Comment by 0xbadcafebee
18 hours ago
I like the idea of it, but Linux hardware support is still crap, and will get worse as ARM becomes more entrenched.
What boggles my mind is why Google hasn't gotten more serious about making Android a desktop OS. Pay the money needed to get good hardware support, control the OS, and now you're a Microsoft/Apple competitor for devices. Yes there is the Chromebook, but ChromeOS is not a real desktop OS, it's a toy. Google could control both the browser market and the desktop computing market if they seriously tried. (But then again that would require listening to customers and providing support, so nevermind)
> I like the idea of it, but Linux hardware support is still crap, and will get worse as ARM becomes more entrenched. Linux arguably has better compatibility than Windows, but it's nuanced as it depends on what devices you're interested in.
> What boggles my mind is why Google hasn't gotten more serious about making Android a desktop OS. Google is seriously working on making Android a desktop OS, Android 16 is only the first steps towards it.
> Yes there is the Chromebook, but ChromeOS is not a real desktop OS, it's a toy. ChromeOS is very much not a toy, it's pretty great if it can facilitate your work.
> But then again that would require listening to customers and providing support, so nevermind Google has consistently provided good support for all their hardware products, listening to customers is not their cup of tea though.
Google is absolutely no saint, I don't like their business model, how they're closing more and more of Android, how they keep killing services, how GCP can nuke AI nuke you, that they "own" web standards, ... But they're not all bad, they've also contributed greatly to much of the web and surrounding technologies.
> but ChromeOS is not a real desktop OS, it's a toy.
ChromeOS is a better development environment than macOS in many ways. When was the last time you actually used one of these things, 2013?
> Linux hardware support is still crap
What are you talking about? The majority of hardware is supported by only Linux at this point.
There is plenty of hardware that is either unsupported or poorly supported. I have personally run into a dozen different devices and several architectures that were unsupported. And I'm just one person buying normal stuff in stores.
Sure but this is true of every OS. I can't install macOS or Windows on most of the hardware around me and have it support all the hardware either.
> but Linux hardware support is still crap
What are you talking about? Everything for desktops work out of the box unless you have something weird and proprietary, and even then most distros have support anyway.
By desktop I include laptops (many don't work out of the box) but larger systems can be weird too. Just the choice of CPU can decide whether hibernate or suspend works at all. There's a large ecosystem of accessories which have no Linux support. Video cards have been a nightmare on Linux for decades, famously the reason Torvalds gave Nvidia the finger. Even when something's technically supported, it may require obscure undocumented boot flags, bit-twiddling, userland apps which may not work on the same distro as the kernel you want to use, and of course there's the Wayland debacle (abandoning X extensions that lots of devices used to use to control features from touchpads to input pens)
> Video cards have been a nightmare on Linux for decades, famously the reason Torvalds gave Nvidia the finger.
What are you talking about... The situation is the same as on Windows, an officially supported and maintained proprietary driver maintained by Nvidia. Unless you're trying to run a 12+ year old car, it'll work fine. AMD on the other hand is amazingland and works perfectly, officially supported and maintained open source driver. I LOVE it.
> bit-twiddling
Never happened.
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> Video cards have been a nightmare on Linux for decades,
Again, I question your experience in this regard. Do you actually use dGPUs on Linux, or are you repeating a 14-year-old meme?
GPU support on Linux is more comprehensive than macOS, and if you don't need DirectX it's arguably better than Windows too. Mesa drivers are unparalleled by Apple or Microsoft, in a myriad of ways.
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