years ago. Nobody would have used the software of such dubious origin if it was closed-source. Being open-source allowed many more eyeballs and developers which increased trust in the project.
With the current geopolitical landscape, projects from Russia, China and increasingly the United States must be open-source to become widely used and trusted.
If China-based JingOS aren't developing their work publicly, for most developers it may as well not exist.
> JingOS is based on Ubuntu 20.04, KDE v5.75, Plasma Mobile 5.20. We will replace the framework from Plasma Mobile to JDE(Jing Desktop Environment) later this year.
> The project will open-source step by step on GitHub: JingOS-team
The word you’re looking for is trademarked, not copyrighted. Anyway, IANAL but in the USA it’s perfectly legal to describe something as iPad-like in sales copy as long as it doesn’t look like you’re attempting to deceive the user that it is an Apple product.
Practically speaking, I agree completely. Apple could just file some bullshit motion for shits and giggles and the only practical thing to do would be to take it down or get bankrupted by a baseless lawsuit.
I'm both hopeful and dubious about this. Can't see this getting very far if it isn't open source, but it seems like something similar could scratch an itch I've had for a while (detailed below).
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I love using my iPad to consume content, but damn do I sometimes wish I could just use a real desktop on it. With some caveats, of course:
- Without needing an internet connection/AP
- At least some kind touch support* (clicking, scrolling, gestures, etc.)
- Consistent, dependable graphical fidelity/performance
- Easily portable
- Quick to instantiate
- Clean-yet-functional UI*
I've tried some wireless AP/bridge setups on a Pi4 and VNCing into it via my iPad, but they've been not-so-satisfactory for a few of the reasons listed above. Haven't given up on it -still researching/fiddling around - but definitely the biggest hurdle is going to be the UI. Gotta find that balance between functionality, simplicity, and aesthetic - preferably out of the box. Not something Linux is particularly known for.
*i.e. simplified desktop/application UI so that I can do most everything using the touchscreen (in addition to the keyboard/mouse), but can still access the advanced functions, even if those specifically are only optimized for mouse/keyboard. Ideally I'd be able to show/hide functions arbitrarily in the simple mode based on if I do/don't use them. Tiled WM or similar for single-app or split-pane view mode.
I found it amusing how on the one side we're being told is a full-fledged Linux under the hood, and on the other side they felt it was worth noting that it comes with a native calculator app.
I always thought, if a vendor ever wants to encroach into Apple's territory, literally all they have to do is the same formula: Commercially supported Unix operating system with a polished UI + hardware. If you want to approach the enterprise market, you need an excel and word clone. For the consumer market, a polished and solid (crash free) browser with GPU acceleration is probably the #1 feature.
Obviously not that simple in practice but what certainly _doesnt_ work is sexy hardware running the turd that is windows.
This reminds me of DeepinOS though it's intentions are a bit different. The obsession the Chinese people have with iOS is insane though from a UX/UI it seems justifiable given user demand on this front. Simple gets the job done.
It explains why for ex. Xiaomi themes it's mobile OS (MIUI) to appear more iOS-ish.
Basically hybrid will win, as on the Windows side, Microsoft is winning over Android by having laptops with detachable keyboards, turning most non gamer Windows laptops into Surface Pro clones.
Many members of this site cut their teeth reimplementing proprietary Unix from scratch, e.g. the entire GNU project. Having an open source version of something is a laudable and noteworthy goal. Often many improvements are implemented along the way, since one doesn’t have to do the original design, e.g. the entire GNU project. I for one, am happy to see this.
Same here. But I use onlyoffice. And its been serving me good till now. Plus I like the tabs thing. I installed it on my friend's laptop which is super old, it seems to work better than MS Office 2016 too
But if you have a group with the design chops capable of producing this; then surely you can make so it doesn't look like a deliberate Apple copy?
Just look at the comments here in this thread; half of the reaction is about this is a rip off of Apple and legal this and that, ignoring what a massive contribution a well-designed tablet UI is.
The real danger is that if the code is open-source, I could fully see knockoff or counterfeit devices taking this project, replacing the icons with rips from iPadOS, and trying to sell it.
But there is no single "Linux Desktop". If these people would contribute to e.g. Gnome instead, they might help improve Gnome but they couldn't realize this idea.
Personally I think there is little benefit to having one single Linux desktop that is equivalent to Windows or macOS, just with a different theme and a different kernel. Desktop Linux is about choice (TM).
Well that is a good idea. But it has a problem: dev and ux capacity. When you try to make 20 different than you split your force into 20 different projects. Apple and Microsoft do not have this problem and will therefore always lead the pack.
Exactly my point. The Linux is all about choice argument means workforce distribution.
Sure, for different hardware (RPi, Tablets, PC, Mobile etc) different distros/DEs make sense. But for a single similar hardware, (PC for example) I never understood why distros like Manjaro and KDE neon are separate. Wish those teams were together and built a kick-ass serious competitor.
If I use Windows, I get a certain familiar desktop. I can change the colors and the wallpaper, but that is about it.
But in the Linux world, if I like a minimalistic appearance and the Gnome shell model, I use Gnome. If I want a powerful desktop that I can configure a lot, I choose KDE/Plasma. If I want something lightweight, there are plenty of choices.
And why are there different distros like Manjaro, KDE Neon, Ubuntu, Fedora? This is somewhat orthognal, but they all have important differences.
I don't think one "Desktop Linux" could give me the breadth of choices that multiple desktop environments can. If they were to merge and make one big enviroment, that would have to be really good because it is competing with Windows and macOS.
I used to use Gnome, but since Linux is moving in the direction you describe and homogenizing under the hood (see systemd for example), I found that current desktop Linux is no longer the radical different OS - it is just an inferior alternative Windows (for me personally, at this point in time!).
What would I have given for a second iteration on that device and form factor. Next to the 2nd Chromebook Pixel, the Pixel C was the most perfect device from Google.
> JingOS is based on Ubuntu 20.04, KDE v5.75, Plasma Mobile 5.20. We will replace the framework from Plasma Mobile to JDE(Jing Desktop Environment) later this year.
> The project will open-source step by step on GitHub: JingOS-team[1]
So later this year, hopefully, you'll be able to install JDE on any tablet running Linux, though I suspect it won't be 100% smooth from the get-go.
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Why on Ubuntu not Debian? If you forking something fork from more legit upstream distro. What are they including in Ubuntu that Debian doesn't have concerns me due to Ubuntu's track record.
