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by dec0dedab0de 1484 days ago
It's hard not to feel like maybe Google has lost the ability to develop operating systems.

Did they ever have that ability? I know they did a bunch of work for Android/Chrome OS. But both of those are Linux, have they tried to develop an OS from scratch before fuschia?
2 comments
native_samples 1484 days ago
Yes. Android is sufficiently different from a stock Linux distro that it absolutely counts as a unique operating system. ChromeOS is also unique in interesting ways, although less successful. It's certainly a production quality OS.

Perhaps more importantly, both of those are complete and have real users who found value in them.

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kllrnohj 1484 days ago
> ChromeOS is also unique in interesting ways, although less successful.

Chrome OS absolutely dominates the education market. So less successful than Android, sure (but so is literally every other OS at this point), but still very successful.

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pjmlp 1484 days ago
That is an US phenomenon though.

It can be hardly seen in European countries, and I bet other continents are hardly different.

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kllrnohj 1484 days ago
That's just not true. It might not be seen in your particular country, but it's definitely not US centric. Canada, Sweden, and New Zealand are also countries where Chromebooks are sweeping education https://www.neowin.net/news/chromebooks-are-seeing-huge-adop...

And the reasons why are pretty straightforward. Kids can't really mess them up, they are highly sharable (eg laptop carts), they are cheap (generally), and they have centralized management for schools that's otherwise typically limited to enterprise markets.

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pjmlp 1484 days ago
In countries where parents pay for kids computers, and worry about what everyone else is using, they don't get any uptakes.

Before COVID, most schools were still about pen and paper in most European countries, computers are used at home.

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kllrnohj 1483 days ago
That's yet again not true. Parents are often paying for the Chromebooks used in some of these markets (eg, US & Canada at least). That the school requires a certain OS doesn't change who pays for it, just like parents are still buying TI graphing calculators.

> Before COVID, most schools were still about pen and paper in most European countries,

Gonna need a citation on that one. It'd be quite surprising for European schools to be so far behind

And from what I can find, they weren't. Eg way back in 2006 https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/19/4242022/europe-ict-survey...

"Scandinavian nations like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden are able to provide computing equipment to almost every single student and teacher within their borders"

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pjmlp 1484 days ago
Android and Chrome OS use the Linux kernel, that is all.

Everything else, including driver subsystem (Android docs even calls classic Linux drivers legacy), doesn't have anything to do with GNU/Linux.

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