It will be very interesting to watch how Fuchsia evolves over the next couple of years. Especially what Google has planned for it.<p>It might be a small moonshot experiment to see if they can come with a sensible, modern OS.<p>It might also be the designated successor for Android/Chrome OS, and the future of the Google ecosystem.<p>Conceptually, Fuchsia is interesting. It's built on a microkernel (Zirkon) and a capabilities based system. Drivers are isolated elf binaries with a stable ABI, other normally privileged things like file systems are also isolated services.<p>On one hand, I find it promising as a application platform, both for mobile devices and desktops: while Linux sandboxing capabilities are evolving (cgroups , namespaces, ...) , very little of the ecosystem is built around isolation as a primary concept, leading to all kinds of half-baked sandboxing and permission solutions: chroot, Flatpack, firejail, SELinux, (Docker, mentioned hesitantly since it's mainly for server environments)...
All of which are somewhat tacked on an hard to use properly.<p>So a clean sheet design might be the best viable (practical) path.<p>On the other hand:<p>* this throws away decades of work on Linux<p>* many drivers will be closed source; open drivers are a major achievement of Linux<p>* Linux is a very collaborative effort with many stakeholders, while Google is known for keeping a very firm grip on their projects<p>Curios to hear other thoughts on this.
I find the Fuchsia Interface Description Language (FIDL) interesting as a concept. It allows components written in different languages to easily cooperate:<p>- Language: <a href="https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/languages/fidl/reference/language.md" rel="nofollow">https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/languages/fidl/r...</a><p>- Wire-format: <a href="https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/languages/fidl/reference/wire-format" rel="nofollow">https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/languages/fidl/r...</a><p>I think it is an underappreciated concept in today's systems, which suffer an epidemic of monolithism, leading to GB-sized installations that do their own variation of.. nothing much.
<i>Story
A user-facing logical container encapsulating human activity, satisfied by one or more related modules. Stories allow users to organize activities in ways they find natural, without developers having to imagine all those ways ahead of time.</i><p>Interesting. Does it mean that medules are able to declare their capabilities and the system then draws the UI around what the user wants to achieve?<p>For example, let's say I want to order pizza. Instead of having to download Domino's app, the system create a story based on the action of ordering pizza with all the relevant module that allows me to order said pizza.<p>Not sure if I understand that correctly.
I am excited for any attempt at innovation in the operating system department.<p>It is too early to tell how Fuchsia will do but at least they are trying.<p>I think <a href="https://www.qubes-os.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.qubes-os.org</a> is interesting as well.<p>Unfortunately almost every attempt to get a new OS out there has failed in one way or another. (as far as user adoptation). There are some pretty nifty things out there.<p>I hope to the higher powers that Linux, UNIX or WindowsNT is not the end of the line.<p>I think it was a very exciting time when you had Atari ST, Amiga, BeOS, NeXT, Solaris etc competing.<p>I fear monoculture is most things. Browsers, operating systems, politis.
I am curious if anyone knows if Google is going to bake analytics into the OS, like Android?<p>Will it be data collection free, and just push users to use Google services as the default, or will it have data collection baked in?
Why not Minix 3? <a href="https://www.minix3.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.minix3.org/</a><p>Heck, while we are dreaming: Why not buy the rights to Plan 9 and start improving on those ideas, now that would be interesting.