This is exciting to see (in a neutral way, I'm not rooting for it) because I wonder how large fuchsia will grow and if it will contend with Linux. Why wouldn't Google want to push containers running it's brand spanking new os without 30+ years of cruft on gcp. And if it has performance/security why wouldn't developers start moving over.
That’s true. But unfortunately all that baggage comes with lots of genuinely useful stuff too. Starting from scratch rarely works, unless you’re willing to put in a lot of time and effort, and are in it for the long haul, and people that want to start from scratch rarely are, and google doesn’t have a good track record in these matters either.
They have an OS running on a consumer device that connects to the wifi where you can play media, browse the web, and run flutter apps, so it seems like they already put the time and effort.
It even self-updates, so in some sense it's already ahead of the standard linux distributions!
Which standard distribution are you running that doesn't self-update? All of the ones I use (Fedora, Centos, Debian, Ubuntu, Qubes) do this and have done for years.
Ubuntu doesn’t update itself, out of the box. It just mentions the availability of updates in the MOTD. And upgrades to new distributions are completely manual and user-initiated.
Normally I'd agree about Googles track record. But they HAVE to innovate in the android/mobile space. It would be their death as opposed to just dropping a random messaging app.
And they did all the "from scratch" work. It would be short sighted to not let zircon at least have the potential to replace Linux.
Apple vertical integration strategy recently took a big step forward and googles response may well be this.
We should judge on what has been finished rather than what has been started. After people start to work with it, that's when the real costs will start to be incurred.
Apple are an interesting case in that they have done this very very gradually over many many years - building on top of existing tried and tested platforms where possible.
Google seem to be dominant in android/mobile despite their crappy OS. Whether they're threatened or not, this does need to be improved. This may or may not be due to Linux - to me it seems to be more the case that it's again their failure to stick to things that's the most frustrating aspect of using Android - but maybe using Linux means they spend more development time doing that than dealing with features. Perhaps they're just trying to emulate Apple's strategy alá cargo cult.
