I haven’t seen this mentioned on the forum, so I figured that not many people are aware of this, but Google is working on a new OS that is FOSS like AOSP.
Didn’t they basically discontinue this? IIRC it was only ever used in their smart home devices.
5 Likes
I thought Fuchsia is pretty much dead although they haven’t made it official yet. Didn’t the fire some of the developers and even before that killed the Fuchsia desktop/GUI and focus on embedded devices only?
4 Likes
https://9to5google.com/2024/01/15/google-is-no-longer-bringing-the-full-chrome-browser-to-fuchsia/
A Google OS without Google Chrome…definitely a dead project.
1 Like
They had a new release just a month ago, and there are a lot of commits every workday, so it’d definitely not discontinued. Their focus though is unclear to probably anyone outside Google.
1 Like
Speculation (knowing uni folks at Goog): Projects are funded to facilitate promotions for engs. Or, fund some accomplished eng’s pet project so they wouldn’t leave to work for competitors.
(this isn’t exclusive to Goog. I saw the same thing going on at Amzn)
Light reading: Let 1,000 Flowers Blossom — Jeremy Utley (mirror).
2 Likes
One of my co-workers is an ex-Googler, and he was in touch with some Fuchsia engineers. I asked him once if he heard anything about what’s Google’s plans are, and he told me that they explore using it as a base for Android instead of Linux among other things which I forgot.
But that was before layoffs which affected Fuchsia team.
If you look at the 2024 roadmap, they plan to support parts of SELinux in Starnix, which is part of the Android security model. They also want to support eBPF which is used by Android’s networking daemon. So I wonder if they still explore the idea.
Interestingly, they also recently accepted a proposal to support crosvm which is used by ChromeOS to run Linux/Android. I’d like to hope they still want ChromeOS to run on Fuchsia but given the news Chrome isn’t coming there makes me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1 Like
I’d like to think it’s because they need the engineers to keep practicing their other skill beyond their currently assigned projects.
Some encouraging news
This might be interesting but I highly doubt Fuchsia will replace Android or whatever if the OS doesn’t even support Google Chrome. Most likely it will remain restricted to the Nest line of devices by Google.
It doesn’t have Google Chrome support now. Even if AOSP is ever replaced by Fuchsia, it will be very far from now, so there is plenty of time to add that support.
It’s not the lack of support in and of itself, but rather that they stopped trying to bring support. And this is Google. They can erratically kill off projects. (inb4 link to killedbygoogle.com)
1 Like
At least at the moment Google doesn’t want it to run on Nest only, otherwise they wouldn’t work on Linux compatibility layer (Starnix) that hard. Whether they’ll kill it or not remains to be seen.