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by toast0 1315 days ago
There's a couple things

google doesn't like shipping GPL software to end users, and anyway, they had a lot of opinionated changes to make and plumb through, wakelocks and other things. No glibc, mininal other GPL stuff, it's not GNU/Linux, it's just Linux.

Display hardware for mobile SoCs often had no or poor x11 drivers during the early days of Android. x11 drivers are not easy to write, it's easier to do something else that has more specific requirements. Nowadays, I think you could probably do pretty well with glamor, but that wasn't a given back then. Limited capability mobile devices really don't need to run a distributed systems protocol that outputs to screens as a side effect, regardless of how cool distributed systems are.

Desktop apps running on a phone is not a good experience, and is unlikely to ever be a good experience. Applications need to be rebuilt for the context and if you're going to do that, x11 doesn't buy you much.

I'm not saying Android UI did a good job, but it made sense to start clean even if the results were poor.
1 comments
wusspuss 1313 days ago
>Display hardware for mobile SoCs often had no or poor x11 drivers during the early days of Android.

How is creating an entirely new SurfaceFlinger a solution to the lack of x11 drivers, logically? There could no drivers for SurfaceFlinger either, if it didn't even exist yet.

>x11 drivers are not easy to write,

I can't believe that's harder than redoing what X11 does from the ground up.

>Limited capability mobile devices really don't need to run a distributed systems protocol that outputs to screens as a side effect, regardless of how cool distributed systems are.

I don't see what the word "limited" has to do with anything here since system requirements of Android are greater than that of the desktop GNU/Linux. When a keyboard app eats away a hundred MBs, any overhead introduced by X11 is outright negligible.

And then even if X11 was so unsuitable that they just HAD to reinvent something, they could've done what Wayland is doing - reinvent it but that's it, don't reinvent the rest of the system, and keep it compatible with the existing ecosystem.

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