[saghm]

I think the problem is that "lack of public information about their future plans" is hard to differentiate from "no future plans exist". For a company that's in the past been known for their willingness to go for low-likelihood but high impact "moonshot" projects and seemingly open with some of their long-term plans (like everyone knowing that they were working on self-driving cars years before self-driving became a topic that people wouldn't be shocked to hear, like, their grandparents talking about), it's honestly pretty weird that the only device they've shipped with it was the Nest Hub, which apparently used to run on the same thing as a Chromcast (so which I don't even think was ChromeOS?).

If this were something that they were planning on using mainly for internal stuff, like for some sort of competitive advantage in data centers or something, I could understand the radio silence on future plans, but it's hard for me to imagine that's their main purpose when they're publicly putting it on stuff like the Nest Hub and Chromebooks (they didn't sell any with it afaik, but they published a guide for putting it on them). It really feels like they just don't know exactly what to do with it, and they're trying to figure that out as well. As for ChromeOS and Android, those already feel like a pretty good example of them not having a super clear initial product strategy for how they overlap (and more important, how they _don't_), so while having some sort of consolidation would make sense, it's not clear to me how Fuschia would help with that rather than just make things even murkier if they start pushing it more. I'd expect that consolidating them would start with the lower-level components rather than the UI, and my understanding is that Fuschia (as opposed to Zircon, which is the kernel) has quite a lot of UI-related stuff in it specifically with Flutter. I'm not saying you're wrong, since it sounds like you might have more relevant knowledge than me, but I can't help but wonder how much of this has really been planned in the long term rather than just been played by ear by those with decision-making power.

[surajrmal]

Fuchsia's UI layers are roughly equivalent to Wayland. There is a compositor, but no special alignment to any particular UI toolkit like flutter.

Fuchsia is not itself a consumer product, it's an open source project meant to be used to build a product. There is no application runtime for app developers to care about or UI for an end user to see. It would be strange to talk about things like mesa or the Linux kernel the way you are talking about fuchsia. There are software layers it does need to integrate with, but unless you work on those things, it's not really interesting to you.

Companies don't really discuss products they build using these open source building blocks while contributing to those projects until after the product launches either. It shouldn't really matter where and how it gets used to the end consumer, only that when it is used there are tangible benefits (more stable, less security problems, etc). I don't really understand why folks are so keen to understand what internal plans for using it may or may not be.

[saghm]

> Fuchsia is not itself a consumer product, it's an open source project meant to be used to build a product. There is no application runtime for app developers to care about or UI for an end user to see. It would be strange to talk about things like mesa or the Linux kernel the way you are talking about fuchsia.

The difference is that those aren't entirely funded and developed by a single a for-profit entity that presumably expects some sort of net positive results from the effort spent on them in the future. To be clear, I don't consider anything I said in my previous comment to be a reflection of whether Fuschia is useful or whether it has any technical merits; my commentary is intended to be entirely scoped to Google's _intent_ for Fuchsia, which is what I read the part of the top-level comment that the parent comment I responded to directly to be discussing.

It's certainly possible that you're correct that Google has had plans for Fuschia this whole time and didn't discuss them because they didn't think it was relevant, but I guess I just don't find that convincing enough to change my mind about what I perceive to be going on.

> It shouldn't really matter where and how it gets used to the end consumer, only that when it is used there are tangible benefits (more stable, less security problems, etc). I don't really understand why folks are so keen to understand what internal plans for using it may or may not be.

This is probably just a matter of differing personalities. I don't think I have any explanation for why I'm curious about the topic, but I just am. I think you could make any number of similar statements about not understanding why people find certain things interesting (sports, video games, celebrity gossip, etc.), and you wouldn't be wrong or right; in my experience, it's not a personal choice to decide to find something interesting or not.

[surajrmal]

It just feels really cynical to make everything about motivations and incentives. There are plenty of great projects that Google has produced that provide great external value without an interesting internal plan beyond using it to make products better. Golang, flutter, bazel, Gerrit, etc. I understand there are also examples where it uses it with some other intentions, such as the case of tensorflow or kubernetes, but I'm not really sure why one would think fuchsia is closer to those than it is to the former set.

[saghm]

It's certainly a bit cynical to view for-profit companies as being solely profit motivated, but I don't think it's _that_ cynical. To me, it almost seems a bit naive to assume that a company like Google would be doing something for purely altruistic motives in the absence of any evidence one way or another. I'm not a subscriber to Friedman's view that corporations are _required_ to maximize profits for their shareholders, but I do think that they all inevitably end up there in the absence of mitigating factors.

[surajrmal]

Google's goal is to make good products. That will enable making money. A positive externality of trying to create a good product is creating technologies such as fuchsia. I don't think there is more to it beyond that. If it's more complicated than that, that would probably be news to most people working on Fuchsia.

[shocking63]

To me, one of the best features of ChromeOS is that it runs both Android and Linux. I have a number of telescopes that are controlled via Android apps, and being able to run astronomy processes apps like siril on the same platform is wonderful.