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by obulpathi 2182 days ago
They actually pushed ChromeOS and web services (GMail, Inbox, Docs, Sheets, ... ) pretty hard and realized that its not the way to go forward. While for lightweight tasks (like emailing and docs) it works pretty well, for heavy tasks (like video editing) and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well.

So they pivoted to Fuchsia OS. A new OS to provide seamless experience across several devices (in home or in vehicle while commuting. Some of the resource can be living in cloud). Its a sort of networked OS. Streaming music to your Google Home, let me fetch that music form the Fuchsia Desktop's cache and stream it to Google Home, rather than fetching it all the way from Cloud.

With out applications, OS is not much of use. Here comes Flutter. Let the developers make apps for Android and iOS in Flutter (currently over 50k apps on Google Play store) and have them run the same app on Fuchsia OS. I believe it will take probably another year or two for Google to bring in Fuchsia to Pixelbook. Let's hope so! I would like an OS as open as Linux, with macOS like user experience.
3 comments
hedora 2182 days ago
> and most importantly, as a development platform, chrome os din't do well

Microsoft completely lapped the industry on this with VS Code. It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.

Edit: I thought I just read it just got to 53% market share. It was at 18% and growing fast in 2018, so it’s plausible they have majority market share now: https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual...

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smabie 2182 days ago
> It has a mode where it runs the editor backend the cloud, and the frontend in a browser.

You mean like X? Which was created in 1984 and at the canonical version (11) in 1987?

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hedora 2182 days ago
Yeah, but (presumably) much more latency tolerant.

I didn’t mean to imply they were the first do build a development environment using a thin client.

I meant they are way ahead on in-browser / on tablet IDE’s, which is surprising, since Google had a 10 year lead on the office suite side of things.

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0xCMP 2182 days ago
It seems like they're experimenting with it, but claim it's just for exploring stuff and is not the "future" yet. I've read on HN that it's much slower than Linux thanks to it's micro-kernel design.

That said, I've been very excited for Fuchsia for a long time.

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mav3rick 2182 days ago
Chrome OS has an entire Linux VM integrated natively on your machine.
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